Clinton: 'We're all in this together'

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Former President Bill Clinton made a detailed case for President Obama’s reelection on Wednesday night, portraying the Republican ticket led by Mitt Romney as the embodiment of a “you’re-on-your-own, winner-take-all society.”

Speaking before a rapturous crowd at the Democratic National Convention, Clinton acknowledged that the economy is not “where we want it to be,” but defended Obama’s handling of the severe crisis he inherited.

At the heart of his 48-minute speech, Clinton sought to boil down the election — and the competing visions for the economy — to a clear choice.

“I like the argument for President Obama's reelection a lot better,” he said. “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 modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses and lots of new wealth for the innovators.”

He cut to the core of the Republican argument in recent days: that Obama has left Americans worse off than when he took office.

“Are we where we want to be?” Clinton asked. “No. Is the president satisfied? Of course not. But are we better off than we were when he took office with an economy in free-fall, losing 750,000 jobs a month? The answer is yes.”

Unlike many Clinton stem-winders, he spent little time basking in the economic success of his own presidency. But he said that when Obama took office in 2009, he had it worse than Clinton did in 1993.

“President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did,” he said. “No president — not me or any of my predecessors — could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you'll renew the president's contract you will feel it.”

Departing from his prepared remarks, Clinton said the election “would turn” on whether Americans believed him. “All I can tell you,” he said, “is I believe that with all my heart.”

The crowd in the Time Warner Cable Arena appeared to hang on Clinton’s every word, joining in call-and-response exchanges throughout the address.

The former president and onetime Obama critic painted a sharp contrast between the Democratic and Republican economic philosophies for the country 12 years after he left the White House.

“The most important question is, what kind of country do you want to live in?” Clinton asked.

“If you want a you’re-on-your-own, winner-take-all society, you should support the Republican ticket,” Clinton said. “If you want a country of shared prosperity and shared responsibility — a we're-all-in-this-together society — you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.”

A relaxed but raspy-voiced Clinton riffed with the jovial crowd, at times trying to focus their attention by saying, “It's time to get serious.” Clinton's speech extended well beyond 11 p.m., the time when networks were scheduled to go off the air.

And he offered detailed explanations on policies including welfare, taking on Romney's stance that Obama is trying to weaken the work requirements in the welfare reform bill he signed, saying it's “just not true.”

“When some Republican governors asked to try new ways to put people on welfare back to work, the Obama administration said they would only do it if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20 percent,” he said. “You hear that? More work.

“But they keep running ads on it,” he said. “As their campaign pollster said, 'We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.' Now, that is true. I couldn't have said it better myself — I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.”

Obama joined Clinton on stage after his address, providing the president’s campaign with the made-for-the-front-page tableau of Obama linking arms with the man who, at 66, is now indisputably the patriarch of the Democratic Party. Clinton bowed to Obama and the two shared a bear-hug.

As the two left the stage, the crowd chanted, "We are fired up!" After the speech, Democratic delegates held their formal roll-call vote to nominate Obama as their candidate for reelection.

Obama is counting on Clinton to help him in the tight contest with Romney, especially with independent voters expected to decide the presidential election.

Clinton remains enormously popular with the public, polls show, and is considered the Democratic Party's foremost economic messenger. He is also seen as more of a centrist than Obama, and in his speech Wednesday he defended the president from GOP attacks on the subject of welfare reform, a central issue of Clinton’s presidency.

As a video highlighting Clinton’s presidency played before his speech, virtually every delegate in the hall stood on the floor. Waving signs that read “Middle Class First,” they erupted when the silver-haired former president walked on stage shortly after 10:30 p.m. to the sounds of his old campaign song, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop.”

“Mr. Mayor, fellow Democrats, we are here to nominate a president. And I’ve got one in mind,” Clinton began, drawing laughs and cheers.

“I want to nominate a man who is cool on the outside but who burns for America on the inside,” he added to a deafening roar.

This is the seventh consecutive Democratic National Convention in which Clinton delivered a major speech. As is his custom, he was still working on the text late Wednesday, hours before he was to take the stage.

His marquee speech marked the culmination of a four-year defrosting of the Clinton-Obama relationship.

During the 2008 Democratic primary, the former president’s sharp criticism of Obama in support of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, prompted party leaders to intercede to urge him to tone it down. Clinton had suggested Obama’s stance on the Iraq war was “a fairy tale” and played down his victory in South Carolina as comparable to the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s wins in the state a generation earlier.

Those close to the two men now say the bond between the presidents has never been better, although the freewheeling Clinton has occasionally veered from the Obama campaign’s message. Earlier this year, for example, he caused a minor headache in Obama-land when he called Mitt Romney's business record “sterling.”

But in an interview with NBC News that aired Wednesday before his speech, Clinton said his relationship with Obama is “quite good, actually.”

“It's candid, it's open," the former president said. “We haven't been close friends a long time or anything like that, but he knows that I support him.”

In the interview, Clinton added to his defense of Obama’s response to the deep recession he inherited and said “no president” could have restored America to full employment in just four years. “Nobody could've turned it around by now,” he said. “So the question is: Do you want to go back to the people and the policies that were in charge before?”