In what has been billed as the most important debate of the campaign so far, the final two Democratic candidates met Tuesday night in Ohio to hash out disagreements on issues like NAFTA, foreign policy expertise, and health care. Countering Sen. Barack Obama’s contention, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) said she has “been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning,” but that she did not make her objections to it in public in the 1990s because “I was part of the administration.” Obama rejected Clinton’s claim, saying “it is inaccurate for Senator Clinton to say that she’s always opposed NAFTA. In her campaign for Senate, she said that NAFTA, on balance, had been good for New York and good for America.” Both candidates said they would renegotiate NAFTA to ensure more labor and environmental protections.

Pakistan: Attempting to highlight what she says is a lack of foreign policy experience on Obama’s part, Clinton said Obama “threatened to bomb Pakistan” last summer. That, she said, was not “a particularly wise position to take.” Obama denied the accusation. “I never said I would bomb Pakistan,” he said. Rather, he said, “if we have actionable intelligence against bin Laden or other key al Qaeda officials– and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to strike against them, we should.”

Russia: Obama and Clinton both expressed skepticism about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s likely successor, Dmitri Medvedev. Clinton said Medvedev is “being installed by Putin” and will have “very little independence.” Obama agreed, and criticized President Bush for neglecting U.S.-Russian relations.

Iraq: Though she has declined to apologize for her 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq war, Clinton said she regrets the vote and said if the United States had not been in Iraq in the last several years, it instead could have “talked about the retreat from democracy” in Latin America or the “failure to end the genocide in Darfur.”