Official site of Tribune News serving Tomball, Magnolia and Waller

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Democrats open their national convention Tuesday offering President Barack Obama as America's best chance to revive the ragged U.S. economy and asking voters to be patient with incomplete results so far. Michelle Obama, in her opening-night speech, aims to give people a very personal reminder of "the man that he was before he was president."

"The truth is that he has grown so much, but in terms of his core character and value, that has not been changed at all," Mrs. Obama said in interview airing on SiriusXM's "The Joe Madison Show."

The three-day convention has drawn thousands of delegates to a state Obama narrowly carried in 2008. And although Obama no longer is the fresh-faced newbie who leveraged a short Senate career into an audacious run for the nation's highest office, he still can excite partisans, and Democrats were counting on massive numbers to pack a stadium for his speech later in the week.

The Democrats dispatched U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, who hopes to unseat Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts, to make the case for Obama on morning talk shows, and she acknowledged that "it's tough out there" for many Americans. But she insisted that Obama offers the better vision going forward.

"Republicans are not helping us get back," she said.

Warren was up against GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman, who held out the millions of people who are struggling to find work as an indictment of the president's first term.

"Four years into a presidency and it's incomplete?" he asked in a round of morning television interviews. "The president is asking people just to be patient with him?"

GOP nominee Mitt Romney's campaign reinforced that message with a new Web video answering Obama's statement that "there are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery." The new video showcases a series of ordinary people who've lost their jobs saying, "I'm an American, not a bump in the road."

Romney, his convention behind him, planned to spend the day in Vermont preparing for the fall debates with Obama.

If the economy is Obama's burden, he demonstrated the power of the presidency with a convention-eve visit to hurricane-stricken lands in Louisiana, offering aid and empathy. The president emphasized the government's determination to lend a strong helping hand. Romney, for his part, focused on neighbor helping neighbor in his visit days earlier, though both support a mix of emergency aid from the taxpayer and volunteerism in response to natural disasters.

On convention eve, Democrats released a party platform for ratification Tuesday that echoes Obama's call for higher taxes on the wealthy and reflects his shift on gay marriage by supporting it explicitly.

In a nod to dissenters on gay marriage, the platform expresses support for "the freedom of churches and religious entities to decide how to administer marriage as a religious sacrament without government interference."

As with the deeply conservative Republican platform, not all of which Romney endorses, nothing binds Obama to the specifics of the party's manifesto.

The president rallies in Virginia on Tuesday before joining the convention a day later.

Michelle Obama said she wants to use her opening speech to "remind people about the values that drive my husband to do what he has done and what he is going to do for the next four years. I am going to take folks back to the man he was before he was president."

San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro delivers the convention's keynote address Tuesday, a nod to the importance of Hispanic voters in the race.

"Under any score — immigration, education, health care — in any number of issues, he has been a very effective advocate for the Latino community," Castro said of Obama during an interview on CNN.

With flourishes but no suspense, Democrats will march through the roll call of states renominating Obama for president and Joe Biden for vice president on Wednesday.

That's also when the convention hears from Bill Clinton, whose 1990s presidency is being trumpeted by Democrats as the last great period of economic growth and balanced budgets — a further redemption of sorts, at least from his party, for a leader who survived impeachment over sexual scandal.

Obama's big acceptance speech is Thursday, and Democrats were closely monitoring the weather forecast. Officials had to decide by Tuesday whether to proceed with plans to hold the final night of the convention in an outdoor stadium or move it to a smaller indoor arena. Heavy evening rains doused Charlotte over the Labor Day weekend. Thursday's forecast calls for a chance of rain.

In a USA Today interview, Obama accused Republicans of building their campaign around a "fictional Barack Obama" by wholly misrepresenting his positions and words. He singled out Romney's claim, widely debunked, that the Obama administration stripped a work requirement out of federal welfare laws.

The Republican convention last week heard testimonials from a colleague of Romney at Bain Capital and from the founder of Staples, the office supply chain that grew from the private-equity firm's investments. Democrats, focused on enterprises that closed or moved overseas after Romney's firm got involved, are giving speaking time to workers from Bain-controlled companies who will tell the other side of the story.

