WASHINGTON (AFP) — Former president Bill Clinton has accepted a prime-time slot at the Democratic National Convention and will speak before Barack Obama's vice-presidential choice, US media reported Friday.
The move follows days of speculation over tense relations between Obama and the ex-president, still seen as simmering over the defeat of his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, for the party's nomination.
News media, including the New York Times, CNN and NBC, say that Bill Clinton was offered to speak on August 27, the second to last night of the party's convention in Denver, Colorado.
Hillary Clinton is scheduled to speak the night before, on August 26.
Bill Clinton is still lukewarm towards Obama: when asked in an ABC interview that aired Monday if Obama was ready to be president, his answer was: "You could argue that no one is ever ready to be president. I mean, I certainly learned a lot about the job my first year."
Clinton quickly added that Obama is "smart as a whip, so there's nothing he can't learn."
Speaking Thursday to reporters on the campaign trail, Obama described the ex-president as being "very supportive" of his candidacy.
"I couldn't ask for him to be any more gracious than he's been and supportive since the campaign ended," Obama said.
Bill Clinton, who was president from January 1993-January 2001, is the only Democrat to have served two consecutive terms in the White House since Franklin Roosevelt, who died in office in 1945, one year before Clinton was born.
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