COLUMBIA - South Carolina has lost more manufacturing jobs per capita than any state since President Bush took office, and Democrats running for Bush's job are taking note.

U.S. Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., speaking recently at a fish fry sponsored by his supporters in Orangeburg, quoted U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showing that manufacturing employment in the state has declined by 58,000 since January 2001.

"We want to be exporting American products, not American jobs," Edwards said. Speaking of Bush, he said, "He has done an extraordinary amount of damage."

Last week, U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., swept into the state for an "economic round table" discussion with labor union officials and laid-off workers at a state job-placement center in Columbia.

Friday, retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark spoke at an Inman Mills textile plant in Spartanburg County about manufacturing job losses. Inman's work force has shrunk from 1,350 employees in 1998 to 500 today.

Even as Clark visited the state, there was more bad news about jobs. The state Employment Security Commission said Friday the unemployment rate rose to 7.1 percent in October from 6.4 percent a month earlier. It was the state's highest rate since March 1994.

The state's employment security director, Roosevelt "Ted" Halley, said the increase surprised him, and he speculated it may be due, in part, to people re-entering the job market. Only people actively looking for work are counted as unemployed; those who get discouraged and give up are not accounted for in the unemployment rate.

South Carolina will host one of the nation's earliest presidential primaries Feb. 3, and most of the nine Democratic hopefuls are making a major effort in the state.

Jobs, and what can be done to hold on to them, will be a more important subject in South Carolina than in the Iowa Democratic caucuses and New Hampshire primary that come before the S.C. vote, political strategists say.

In Iowa and New Hampshire, as many as half the people who normally participate in choosing among the Democratic candidates are college-educated, economically comfortable white liberals. In Iowa, for example, opposition to the war in Iraq holds center stage.

But the S.C. Democratic constituency is much more lower-income and racially diverse. African American voters are expected to make up at least 50 percent of S.C. primary voters.

That gives the jobs issue a great deal of intensity in South Carolina, said Bill Carrick, an Aiken native who is Gephardt's national campaign consultant.

"So many of the voters are people who, if they're not suffering from economic dislocation themselves, they are at least suffering from enormous economic anxiety," Carrick said.

Economists say, however, that government has only limited abilities to control either the business cycle fluctuations that affect employment and unemployment, or the technological and other long-term changes that have led to the movement of U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas.

Of the Democratic candidates, Edwards and Gephardt have expended the most energy appealing to blue-collar voters, emphasizing their own roots. Edwards grew up in a family of textile workers; Gephardt's father was a milkman. Both candidates talk about protecting jobs and standing up for working Americans.

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, one of the most influential Democratic politicians in South Carolina, said he thinks the jobs issue is starting to give Gephardt some momentum in the state.

"He has been an opponent of these trade agreements that have cost us tremendously in jobs," said Clyburn. "I look for him to make it the centerpiece of his campaign."

In his appearance in Columbia last week, Gephardt faulted the Bush administration for failing to expand the U.S. economy to create new jobs while also pointing a finger at his rivals who had supported trade agreements. He was especially critical of Edwards' Senate vote in 2000 to establish permanent normal trade relations with China.

Because the China agreement and others were passed without requiring other countries to adopt minimum-wage levels for workers, Gephardt said, "We now see the race to the bottom in full bloom. That's why we're losing all these good jobs in the U.S."

Each of the nine Democratic candidates has a plan to create jobs. Meanwhile, Bush, who earlier this month paid a visit to South Carolina's biggest economic success story, the BMW auto assembly plant near Spartanburg, says his tax cuts already are doing that very thing.

But economists say that for all the rhetoric and all the plans, the American economy is too big, too complex and too tied to the global economy to be managed by anyone -- even the president of the United States.

"It's always easy to look at a plant that's closed and come up with a political solution," said College of Charleston economics professor Frank Hefner. "But it's a lot harder to see the ramifications of keeping that plant open through political management of the economy."

For instance, he said, when a company making computer components moves to Mexico for cheap labor, that costs jobs. But it also helps drive down the price of computers in the United States. "That allows a small business owner in the U.S. to buy an inexpensive computer and stay in business," Hefner said, "and that keeps a job."

Economists say that the movement of jobs overseas is a historical process that is very similar to what occurred from the 1870s up to the post-World War II era, when textile jobs moved out of New England and came South for cheaper labor.

"We're moving out of a manufacturing economy, just like we moved out of an agricultural economy," said retired Clemson University economics professor James Hite, a senior fellow at the school's Strom Thurmond Institute of Government.

He said that if the United States is successful in making a transition to something new and prosperous, "It's going to be high-end services -- information services, financial services, banking. You've got a prototype there in Charlotte of what we're looking at."