Obama came out with a campaign commercial asserting that, under Romney, "a middle-class family will pay an average of up to $2,000 more a year in taxes, while at the same time giving multimillionaires like himself a $250,000 tax cut." Aides said it would be seen in Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia, the battleground states where the White House race is likely to be decided.

The president and aides have acknowledged for weeks that they and the groups supporting them are likely to be outspent by Romney, and recent figures say that has been the case in television advertising in the battleground states for much of the past two months.

Democrats chose North Carolina for their convention to demonstrate their determination to contest it in the fall campaign. Obama carried North Carolina by 14,000 votes in 2008, but faces a tough challenge this time given statewide unemployment of 9.6 percent, higher than the vexing national rate of 8.3 percent.

Woodward reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Ben Feller in LaPlace, La., Philip Elliott in Detroit, Kasie Hunt in Wolfeboro, N.H., and Michael Biesecker, Mitch Weiss and Beth Fouhy in North Carolina contributed to this report.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — President Barack Obama swept into his convention city Wednesday, eager to accept his party's nomination and make the case for re-election despite a sputtering economy. He hoped to claim a little luster from Bill Clinton's prime-time address to the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday.

In a last-minute shift, the president ditched plans to deliver his acceptance speech before a throng of 74,000 at an outdoor stadium on the convention's final night, citing iffy weather for Thursday. With a chance of thunderstorms on the horizon, Obama will accept his party's nomination indoors before about 15,000 people at the Time Warner Cable Arena.

Convention CEO Steve Kerrigan said the speech was moved "to ensure the safety and security of our delegates and convention guests." But GOP spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski cast it as Democrats downgrading the event "due to lack of enthusiasm."

"Problems filling the seats?" she asked in a statement.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican, dismissed the risks of speaking "during a light September rain" and speculated the decision "has to do more with attendance than participation."

Whatever the reason, the shift ensured there would be no repeat of the extraordinary scene from 2008, when Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in a packed-to-the-gills, 84,000-seat stadium in Denver, complete with ivory columns on the 50-yard line. Republicans mocked that as "The Temple of Obama."

The move also reduced the likelihood of anti-Obama hecklers, since most of those in the crowd will be official convention participants.

Obama planned a national conference call Thursday to those who won't get in to the smaller hall.

Clinton's convention speech Wednesday will be a high point in a checkered relationship between two men who sparred, sometimes sharply, in the 2008 primaries, when the ex-president was supporting wife Hillary's campaign for the nomination.

Democrats hope that as the last president to preside over sustained economic growth, Clinton can help propel this president to re-election in less rosy times. His wife — seen as a potential presidential candidate again for 2016 — will be worlds away from the debate, in distance and substance. Obama's secretary of state, she will be midway through an 11-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region and should be in East Timor by the time her husband speaks.

Obama's Republican rival, Mitt Romney, said flatly the president just wasn't up to the job.

"Anyone who wants him to try again will be making a big mistake," Romney said in an interview that aired on Fox News Channel. The GOP nominee, staying in Vermont, has been spending the Democratic convention week preparing for fall debates with Obama.

He framed the economic debate against Obama in an email to supporters, writing that "no president in modern history has ever asked to be re-elected with this many Americans out of work. Twenty-three million Americans are struggling for work, and more families wake up in poverty than ever before."

GOP running mate Paul Ryan, campaigning in Iowa, kept up his running criticism of the Democrats. He predicted Clinton and the Democrats would offer "a great rendition of how good things were in the 1990s. But we're not going to hear much about how things have been in the last four years."

Ryan cast the country's economic struggles in grim terms, noting the national debt reached $16 trillion on Tuesday. "That's a country in decline," he said.

To bolster Romney and Ryan, conservative groups announced nearly $13 million in new ad spending to counter Obama's convention.

American Crossroads planned to spend $6.6 million over the next 10 days on an ad that criticizes the economy under Obama's watch and Americans for Prosperity is spending another $6.2 million on ads criticizing the Democrats' health-care overhaul.

Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor who served under both Clinton and Obama, made the rounds of morning talk shows Wednesday to trace a connection between the two presidents, speaking of "similar values, similar policies and similar objectives."

Clinton "can do nothing but help" Obama, Emanuel said, rejecting any notion that Clinton's ability to get things done and work with Republicans would somehow diminish perceptions of Obama.

