Clintons remain a focus in Denver

DENVER -- This is not the convention the Clintons had planned.

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is playing a supporting role, not the starring one. Former president Bill Clinton won't even be speaking in prime time.

Even so, Clinton-watching has become the mesmerizing sideshow of the Democratic National Convention that will nominate Barack Obama. Their words, actions, even body language are being parsed for clues about how aggressively they'll help the rival who shattered their dreams of moving back into the White House.

The Clintons still matter, certainly, but one key question is how much? And another: What do they want?

"Sometimes dealing with the Clintons is like dealing with Brett Favre," says Leon Panetta, Clinton's former White House chief of staff, referring to the Green Bay football legend whose on-again, off-again decision on whether to retire was a big story this summer.

"They're very good players and they've got a great record, but sometimes you're not sure what they really want."

In a procession of Democratic conventions over nearly three decades, the Clintons have been rising stars, prevailing powerhouses and breakthrough figures. He is the only Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win two terms in the White House. She was the most competitive female presidential contender in American history.

But Obama's nomination this week will mark "a changing of the guard," says former Democratic national chairman Don Fowler, who supported Clinton in the primaries.

In age, mind-set and technological innovation, it is a generational shift for a party now led by the junior senator from Illinois.

Associates say Bill Clinton is still steaming about his wife's loss and the damage done during the campaign to his own reputation, especially among African-American voters who had been a base of his support. He drew fire by calling Obama's meteoric rise a "fairy tale" and minimizing his South Carolina victory by likening it to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988.

Bill Clinton is "taking it a little harder … because he wanted his wife to succeed and also because he wants a good Clinton legacy," says New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who was a member of Clinton's Cabinet but enraged the former president by endorsing Obama. "He's probably still upset."

Hillary Clinton, the convention's featured speaker tonight, told a New York state delegation breakfast Monday that "we are united and we are together" behind Obama's candidacy.

During a reception Wednesday, she plans to release her delegates from their commitments to vote for her at the convention.

She referred to a TV ad Republican John McCain is airing that quotes a former Clinton convention delegate as endorsing him, part of a concerted GOP effort to reach out to disaffected Clinton supporters.

"I'm Hillary Clinton," she quipped to laughter and applause, "and I do not approve that message."

She and her aides complain she isn't being given credit for how much she's done, and how quickly she moved after their rivalry ended at the close of the Democratic primaries.

"I've probably done more for Sen. Obama than anybody in my position has ever done by this time," she told reporters Friday, her exasperation apparent.

There is exasperation among the Obama team, too, and a debate over how to deploy the Clintons, especially the former president. Some Obama partisans are annoyed by Bill Clinton's notably tepid praise for Obama so far.

Both Clintons declined requests for interviews.

"I can't imagine he will continue to bum-rap Barack Obama, which is what he's been doing up until now, unfortunately," says Abner Mikva, 82, a political mentor to Obama who also served as Clinton's White House counsel.

Mikva predicts Bill Clinton is likely to deliver some speeches but will "probably be less of a factor" in this campaign than in recent ones.

'We will not be silenced'

Hillary Clinton's campaign role is more problematic and more important for Obama, given that only half of the voters who supported her say in the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll that they definitely will vote for him.

Obama needs their support, especially in the key states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida where she won primaries.

There also is a debate within the Clinton camp over what her future role might be in the Senate, in an Obama administration or even on the Supreme Court.

Some of her supporters haven't given up on the White House, either.

Three of four Democrats say they hope she runs for president again, the USA TODAY poll found. That view was nearly universal — 94% — among those who supported her this time.

"We would love to see her in the White House," says Blaine Whitford, an artist from St. Petersburg, Fla., who helps lead a pro-Clinton convention group, 18 Million Voices. "This time, next time or the time after that."

At issue at the convention, of course, is not only what Clinton says but what her delegates do.

Heidi Li Feldman, a Georgetown University law professor who helped organize the ad hoc The Denver Group, is among those who demanded that Clinton's name be placed in nomination and a roll-call vote taken.

A move to declare Obama the nominee by acclamation is not what they have in mind — even if that's what Clinton proposes in her speech after a few states have cast their ballots.

"When someone tries to ram a vote by acclamation, you can walk out of the convention," Feldman says. "If you stay in that hall, you can stand up and say, 'We will not be silenced.' I tell them to stand up and sing, 'We Shall Not Be Overcome.' "

End of the 'Clinton era'?

