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Election 2012: Obama to take stage after Clinton pitch
“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,” said Clinton, the last president to see sustained growth, in the 1990s. “Conditions are improving and if you’ll renew the president’s contract, you will feel it.”
Clinton also preached bipartisanship and a pullback from politics as “blood sport”, this near the end of back-to-back conventions that feasted on rhetorical red meat and even as he ripped the Republican agenda as a throwback to the past, a “double-down on trickle-down” economics that assumes tax cuts for the wealthy will help everyone down the ladder.
Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod, also appearing on morning talk shows, said Clinton’s speech had set out the economic choices, “so now the president can talk about the future having some of that underbrush out of the way.”
Obama watched Clinton’s speech from backstage, then strolled out and embraced him, bringing happy roars from the crowd in his first appearance at the convention.
It was no accident the president devoted many stops on a pre-convention tour of battleground states to campus crowds of the sort that lifted him to the Democratic nomination and the presidency last time.
“Barack’s challenge here is to sort of wake up America and make them realize how serious this election is,” Democratic Rep. Sam Farr of California said in an interview at the convention. Judging from his town hall meetings in August, when only 15 or 20 people showed up instead of the usual hundreds, there is a “big apathy about politics right now,” regardless of party.
Farr added: “If we have an apathetic America, I’m terrified.”
