Democratic Convention Focus Shifts to National Security

DENVER, Aug. 27 -- Democrats shifted their focus to national security issues Wednesday as they prepared to formally nominate Sen. Barack Obama as their party's presidential candidate with backing from former president Bill Clinton, a featured speaker on the third night of the Democratic National Convention.

The Obama campaign, meanwhile, announced that the senator from Illinois, accompanied by his wife, Michelle, and his vice presidential running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., will begin a bus tour of three key battleground states later this week after his formal acceptance Thursday of the Democratic presidential nomination. The tour of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan will kick off the post-convention drive to defeat the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) in the Nov. 4 presidential election.

With the Democratic convention stressing foreign policy issues Wednesday under the theme, "Securing America's Future," the McCain campaign attacked Obama in a new television ad as "dangerously unprepared to be president." Former GOP presidential contenders Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney also visited the Democratic convention site to appear on morning cable television talk shows and press the McCain camp's arguments.

Obama campaigned in Billings, Mont., Wednesday morning and was scheduled to arrive in Denver in the afternoon. Among the speakers lined up for Wednesday night's program were Bill Clinton; Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2004 election; New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who briefly competed for the nomination earlier this year; Sen. Evan Bayh (Ind.), a former contender for the vice presidential nod; and Tammy Duckworth, a disabled Iraq war veteran who ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. House seat from Illinois in 2006.

Delivering a prime-time speech Wednesday night is Biden, the six-term senator from Delaware who was chosen by Obama last week to join him on the Democratic ticket.

Clinton, Biden and other speakers were expected to press attacks on the Bush administration and McCain a day after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) roused the convention with sharp criticism of the Arizona Republican and a full-throated endorsement of Obama, her former rival for the Democratic nomination. She urged Democrats to put the long and bitter battle behind them and unite to take back the White House in November.

"You haven't worked so hard over the last 18 months, or endured the last eight years, to suffer through more failed leadership," Clinton told an audience packed to overflowing at Denver's Pepsi Center. "No way. No how. No McCain. Barack Obama is my candidate. And he must be our president."

With some Clinton supporters still voicing reluctance to back the senator from Illinois, the former first lady's address was the most highly anticipated of the convention, short of Obama's acceptance speech on Thursday night. Her appearance was designed to signal the final transition from leader of her own historic campaign, which drew 18 million votes and pushed Obama to the limit, to unabashed supporter of the party's presumptive nominee.

The process of formally nominating Obama was expected to follow a script Wednesday afternoon in which delegates would first hear nominating and seconding speeches on behalf of Clinton as part of an effort to assuage her supporters. The schedule then calls for nominating and seconding speeches on behalf of Obama, followed by a roll call vote.

At some point, the roll call vote -- designed to allow Clinton supporters to voice their support for her -- is expected to be cut off in favor of a move to give the nomination to Obama by acclamation, thus demonstrating party unity.

In an apparent effort to highlight Democratic divisions, Giuliani and Romney showed up at the Pepsi Center Wednesday and appeared on morning talk shows.

Clinton "did not answer the major question that she's raised about Barack Obama," Giuliani said on CBS's "Early Show." The former New York mayor added: "She's the one who said during the primary that he's not prepared to be president of the United States, as Joe Biden did. And nowhere in that speech did she answer that question about his character, his ability to lead, the things that are really at issue here."