"Bill Clinton has not turned belligerent or angry in front of television cameras for weeks now. No controversial statements, few interviews with the media, just one vote-hunting event after another -- precisely the way his wife's campaign wants it.

Michelle Obama drew unwanted attention to her husband a little more than a week ago when she said that "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country." But she brushed aside charges that she isn't a patriot and stuck to her schedule of media interviews and ever-larger rallies, hoping to live up to her campaign nickname of "the closer."

Days before crucial primaries in Texas and Ohio that could determine who becomes the Democratic nominee for president, the political arcs of Clinton and Obama have been nearly as surprising as the historic campaigns of their spouses.

It was Clinton who was projected to be one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's most effective champions. Still revered by many Democrats, he was expected to remind voters of the glory days of the 1990s, when Democrats retook the White House and the country enjoyed its biggest economic boom in decades. Opinion polls in the fall showed that voters saw the former president as a huge plus for his wife.

But Bill Clinton made a series of racially charged and controversial statements in the days before the South Carolina primary that helped to turn many voters, particularly African Americans, away from his wife's candidacy. His temperamental campaigning also reminded voters of the dark side of the Clinton years. In recent weeks, he has largely been kept away from one-on-one encounters with the media.

By contrast, when Sen. Barack Obama's campaign started, his wife was virtually unknown. As recently as December, her appearances in Iowa and New Hampshire drew mostly the curious, and crowds numbered in the dozens. Now hundreds of fans show up, and they invariably cheer louder at the end of her events than at the beginning.

As their spouses campaign across Texas and Ohio, Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are doing the same, sparing no superlative in describing their better halves.

Clinton says his wife has "the best solutions."

Obama calls her husband "brilliant."

Clinton labels his wife "the best candidate I ever supported in my life."

Obama says, "We need someone to challenge us to be a better nation . . . and the only person in this race who can do this is Barack Obama."

On the trail, the spouses play very different roles. Clinton comes across less as his wife's biographer than as her vice president, detailing her policy proposals in as many as six events a day. His stump speech resembles a mini-State of the Union address as he skips rapidly from Iran and Iraq to renewable fuels, tax policy and job creation.

He returns repeatedly to his economic record as president, and he told an audience in Texas, a state closely linked to the armed services, that "on every measurement of readiness, our military is in worse shape, much worse shape, than it was the day I left office."

Clinton's homage skips some of the standard riffs of spousal speechmaking: Anecdotes are rare, and so are highlights of his wife's upbringing. He runs through a few slices of her r¿sum¿ but concentrates on her knowledge of the issues, something he believes should separate her from Barack Obama, whom he accuses of campaigning on feeling, not fact. He charges that Obama's call for wholesale change devalues Washington experience and unfairly tars his wife as being in the game too long.

"The other campaign," Clinton said on a stage in Corpus Christi, "believes that anybody who was involved in making anything good happen in the '90s or stopping anything bad from happening this decade . . . should not be permitted to lead this country. So we have to begin again as if nothing ever happened before."

Clinton remains popular, but in a Washington Post poll this month, 50 percent of respondents said they would be comfortable with him back in the White House, down from 60 percent last fall.

Obama's main role has been to introduce her husband to audiences unfamiliar with him.

On the campaign trail about half as often as Clinton so she can be home with her two young daughters, Obama weaves details of her husband's life and her own into an alternately bleak and hopeful tale. It hinges on economic struggle, especially for the working class.

"The bar is set, and folks work to reach a bar. And then they reach it and they think they're there, only to find that the bar has moved," she told an audience in Galveston. "We're seeing it happening to regular folks all over this country. We're living in a time where people are finding that the bar is just shifting and moving on them, and that they can't get ahead."

She then pivots to the call to action that lies at the heart of Barack Obama's approach and appeal.

"Barack says our challenge is that we are suffering from a deficit of empathy, that deep down we are one another's brothers' and sisters' keepers. We've lost the understanding that we in this nation have to have a mutual obligation to one other," Obama said in Galveston. "The truth is, we haven't been asked to compromise and sacrifice for one another. We've been told, 'Just take care of your own, and if you're okay, then don't worry about anybody else.' "

She has castigated the Clintons for what she considers rough tactics that make reconciliation harder once a campaign ends. The way forward, she said in Houston, "is by building relationships, not by cutting your opponents into pieces."

It is a theme she has been hitting for weeks, particularly after Bill Clinton belittled her husband's narrative of opposition to the Iraq war as "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

"Another candidate's spouse has been getting an awful lot of attention," Obama wrote in a fundraising letter. ". . . What we didn't expect, at least not from our fellow Democrats, are the win-at-all-costs tactics we've seen recently. We didn't expect misleading accusations that willfully distort Barack's record."

The crowds for both spouses border on the adoring. They interrupt speeches with cheers and, in Obama's case, quieter affirmations of "You go" and "Girl, we know." Afterward, scores of people press forward, reaching for a handshake or an autograph as Secret Service agents watch intently.

At Clinton events, supporters bring copies of his memoir, "My Life," for his signature.

"I love that guy. Bill's a good old Southern boy. He's old-school; I'm old-school. He's grass roots like I am," said Albert L. Ellis, a politics professor in Corpus Christi who is not an Obama fan. "All this talk about change is so celebrity: 'I've got the glow.' "

At a Michelle Obama event in Galveston, Suzanne Still arrived undecided and left with some of that glow. A Republican who voted twice for President Bush, she said that Obama "just seemed so down-to-earth. It's the naturalness of her. There's no pretend."

"With the Clintons," Still said, "you don't know what to expect." (Peter Slevin, The Washington Post, February 29, 2008)

Polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.