On the Trail, Spouses' Roles Evolve

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Bill Stumps for Hillary Clinton in Iowa

Former president Bill Clinton stumps for his wife in Carlisle, Iowa Sunday night.

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He returns repeatedly to his economic record as president, and he told an audience in Texas, a state closely linked to the armed services, that "on every measurement of readiness, our military is in worse shape, much worse shape, than it was the day I left office."

Clinton's homage skips some of the standard riffs of spousal speechmaking: Anecdotes are rare, and so are highlights of his wife's upbringing. He runs through a few slices of her r¿sum¿ but concentrates on her knowledge of the issues, something he believes should separate her from Barack Obama, whom he accuses of campaigning on feeling, not fact. He charges that Obama's call for wholesale change devalues Washington experience and unfairly tars his wife as being in the game too long.

"The other campaign," Clinton said on a stage in Corpus Christi, "believes that anybody who was involved in making anything good happen in the '90s or stopping anything bad from happening this decade . . . should not be permitted to lead this country. So we have to begin again as if nothing ever happened before."

Clinton remains popular, but in a Washington Post poll this month, 50 percent of respondents said they would be comfortable with him back in the White House, down from 60 percent last fall.

Obama's main role has been to introduce her husband to audiences unfamiliar with him.

On the campaign trail about half as often as Clinton so she can be home with her two young daughters, Obama weaves details of her husband's life and her own into an alternately bleak and hopeful tale. It hinges on economic struggle, especially for the working class.

"The bar is set, and folks work to reach a bar. And then they reach it and they think they're there, only to find that the bar has moved," she told an audience in Galveston. "We're seeing it happening to regular folks all over this country. We're living in a time where people are finding that the bar is just shifting and moving on them, and that they can't get ahead."

She then pivots to the call to action that lies at the heart of Barack Obama's approach and appeal.

"Barack says our challenge is that we are suffering from a deficit of empathy, that deep down we are one another's brothers' and sisters' keepers. We've lost the understanding that we in this nation have to have a mutual obligation to one other," Obama said in Galveston. "The truth is, we haven't been asked to compromise and sacrifice for one another. We've been told, 'Just take care of your own, and if you're okay, then don't worry about anybody else.' "

She has castigated the Clintons for what she considers rough tactics that make reconciliation harder once a campaign ends. The way forward, she said in Houston, "is by building relationships, not by cutting your opponents into pieces."

It is a theme she has been hitting for weeks, particularly after Bill Clinton belittled her husband's narrative of opposition to the Iraq war as "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

"Another candidate's spouse has been getting an awful lot of attention," Obama wrote in a fundraising letter. ". . . What we didn't expect, at least not from our fellow Democrats, are the win-at-all-costs tactics we've seen recently. We didn't expect misleading accusations that willfully distort Barack's record."