Democratic Convention Focus Shifts to National Security

By Dan Balz and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 1:06 PM

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."

Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program that Clinton supporters are going to remember her charge during the primary campaign that Obama "didn't have the experience to be president."

He said he did not know anyone who could beat Biden in a debate but argued that the GOP is "right on the issues" and would ultimately prevail. "If you go back and look at what Joe Biden has been for, you'll see he has had 30 years of foreign policy experience, but he has 30 years of usually being wrong," Romney said.

Both Giuliani and Romney ducked questions about their own vice presidential prospects. But Karl Rove, a former top Bush political strategist who is now a Fox News commentator, said on the air that Romney told him Tuesday night, "They [McCain officials] haven't called me, and I guess I'm out." However, Rove said, Romney could still be in the running because "he doesn't know" what McCain plans to do.

McCain's latest political ad attacking Obama quotes the Democrat as having called Iran a "tiny" country that "doesn't pose a serious threat." An announcer intones: "Terrorism? Destroying Israel? Those aren't serious threats? Obama -- dangerously unprepared to be president."

Omitted from the ad is the context that Obama was comparing Iran, Cuba and Venezuela to the former Soviet Union. "These countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union," he said in a speech in Oregon in May. "They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. . . . If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance."

In her speech Tuesday night, Clinton described the passions that drove her to seek the presidency, including a desire to rebuild the economy, enact universal health care, end the war in Iraq and stand up for what she called "invisible" Americans. "Those are the reasons I ran for president. These are the reasons I support Barack Obama. And those are the reasons you should, too," she said.

When she finished, the white placards that had greeted her gave way to narrow blue-and-white signs that said "Obama" on one side and "Unity" on the other, as well as signs that said "Hillary" and "Unity."

Clinton called McCain "a colleague and a friend who has served his country with honor." But she told the delegates, "We don't need four more years of the last eight years," and she drew a huge cheer when she described McCain as a virtual clone of Bush who would continue the administration's policies.

"It makes sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities," she said, referring to the site of the Republican National Convention in Minnesota. "Because these days, they're awfully hard to tell apart."

Obama aides said he called Clinton after watching her speech at a house in Billings, Mont., and thanked her for her support. He also called Bill Clinton and congratulated him on his wife's performance.

Before Hillary Clinton arrived at the convention, former Virginia governor Mark Warner, delivering the keynote address Tuesday night, described Obama as the candidate best equipped to put the United States on course to win "the race for the future" in an increasingly competitive global economy.

Arguing that the status quo "just won't cut it," Warner said McCain would explode the deficit, ignore the nation's infrastructure needs and continue spending $10 billion a month on the Iraq war. "That's four more years that we just can't afford," he said to cheers. "Barack Obama has a different vision and a different plan."

The election, Warner said, is about not left vs. right but future vs. past. He said Obama would not govern as a partisan Democrat but would reach out to the opposition to get things done. "We need leaders who will appeal to us not as Republicans or Democrats but first and foremost as Americans," he said.

As convention delegates looked toward the evening program, top Democratic elected officials continued to raise questions about Obama's campaign strategy and worried aloud that he must do more to overcome the doubts that voters in their states have about his readiness to be president. Their concerns came as McCain blasted Obama in a speech to the American Legion convention in Phoenix.

Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a prominent Clinton supporter, said that Obama is still struggling to connect with working-class voters and that the presumptive nominee reminded him of Adlai Stevenson, the brainy Illinoisan who lost the presidential campaigns of 1952 and 1956.

"You ask him a question, and he gives you a six-minute answer," Rendell told Washington Post reporters and editors. "And the six-minute answer is smart as all get-out. It's intellectual. It's well framed. It takes care of all the contingencies. But it's a lousy sound bite."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) said Obama's campaign must demonstrate its willingness to engage against a Republican Party that he said is well skilled in political combat.

"The only thing they're going to do is, in old Brooklyn terms, rabbit-punch every day, and Obama has to show the American people that he can rabbit-punch, that he can be in that street fight," he told The Post. "I think there was a reluctance initially in the Obama campaign to engage in that. I think they now realize they have to."

If Monday night's convention program lacked a fighting spirit, Obama brought his to the campaign trail on Tuesday -- fiercely laying out the case for his candidacy and the contrast with McCain. Obama even mentioned McCain's prisoner-of-war status in Vietnam in a way that suggested he will begin to challenge that as a credential for being president.

"John McCain has a great biography, has been a POW," Obama told a small group gathered at an aircraft maintenance facility in Kansas City, Mo. "I have a funny name." He said the Republicans are arguing "that you don't know whether I can be trusted to lead."

"But I'm just going to remind everyone here: This election is not about me," he said. "It's about you. It's about who's going to be fighting for you."

Branigin reported from Washington. Staff writers Shailagh Murray in Denver, Anne E. Kornblut with Obama and Michael D. Shear with McCain contributed to this report.