Dems seek Clinton luster; move Obama’s big speech

In this Dec. 10, 2010 photo, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama lis­tens as for­mer Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton speaks in the brief­ing room of the White House in Wash­ing­ton. When Bill Clin­ton takes the con­ven­tion stage to endorse Barack Obama later this week, it will be a land­mark step on a path to rec­on­cil­i­a­tion for two for­mer rivals whose polit­i­cal for­tunes are now inex­tri­ca­bly tied. By embrac­ing Clin­ton, Obama hopes to cap­ture the for­mer president’s uncanny knack for polit­i­cal sur­vival against tough odds. And it doesn’t hurt that the econ­omy and the nation’s bud­get pic­ture last truly soared under Clin­ton. (Asso­ci­ated Press File | J. Scott Applewhite)

CALVIN WOODWARD

JULIE PACE

Asso­ci­ated Press

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Bill Clin­ton offered some of his lus­ter to the Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion with a prime-time address Wednes­day as iffy weather forced Pres­i­dent Barack Obama to scale back plans for a grand accep­tance speech before a throng of 74,000 at an out­door sta­dium on the convention’s final night.

With a chance of thun­der­storms on the hori­zon, con­ven­tion offi­cials announced that Obama would accept his party’s nom­i­na­tion indoors Thurs­day night before about 15,000 peo­ple at the Time Warner Cable Arena.

Con­ven­tion CEO Steve Ker­ri­gan said the speech was moved “to ensure the safety and secu­rity of our del­e­gates and con­ven­tion guests.” But GOP spokes­woman Kirsten Kukowski cast it as Democ­rats down­grad­ing the event “due to lack of enthusiasm.”

“Prob­lems fill­ing the seats?” she asked in a statement.

The shift ensured there would be no repeat of the spec­tac­u­lar scene from 2008, when Obama accepted the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion in a packed-to-the-gills, 84,000-seat sta­dium in Den­ver, com­plete with ivory columns on the 50-yard line. Repub­li­cans mocked that as “The Tem­ple of Obama.”

The pres­i­dent planned a national con­fer­ence call Thurs­day to those who won’t get in to the smaller hall.

Clinton’s con­ven­tion speech on Wednes­day will be a high point in a check­ered rela­tion­ship between two men who sparred, some­times sharply, in the 2008 pri­maries, when the ex-president was sup­port­ing wife Hillary’s cam­paign for the nomination.

Democ­rats hope that as the last pres­i­dent to pre­side over sus­tained eco­nomic growth, Clin­ton can help pro­pel this pres­i­dent to re-election in less rosy times. His wife — seen as a poten­tial pres­i­den­tial can­di­date again for 2016 — will be worlds away from the debate, in dis­tance and sub­stance. Obama’s sec­re­tary of state, mid­way through an 11-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region, should be in East Timor by the time her hus­band speaks.

Repub­li­can Mitt Rom­ney had no pub­lic sched­ule on the day Obama accepts his nom­i­na­tion. But he framed the eco­nomic debate against Obama in an email to sup­port­ers, writ­ing that “no pres­i­dent in mod­ern his­tory has ever asked to be re-elected with this many Amer­i­cans out of work. Twenty-three mil­lion Amer­i­cans are strug­gling for work, and more fam­i­lies wake up in poverty than ever before.”

GOP run­ning mate Paul Ryan, cam­paign­ing in Iowa, kept up his run­ning crit­i­cism of the Democ­rats. He pre­dicted Clin­ton and the Democ­rats would offer “a great ren­di­tion of how good things were in the 1990s. But we’re not going to hear much about how things have been in the last four years.”

To bol­ster Rom­ney and Ryan, con­ser­v­a­tive groups announced nearly $13 mil­lion in new ad spend­ing to counter Obama’s convention.

Amer­i­can Cross­roads planned to spend $6.6 mil­lion over the next 10 days on an ad that crit­i­cizes the econ­omy under Obama’s watch and Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­ity is spend­ing another $6.2 mil­lion on ads crit­i­ciz­ing the Democ­rats’ health-care overhaul.

Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor who served under both Clin­ton and Obama, made the rounds of morn­ing talk shows Wednes­day to trace a con­nec­tion between the two pres­i­dents, speak­ing of “sim­i­lar val­ues, sim­i­lar poli­cies and sim­i­lar objectives.”

Clin­ton “can do noth­ing but help” Obama, Emanuel said, reject­ing any notion that Clinton’s abil­ity to get things done and work with Repub­li­cans would some­how dimin­ish per­cep­tions of Obama.

But for­mer Repub­li­can New Hamp­shire Gov. John Sununu, writ­ing in the New Hamp­shire Union Leader, said Clinton’s speech “will serve to remind the world of a time when the lead­er­ship of the Demo­c­ra­tic Party took fis­cal respon­si­bil­ity seri­ously. It might even induce nos­tal­gia for the days of bal­anced bud­gets and bipar­ti­san accom­plish­ments such as wel­fare reform.”

The GOP released a new Web video show­cas­ing the story of a man who lost his job and got back on his feet through the welfare-to-work require­ments enacted under Clin­ton. Repub­li­can Party Chair­man Reince Priebus said Obama was gut­ting the work require­ments, “hold­ing back the pros­per­ity of so many who are scrap­ing to get by.”

Obama adviser Valerie Jar­rett, mak­ing the case for Obama’s eco­nomic poli­cies in an appear­ance on MSNBC, said the pres­i­dent has a strong argu­ment to make that peo­ple are doing bet­ter, but she acknowl­edged that “Amer­i­cans are sit­ting around the break­fast table try­ing to fig­ure out to make ends meet, so we have work to do.”

Mary­land Gov. Mar­tin O’Malley, chair­man of the Demo­c­ra­tic Gov­er­nors Asso­ci­a­tion, spoke at a break­fast with Iowa del­e­gates and urged party activists to get fully behind Obama in the next two months.

“We have 60 days to turn to our neigh­bors, to find com­mon ground, to appeal to their good inten­tions and to cre­ate a coun­try of more by re-electing Barack Obama pres­i­dent of the United States,” he said.

If Day 2 of the Democ­rats’ con­ven­tion was all about grab­bing some of Clinton’s star power, open­ing day was designed to por­tray Obama as some­one who under­stands the prob­lems of ordi­nary people.

Michelle Obama played those cards with force in a speech declar­ing that after four years as pres­i­dent, her hus­band is still the man who drove a rust-bucket on early dates, res­cued a cof­fee table from the trash and knows the strug­gles of every­day Amer­i­cans because he lived them in full.

“I have seen first­hand that being pres­i­dent doesn’t change who you are. No, it reveals who you are,” the first lady said to lusty cheers Tues­day night in a deeply per­sonal, yet unmis­tak­ably polit­i­cal testimonial.

Mrs. Obama didn’t men­tion Rom­ney in her remarks. But there was no mis­tak­ing the con­trast she was draw­ing when she laid out cer­tain val­ues, “that how hard you work mat­ters more than how much you make, that help­ing oth­ers means more than just get­ting ahead yourself.”

Polling gives Obama a con­sis­tent advan­tage over Rom­ney as the more empa­thetic and in-touch leader. But the sput­ter­ing econ­omy is the top­most voter con­cern and Obama’s high­est moun­tain to climb after more than 42 months of unem­ploy­ment sur­pass­ing 8 per­cent, the longest such stretch since the end of World War II. No pres­i­dent since the Great Depres­sion has been re-elected with job­less­ness so high.

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