Obama Makes Case for 2nd Term: ‘Harder’ Path to ‘Better Place’

President Obama on Thursday night accepted the Democratic nomination for a second term, making a forceful argument that he had rescued the economy from disaster and ushered in a recovery that would be imperiled by a return to Republican stewardship. Defining his fight for re-election as a bald “choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future,” Mr. Obama conceded the country’s continuing difficulties while pleading for more time to solve them. He laid out a long-term blueprint for revival in an era obsessed with short-term expectations. “I won’t pretend the path I’m offering is quick or easy,” Mr. Obama said. “You didn’t elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear. You elected me to tell you the truth. And the truth is, it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades.” He added: “But know this, America: Our problems can be solved. Our challenges can be met. The path we offer may be harder, but it leads to a better place. And I’m asking you to choose that future.” Mr. Obama’s speech before 20,000 enthusiastic Democratic leaders and supporters punctuated back-to-back political conventions in which the two parties, if nothing else, delivered radically different visions for how to end the economic malaise that has afflicted the country since 2008. A week after Mitt Romney sought to appeal to American disappointment with Mr. Obama, the president pressed his case that the Republican candidate is so disconnected from the struggles of the middle class that he has no clue how to address them. In sharp language, he planned to link Mr. Romney and his running mate, Paul D. Ryan, to what he long described as failed trickle-down economic policies that favor the wealthy, reflecting what has become a central theme of his campaign. “On every issue, the choice you face won’t just be between two candidates or two parties,” Mr. Obama said. “When all is said and done, when you pick up that ballot to vote, you will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation.” Mr. Obama sought to cast his own economic prescriptions in historical terms. Fixing the economy, Mr. Obama said, “will require common effort, shared responsibility, and the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one.” Appealing to moderate voters, he added: “And by the way, those of us who carry on his party’s legacy should remember that not every problem can be remedied with another government program or dictate from Washington.” The Romney campaign released a reaction to the president’s speech before it was even delivered, assailing Mr. Obama as having failed to create enough jobs, cut the deficit in half or increase incomes. “This is a time not for him to start restating new promises, but to report on the promises he made,” Mr. Romney said in the taped statement. “I think he wants a promises reset. We want a report on the promises he made.” Introducing Mr. Obama on Thursday night was Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who offered testimony to the president’s leadership on everything from the economy to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Mr. Biden also fired some of the evening’s tougher shots at Mr. Romney. “I found it fascinating last week when Governor Romney said that as president, he’d take a jobs tour,” he said. “Well, with all his support for outsourcing, it’s going to have to be a foreign trip.” Mr. Biden’s nomination for a second term as vice president was approved by the convention by acclamation after his son Beau, the attorney general of Delaware, formally put his name up for consideration in a speech that left the vice president teary-eyed for the second consecutive night.The emotion in the packed hall crested early, when former Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, her step faltering, walked tentatively onto the stage in a surprise appearance to lead the pledge of allegiance. Mrs. Giffords, who was shot in the head by a would-be assassin in Tucson, is still recovering, and she stumbled over the word “indivisible.” But she got through the pledge in her first real public speaking since the shooting, and blew kisses to the crowd, which surged to its feet in ovation, chanting “Gabby! Gabby!” Given that Mr. Romney did not spend much time on foreign policy during his acceptance speech last week, it was a foregone conclusion that Mr. Obama would devote time to national security, an area where Democrats believe they have carved out a surprising advantage. Even before Mr. Obama appeared on stage, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the party’s presidential nominee in 2004, recited a list of foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration, from ending the Iraq war to the killing of Osama bin Laden. “Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago,” Mr. Kerry said, turning a Republican line critical of the president into an argument for his re-election. Heading into the conventions, the two candidates were locked in a statistical tie and neither side was sure whether that would change coming out of Charlotte. While other presidential races have seen wild swings of support over the months leading up to the vote, this one has been remarkably static since it began taking shape in the spring. The two campaigns now have a month until a series of four televised debates, three between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney and one between Mr. Biden and Mr. Ryan, that will frame the final choice heading to the Nov. 6 election. The president’s speech culminated a three-day convention that, like its Republican equivalent last week, did not always go according to script. In what was widely viewed as correcting an unforced error, party leaders in Charlotte, at the behest of Mr. Obama, pushed through a vote to change language in their platform affirming Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The reference had been in the 2008 platform but dropped this year, prompting criticism from Republicans and pro-Israel groups, and Mr. Obama bowed to the pressure. Just as distracting was the move Thursday night to the Time Warner Cable Arena from the Bank of America Stadium, where Mr. Obama’s campaign had hoped to put the president before 85,000 supporters in a bid to re-create some of the magic of his 2008 run. Instead, with thunder, lightning and rain forecast — conventiongoers huddled under plastic sheets as they darted between sites — organizers were forced to cancel the big outdoor stadium event. That left a substantial segment of some 65,000 supporters — many of them traveling from all over the country — without the chance to see the president in person. In a teleconference call Thursday afternoon, he expressed his regrets. “The problem was a safety issue,” Mr. Obama said. “You guys can imagine, with all the nagging that goes on and the security issues involved, getting 70,000 people into a place is tough; getting them out of there is even tougher. And if we had started seeing severe thunderstorms and lightning, in particular, it would have been a problem.” But if the weather did not cooperate, the challenge of recapturing the excitement of the past went beyond meteorology. Mr. Obama’s task was harder than in 2004, when his keynote convention address rocketed him to stardom, or in 2008, when he claimed leadership of the party on the back of a popular wave of support and distaste for the opposition. If eight years ago he came to fame by deploring the divisions of a red America and a blue America, he arrived at this moment governing a country seemingly even more divided than before. If four years ago he represented promise, a word he used 32 times in that speech as he insisted that the party then in power “own their failure,” he now argues that he has kept that promise and disclaims ownership of the failure his critics see. The president’s aides understood they could never re-create the power of the past but hoped to convince voters that more has been done than commonly recognized. The “promises kept” theme was intended to address the same swing voters Mr. Romney sought last week to win over. In his speech, Mr. Obama laid out several specific promises for the next four years. He vowed to cut deficit spending by $4 trillion over the next decade, to double exports by the end of 2014 and create one million new manufacturing jobs by the end of a second term.