But former Republican New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, writing in the New Hampshire Union Leader, said Clinton's speech "will serve to remind the world of a time when the leadership of the Democratic Party took fiscal responsibility seriously. It might even induce nostalgia for the days of balanced budgets and bipartisan accomplishments such as welfare reform."

The GOP released a new Web video showcasing the story of a man who lost his job and got back on his feet through the welfare-to-work requirements enacted under Clinton. Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus repeated the widely debunked claim that Obama was gutting the work requirements, "holding back the prosperity of so many who are scraping to get by."

Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, making the case for Obama's economic policies in an appearance on MSNBC, said the president has a strong argument to make that people are doing better, but she acknowledged that "Americans are sitting around the breakfast table trying to figure out to make ends meet, so we have work to do."

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, spoke at a breakfast with Iowa delegates and urged party activists to get fully behind Obama in the next two months.

"We have 60 days to turn to our neighbors, to find common ground, to appeal to their good intentions and to create a country of more by re-electing Barack Obama president of the United States," he said.

The Obama campaign insisted the decision to relocate his speech had nothing to do with worries about filling the stadium.

"Our concern was more about turning people away than about filling the stadium," Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters aboard Air Force One as Obama made his way to Charlotte.

Not only were there 65,000 people with tickets to Obama's speech, Psaki said, but another 19,000 were on a waiting list.

On the day after her big speech to the convention that sketched her husband in warm and personal terms, Michelle Obama told supporters at a luncheon promoting gay rights that it was time to get to work.

"We need you out there every single day between now and Nov. 6," she said. "You see my face? I'm serious? It's my serious first lady face. "My 'mom' face."

Woodward reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jennifer Agiesta and Jack Gillum in Washington, Kasie Hunt in Vermont, Thomas Beaumont and Steve Peoples in Iowa, and Ben Feller, Ken Thomas, Matt Michaels and Jim Kuhnhenn in Charlotte contributed to this report.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — The Democratic Party's platform makes no reference to God, drawing criticism from Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

Ryan tells Fox News' "Fox & Friends" the change is not in keeping with the country's founding documents and principles and suggests the Obama administration is behind the decision. The Republican platform mentions God 12 times.

The 2008 Democratic Party platform made a single reference to God, referring to the "God-given potential" of working people.

The new platform does contain a plank on faith, saying it "has always been a central part of the American story." The platform says the nation was founded on the principle of religious freedom and the ability of people to worship as they please. It also praises the work of faith-based organizations.

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — The conventional wisdom about national political conventions is that they have outlived their purpose.

Once, they were the place where the parties actually picked their candidates for president and vice president. But for at least 30 years now, conventions have been the place where the nominees, long since selected, try to bind up their party's internal wounds and reach out over the heads of the delegates to woo the less partisan voters who usually decide the election.

They have become the largest, most expensive infomercials in human experience.

So why are we even still having them?

As the parties convene, there will be much chattering that conventions don't matter anymore, that they are a waste of money (some of it taxpayer money) and should be abandoned. "Total anachronisms. Parties should scrap 'em," sniffs Mark McKinnon, former media adviser to George W. Bush and a co-founder of No Labels, a group devoted to purging "hyper-partisanship" from politics.

The Senate, in fact, voted, 95 to 4 a few weeks ago to cut off in the future the $18.3 million subsidy each party gets to stage (that is the word — "stage") the conventions. Homeland Security also gives out $50-milllion to assure security at each convention.

The parties are not likely to give up their moments in the sun, however.

Conventions are the time when voters really tune in. Even with the reduced air time the TV networks now give them, conventions bring a spike in attention, says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. Social media is likely to magnify that this year in the same way that it whetted TV audiences' appetites for this summer's other big event, the London Olympics.

The acceptance speeches of the two presidential nominees will be the largest campaign audience either receives until they meet together for the three debates.

Those speeches are no small thing.

American politics is hardly burdened by too much communication, although if you live in a battleground state saturated with 30-second commercials you might be forgiven for thinking that. The larger problem is too little substantive communication, particularly communication that forces a thought to last longer than the speed of sound-bite.

