KEY POINTS:
DENVER - It'll be terrific on the night. With Bill Clinton it always is. Far less certain is whether his convention speech today will lay to rest the lingering uncertainties about his involvement in the Obama campaign, his role in the party and - not least - his peace with himself.
Clinton comes to the convention in the unaccustomed role of a loser, if only by association. He threw himself into his wife's campaign, but she was outsmarted by an upstart rival, peddling "fairy tales" according to the former President, but who proved that he was more than a match for the most vaunted machine in Democratic politics.
By all accounts Clinton and the young man bidding for his former job have hardly spoken since the end of the epic primary battle. His public support has been lukewarm at best. Was Obama ready to be president, Clinton was asked last month. No one could ever be prepared for the job beforehand, was the most ringing endorsement he could muster.
Today the support will be more full-throated - as it has to be before an audience still divided by the primary battle, but determined not to blow an election in circumstances that could not be more favourable. The grievances, however, will surely linger.
There are several. The ex-president, whose empathy with African Americans once earned him the description of America's first "black" president, still fumes at accusations that his blundering on the race issue played into Obama's hands in the South Carolina primary and elsewhere.
And he is said to be miffed that he is scheduled to speak during a session devoted to international affairs, instead of economic policy where he believes he excelled. What may rankle most, however, is what to this proud, self-absorbed man is the whipper-snapper's apparent belittling of his achievement in office.
Whether you agreed with him or not, Obama remarked during a campaign debate, Ronald Reagan had been a "consequential" president. The implication was that Clinton, who is only 62, had not been.
Obama could have no more potent advocate on the stump than an enthusiastic Bill Clinton.
But a lukewarm Bill Clinton would only reinforce suspicions that secretly he would prefer Obama to lose this time, opening the way for a second Hillary run in 2012.
- INDEPENDENT