To try to ensure order on the convention floor, the Clinton team has taken the unusual step of deputizing 40 floor whips. Allida Black, a Clinton delegate from Virginia, is one of them.

"We have a moral obligation to count the votes of the woman who achieved what no other woman in American politics has done and who in fact got 18 million votes" in the primaries, Black says.

"I will vote for Obama. But I will not vote for Obama on the first ballot" at the convention.

She scoffs at the suggestion a "Clinton era" is coming to a close.

"Lyndon Johnson became president of the United States and Bobby Kennedy did not. Did that mean the end of Kennedy politics in this country?" Black says. "No."

She describes Hillary Clinton as already "the de facto legislative leader of the Democratic Party and the voice of the party on the Hill."

Many of Clinton's backers see her as the natural heir to the ailing Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy as a liberal voice and legislative dealmaker.

Returning to health care

One possible goal for Sen. Clinton: Shape an overhaul of the nation's health care system, the issue that undid her when she tackled it as first lady 15 years ago. (Ironically, her effort faltered in part because she kept congressional leaders who had worked on the issue at arm's length.)

She told those at Monday's breakfast that she looks forward to a day when she would watch a President Obama sign that bill.

As a result of her presidential campaign, Clinton has more fully emerged from her husband's shadow to become a distinctive political force with a constituency of her own.

In the USA TODAY poll, 75% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they wanted her to be a "major national spokesman" for the party; 21% said they preferred she take "a less prominent role within the Democratic Party."

"She has a world of choices before her," says Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin, who stepped in as a Clinton strategist after a campaign shake-up.

"Her range of options is probably more if Barack Obama wins. I don't think John McCain will consider her for a Cabinet position or the Supreme Court, but Barack Obama may well."

Others suggest that an Obama loss opens another option.

"If she wants another shot (at the White House), obviously it makes it easier if Obama doesn't win," says Lori Cox Han, a political scientist at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and co-editor of Rethinking Madam President: Is America Really Ready for a Woman in the White House? "But that doesn't help her with the Democratic Party if she doesn't actively help him."

For Bill Clinton, too, there could be complicated repercussions from an Obama presidency.

With expanded Democratic majorities in Congress and formidable political skills, Obama "has the real potential to surpass the Clinton legacy," Han says.

Some close to Clinton were dismayed by what they saw as Obama's failure, in pressing a message of change, to acknowledge the achievements of Clinton's presidency.

"What exactly about the Clinton era of the '90s don't you want to go back to?" asks Lanny Davis, a Clinton loyalist who now supports Obama. "One of the most prosperous economies in the country's history and … international relations where Bill Clinton was one of the most popular figures in the world?"

A return to New York issues

On the day before the Senate recessed at the end of July, Hillary Clinton's national ambitions seemed a distant memory.

No longer the would-be president crisscrossing the country on a chartered plane, she was instead the junior senator from New York, tending home-state fires.

First she waited to testify before a Senate energy subcommittee on behalf of a bill that would authorize a guidebook and road signs linking sites in Upstate New York that were significant in the fight for women's suffrage.

Then she chaired a Senate Environment Committee hearing on the nomination of a New Yorker, Thomas Madison, to head the Federal Highway Administration.

The audience included, in its entirety, Madison's entourage, two reporters from Upstate New York newspapers and one from USA TODAY, and a dozen visiting students from Dali University in China on a tour of Capitol Hill.

When Clinton walked over to shake hands with Madison, a reporter from Buffalo asked her about the long-delayed construction of a new "Peace Bridge" linking the United States and Canada at the east end of Lake Erie.

The Chinese students, who were participating in an exchange program with Benedict College in South Carolina, snapped photos of Clinton with their cellphones.

"We know she was first lady and ran for president," Lili Liu, 20, said in careful English.

"She is very graceful, very beautiful, very nice," added Chen Yu Junj, 22.

Escorting the students was Stacey Jones, a vice president at Benedict who had volunteered and helped raise money for Clinton's primary campaign in South Carolina. Clinton greeted Jones by name and gave her a hug.

"It's a little different than we thought," Jones said quietly.

Clinton nodded.

"Yes," she replied. "It is."

Contributing: Kathy Kiely