Bill Clinton Summons the Spotlight for Obama (and Himself) WASHINGTON - Elvis is back in the building, and everyone is singing from his song sheet. Twelve years after leaving the White House, four years after his wife's failed presidential campaign and six days after his well-received convention speech, Bill Clinton is hitting the campaign trail as the role model both sides claim to emulate. Energized by his return to the stage, Mr. Clinton has agreed to barnstorm battleground states like Florida starting Tuesday for President Obama, who has embraced the former president and appropriated his best lines. But as Mr. Clinton promotes his fellow Democrat, Republicans promote him as everything Mr. Obama is not, a "real president," as Newt Gingrich put it, not a "pretender" like the incumbent. Mr. Clinton's encore performance is the latest in a political drama that has played out again and again over a quarter century. The spotlight has a way of following him even when he is not in the leading role. For days, some Democrats have lamented that Mr. Clinton outshines the president he is trying to help, a conclusion Mitt Romney has encouraged. Along the way, Mr. Clinton has reinvented himself as a bipartisan figure from a mythical era of across-the-aisle cooperation. Indeed, just a day before he hits the trail as a campaign surrogate, Mr. Clinton announced Monday that both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have agreed to address his annual philanthropic gathering, known as the Clinton Global Initiative, this month. Perhaps only Mr. Clinton could bash the other party's nominee one day and host him the next. Mr. Clinton's campaign involvement underscores an alliance of expedience with Mr. Obama. Whatever their past tensions, Mr. Obama has concluded the race is tight enough that he needs Mr. Clinton and will swallow whatever tradeoffs come with that, including the inevitable unflattering comparisons and the off-message comments that cause temporary dustups. David Axelrod, the president's strategist, said Mr. Clinton is a useful surrogate because the prosperity of the 1990s gives him credibility when he backs Mr. Obama's economic program. "We will take as much of his time as he's able to give between now and November to help spread the word," Mr. Axelrod said. The day of Mr. Clinton's address at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., represented one of the campaign's largest online fund-raising hauls, aides said. Mr. Clinton has agreed to campaign as often as his schedule allows, aides said, with potential trips to Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire in addition to the two-day Florida visit starting Tuesday. He has agreed to fund-raising events on the East and West Coasts in October and to appear in more campaign commercials. "He'll do whatever the president asks him to do and be very happy to do it," said Joe Lockhart, his former White House press secretary and one of many longtime advisers consulted on the final edit of Mr. Clinton's convention speech. Still, for all the energy Democrats drew from his convention speech, Mr. Clinton is hardly guaranteed to transfer his popularity to others. He made more than 100 campaign stops during the 2010 midterm elections, but could not stop Republicans from sweeping to a landmark victory in taking the House and gaining seats in the Senate. In typical Clinton form, much of his convention speech was extemporaneous. The text fed into the teleprompter was just a little more than 3,000 words, while the version he delivered topped 5,000 words. Many of the most memorable lines were not in the text; in effect, Mr. Clinton ad-libbed back in much of the material the campaign had edited out. The result was an address that by some measures overshadowed Mr. Obama's the next day. Republicans, eager to drive a wedge between the men, tried to fuel that assessment. "He really did elevate the Democrat convention in a lot of ways," Mr. Romney said on "Meet the Press" on NBC, "and frankly the contrast may not have been as attractive as Barack Obama might have preferred." Mr. Gingrich, who as House speaker was Mr. Clinton's main nemesis during the 1990s, said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday that the former president's speech was "eerily anti-Obama if you listened to the subtext," because in recalling his own accomplishments, he seemed to diminish the current president. If Mr. Obama was bothered, he has not shown it. At campaign stops since the convention, he has cited Mr. Clinton. "Somebody e-mailed me after the speech and said, "You need to appoint him secretary of explaining stuff," " Mr. Obama told an audience in Portsmouth, N.H. But the narrative around Mr. Clinton as some sort of representative of a more cooperative age seems a product of calculation and fuzzy memories. "It wasn't exactly that way, no," said Robert Walker, a leading House Republican at the time. A lot was forced on him. When he did compromise with Republicans, Mr. Walker said, it was "very reluctantly." Mr. Clinton's presidency was marked by titanic partisan battles. His first budget plan passed without a single Republican vote, and he was impeached for giving false testimony under oath about his affair with a former intern, Monica S. Lewinsky. Even when the two sides arrived at a mutual goal, it involved great conflict. Mr. Clinton signed a welfare overhaul bill only after vetoing the first two, and a balanced budget deal in his second term was reached only after a budget deadlock that shut the government in his first. "The difference between the "90s and now is the bipartisan cooperation only occurred after partisan Armageddon," said Joel P. Johnson, a former counselor to Mr. Clinton. Everyone crawled out of the crater and got back together. Today, he said, they remain in the crater. Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.