Hopes Clinton speech will lift Obama

Bill Clinton took centre stage at the Democratic National Convention as President Barack Obama’s nomination is placed before a party hoping that the last president to preside over sustained growth can help propel him to re-election in a sputtering economy.

The former president’s speech was a high point in a checkered relationship between two men who sparred, sometimes sharply, in the 2008 primaries, when Clinton was supporting wife Hillary’s campaign for the nomination.

If day two of the Democrats’ convention was all about grabbing some of Clinton’s lustre, 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 first-hand that being president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are,” the first lady said to lusty cheers in a deeply personal, yet unmistakably political testimonial.

Obama, who watched his wife’s address back in Washington, arrived in the convention city yesterday to prepare for his own convention-closing speech tonight.

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

“He can do nothing but help,” 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 New Hampshire governor 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.”

While Bill Clinton reclaimed the political spotlight, his wife was worlds away — in distance and substance. Obama’s secretary of state is midway through an 11-day, six-nation tour of the Asia-Pacific region. She was due to be in East Timor last night.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney appeared nowhere in Mrs Obama’s 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”.

Such subtleties were otherwise missing from the stage as speaker after speaker teed up to take a strip off Romney and the Republicans.

The party’s up-and-coming Julian Castro, mayor of San Antonio, Texas, captured the tone in branding Romney a millionaire “who doesn’t get it”.

Former Ohio governor Ted Strickland said: “If Mitt was Santa Claus, he’d fire the reindeer and outsource the elves.”

Polling gives Obama a consistent advantage over Romney. But the sputtering economy is the biggest voter concern and Obama’s highest mountain to climb after more than 42 months of unemployment surpassing 8%.

No president since the Great Depression has been re-elected with joblessness so high.