CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (Reuters) - Jumping to the defense of an ex-adversary, former U.S. President Bill Clinton will argue on Wednesday that Americans must re-elect President Barack Obama to restore a vibrant economy that creates jobs.
Clinton, the Democrats' most popular elder statesman, caps the second night of the Democratic National Convention with a speech designed to remind voters of the budget surpluses and job growth he led in the 1990s during his two terms in the White House.
Obama needs Clinton's help to recapture some of the magic that carried him to victory in 2008. The president is struggling to rekindle strong job growth and faces a tough fight against Republican Mitt Romney at the November 6 election.
Clinton will appeal for more time for Obama to fix the economy and reduce the jobless rate of 8.3 percent, according to excerpts of a speech to be delivered later.
"He inherited a deeply damaged economy, put a floor under the crash, began the long hard road to recovery, and laid the foundation for a more modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for the innovators," Clinton will say.
'CANDID' RELATIONSHIP
The two men have had strained ties at times, going back to the bitter 2008 Democratic presidential primary battle when the former Illinois Senator defeated Clinton's wife, Hillary Clinton. But Clinton has since campaigned energetically for Obama.
Asked by NBC News about his relationship with Obama, Clinton was frank: "It's quite good, actually. It's candid, it's open. We haven't been close friends a long time or anything like that, but he knows that I support him."
Clinton rejected the criticism of Obama's economic leadership leveled by Romney and fellow Republicans at their own convention last week in Tampa, Florida.
"In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was pretty simple: We left him a total mess, he hasn't finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in," Clinton will say, according to the excerpts.
Clinton's appearance was to be the capstone on a sometimes chaotic day at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina where Obama had to personally intervene to force back into the party platform language declaring Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel.
The wording was omitted from the document to show more even-handed support in the Arab-Israeli dispute. But that risked angering Jewish-American voters who are a key Democratic constituency.
In an embarrassing development after a strong start to the convention on Tuesday, it took three voice votes to bring back the language.
Forecasts of thunderstorms put a crimp on Obama's nomination party, forcing Democrats to move his planned acceptance speech on Thursday from a 74,000-seat outdoor football stadium to a much smaller indoor venue.
The shift to the Time Warner Cable Arena was a setback for Obama, who hoped to create a visual spectacle in Charlotte's Bank of America stadium on Thursday to rival his 2008 acceptance speech in a football stadium in Denver.
It was also a letdown for tens of thousands of Obama supporters from around the country who had been given tickets to the biggest speech in Obama's campaign.
(Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Eric Johnson, Colleen Jenkins and Jeff Mason in Charlotte, Editing by Alistair Bell and Alden Bentley)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bill-clinton-case-obama-election-002119785.html
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