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see sustained growth, in the 1990s. "Conditions are improving and if you'll renew the president's contract, you will feel it."
• He also preached bipartisanship and a pullback from politics as "blood sport" -- this near the end of back-to-back conventions that feasted on rhetorical red meat and even as he ripped the Republican agenda as a throwback to the past, a "double-down on trickle-down" economics that assumes tax cuts for the wealthy will help everyone down the ladder.
• Obama watched Clinton's speech from backstage, then strolled out and embraced him, bringing happy roars from the crowd in his first convention appearance and making for a spirited ending to a trying day for Democrats.
• ___

• CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Barack Obama goes before his convention with a reputation as a great orator.
• But is he?
• Certainly, there have been moments that soared: his address to the 2004 convention and that moving election night in Chicago. Yet a close look at pivotal moments of his presidency finds that, more often than not, Obama has fallen short as a communicator.
• That's the conclusion of one of the leading experts on presidential communica

tions, Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Repeatedly, she asserts, Obama has failed to use the communication power of his office to further his goals and rally the country. So now he goes into his crucial convention speech with high expectations from his successes and yet a mixed record as communicator-in-chief.
• Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, examined six pivotal moments for an article in the next issue of Polity, a political science journal. She found that in five, Obama did not deliver.
• ___

• CAIRO (AP) -- Human Rights Watch said it has uncovered evidence of a wider use of waterboarding in American interrogations of detainees than has been acknowledged by the United States, in a report Thursday that details further brutal

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