Biden Accepts VP Nomination After Rousing Speech by Bill Clinton

DENVER -- Sen. Joseph R. Biden accepted the vice presidential nomination of the Democratic Party with a speech that harkened back to his working-class roots in Scranton, Pa., then launched into a foreign policy broadside tying Republican presidential candidate John McCain to the failures of the Bush administration.

"As we gather here tonight, our country is less secure and more isolated than at any time in recent history," Biden will say, according to an advanced text of his speech. "The Bush-McCain foreign policy has dug us into a very deep hole, with very few friends to help us climb out."

While Biden's speech will be an important marker in the week because of his anticipated aggressive attack on McCain, the rhetorical highlight may have come from former President Bill Clinton.

After months of distance and friction with the Obama campaign, Clinton took the stage to perhaps the longest, most sustained applause yet in the three-day-old convention. Delegates greeted him with a wave of American flags and chants of "Bill, Bill, Bill." The band blared Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop," the anthem of Clinton's 1992 campaign.

Lapping it up, Clinton declared, "I love this." But from the beginning, he made it clear he would not hold back on his embrace of the man who vanquished his wife to formally become the nominee of the the Democratic Party this evening.

"Barack Obama is ready to lead America and restore American leadership in the world," Clinton declared. "Ready to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Barack Obama is ready to be the president of the United States."

Clinton did not try to hide his allegiance to his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, but speaking for all of her followers, he insisted the wounds of that protracted battle would not be lasting.

"Hillary told us in no uncertain terms that she is going to do everything she can to elect Barack Obama; that makes two of us," Clinton said to applause that was as relieved as it was joyful. "Actually, that makes 18 million of us, because like Hillary, I want all of you who supported her to vote for Barack Obama in November."

With Bill Clinton's sometimes-erratic behavior, Obama backers spent the day anxiously awaiting his address. Obama aides were given an advanced look at Hillary Clinton's Tuesday-night speech. Her husband kept his under wraps, only heightening the drama and anxiety. He told the crowd he was there first to throw his support to Obama, and second, to warm up the audience for Biden.

The nearly two-hour gap between Clinton and Biden should ensure the former president will not upstage the would-be future vice president. But the Obama campaign left nothing to chance, releasing excerpts of Biden's speech just after Clinton stepped off stage.

"Barack Obama and I took very different journeys to this destination, but we share a common story," Biden will say. "Mine began in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and then Wilmington, Delaware, with a dad who fell on hard economic times, but who always told me: 'Champ, when you get knocked down, get up... get up.' My mother's creed is the American creed: no one is better than you. You are everyone's equal, and everyone is equal to you."

As Obama's running mate, Biden will heap praise on the man who chose him for the vice presidency.

"You can learn an awful lot about a man campaigning with him, debating him, and seeing how he reacts under pressure," Biden will say of Obama. "You learn about the strength of his mind. But even more importantly, you learn about the quality of his heart. I watched how he touched people, how he inspired them, and I realized he has tapped into the oldest American belief of all: we don't have to accept a situation we cannot bear. We have the power to change it."

McCain's campaign kept up its effort to foment division between the Obama and Clinton camps, reprising past Bill Clinton statements such as when he suggested a vote for Obama was like a roll of the dice.

"I mean when is the last time we elected a president based on one year of service in the Senate before he started running? He would have been a senator longer by the time he's inaugurated, but essentially once you start running for president full-time you don't have time to do much else," the former president said on the Charlie Rose Show in December 2007.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds took Clinton's full-throated endorsement of Obama and tried to use it against the Democrat.

"It is indicative of the concern among Democratic voters about Barack Obama's inexperience that after three full days of the Democratic National Convention, President Clinton was finally forced to testify that Senator Obama is ready to be President, despite his previous arguments to the contrary," Bounds said.