CHARLOTTE: President Barack Obama took the podium at the Democratic convention yesterday to accept the party’s nomination for a second White House term. His candidacy was lifted by the stirring endorsement of Bill Clinton, who warned Americans against returning the reins of government to Republicans who sent the economy crashing into a deep recession.

Arguing on behalf of Obama’s efforts to end the disastrous US slide into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Clinton recalled his own presidency — a period of sustained growth — to declare that no president could have repaired in one term all the economic damage inherited from Republicans almost four years ago.

The symbolism of the popular former president nominating Obama, an unusual turn of events, blunted Republican attempts to use the robust economy of the Clinton years as an argument against Obama, who has overseen only a modest recovery from the Great Recession, with unemployment still high at 8.3 percent.

Polls show Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney virtually tied two months before the Nov. 6 election.

Clinton, who took office at the end of a recession in the early 1990s, argued passionately on Obama’s behalf.

“President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did,” he said. “Listen to me now: No president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.”

The speech was vintage Clinton. Famously long-winded, he commanded the stage for about 50 minutes while Obama waited backstage. He delivered insults to Republicans with a folksy grin and his familiar southern drawl. He said the Republican campaign argument is “pretty simple: ‘We left him a total mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up yet, so fire him and put us back in.’“ Clinton accused Republicans of proposing “the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place” and led to a financial meltdown.

He described Obama as “a man who is cool on the outside but who burns for America on the inside.” He said the president has “laid the foundation for a more modern, more well-balanced economy.”

The Clinton address also sealed the fence-mending with Obama. Relations were poor after an extended, bitter primary campaign in 2008 in which Obama claimed the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton, the wife of the former president and now Obama’s loyal secretary of state. She is widely seen as preparing for another presidential run in 2016.

After the speech, Clinton was joined onstage by Obama, who made his first appearance at the convention. The former president bowed, and Obama pulled him into an embrace as thousands of delegates jammed into the convention hall roared their approval. The delegates then made Obama’s nomination official in a state-by-state roll call vote.