The acceptance speeches are the only time in the entire fall campaign when each candidate speaks directly to the country for an extended time, unfiltered by news coverage or back and forth with an opponent.

Other countries arrange time specifically for that sort of thing. Not in America.

"It is the best chance for a candidate to 'introduce himself' to the country on his own terms," says former Rep. Mickey Edwards, a Republican from Oklahoma. That is particularly interesting coming from Edwards, who in almost every other respect excoriates the present political system in his new book, "The Parties Versus the People."

"I do, indeed, want to radically overhaul the system, but that's about the voting process, money, partisanship in governing," Edwards says. "The convention is not at that level; it's more of a 'show', more important than mere 'entertainment.' I see it as something worth watching, and even more so than most of the other stuff on television."

Indeed, it is the kind of high-school civics version of campaigning that is otherwise pretty hard to locate in the day-to-day scrum of American national politics these days.

If the candidates want to speak directly to the nation after their conventions, they have to pay for the time, as Obama did in 2008.

Of course, if the justification for public spending on party events is that the acceptance speech is a public service, the government could just spend that $18.3 million to buy air time for each campaign.

That $18.3 million is one of the last remnants of a public finance system that was meant to curb money in politics. The IRS collects $3 from every taxpayer who ticks the box for the presidential campaign fund. But most of the money, some $235 million, is sitting in the government coffers because neither Romney nor Obama is taking their share, preferring instead to go out and raise and spend even more on their own.

Since $18 million might not be enough, at going rates, to buy an hour across all the networks and key cable channels, Congress could authorize the Presidential Election Campaign Fund to tap the rest of that money, too, to buy time on the condition it was used for long-form presentations. There will be a great temptation to take this unspent money and plow it back into paying down the government debt. But it would probably increase the chances of actually dealing with that debt if the candidates used the money to explain the fiscal situation and what they planned to do about it.

The parties will have to make their own decision whether to continue the conventions without the federal subsidy. They might well, since the conventions are still a valuable tool for rewarding party workers and motivating the base voters of each party, something that could loom particularly large this year in an election that may revolve even more than usually on whose loyalists turn out in the fall (partisan voters do tend to watch their own convention more than the other guys').

Conventions weren't part of the original plan. The founders by and large hated parties (tellingly, they called them factions) and probably would have hated partisan conventions, which were invented only after they were gone.

Conventions were originally thought of as a reform of a system in which congressmen picked the candidates. The first party conventions were before the election of 1832, and nominated Henry Clay to challenge President Andrew Jackson. Delegates arrived at both those party conventions knowing who would get the nomination. Just like this year. But that hasn't stopped conventions from convening every four years since.

Even before the federal subsidy is yanked, the conventions are evolving. Once a fixture of midsummer, the Democratic convention this year will actually be after Labor Day, coinciding with the traditional kickoff of fall campaigning. The Democrats had already cut their convention to three days, recognizing a reality that broadcasters weren't going to pay attention to their activities on Labor Day anyway. The broadcasters then told the Republicans they wouldn't cover their Monday sessions either, and Hurricane Isaac has now finished the job of washing out day one.

"Despite separation between church and state, Mother Nature is helping to ensure that the conventions get trimmed from four days to three," said Elizabeth Wilner, vice president of the Kantar/media analysis group. "With Dems really only doing three days, and now Republicans only doing three days, in 2016 there will be pressure to only do three days."

Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., saw this coming. He has served as parliamentarian of the last four GOP conventions. He recalls that in 2008 a Katrina-class hurricane was barreling for the Gulf Coast as the convention convened in Minnesota. His staff got together and figured out a way to compress all the legally required business of the convention — rules, the platform and the nomination of the ticket — into a few hours so delegates from the Gulf Coast, including the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi, could rush home to respond to the looming disaster.

This Plan B went unneeded. The hurricane blew out, and the convention went ahead as planned over four days to nominate John McCain and Sarah Palin.

While Dreier developed a plan to effectively eliminate the Republican convention, that doesn't mean he would. "There will be a degree of uncertainty about what party conventions will look like in the future," he said as he headed to Tampa. "They are going through a bit of a change. But I don't agree they are unnecessary."

EDITOR'S NOTE — Michael Oreskes is senior managing editor for U.S. news at The Associated Press. Reach him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .