Bill Clinton is speaking rapidly, a sense of urgency in his hoarse voice, finger jabbing the air, as he implores this Ohio crowd to believe that his wife is the “best change-maker I've ever seen in my entire life”.

The former President, who in 1992 campaigned here as the fresh-faced 45-year-old man from Hope, turned his attention to this year's 46-year-old man of hope, Barack Obama, who on Monday packed an 11,000-strong crowd in Wright State University.

“The case Hillary's opponent is making is that you should vote for him because he embodies change - that anybody who was part of those fights in the 1990s should be disabled and disqualified to be president. Words do matter - the eloquence matters - but Hillary's worked to change people's lives all her adult life.”

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The Stebbins High School gym is only three-quarters full. It was never meant to be like this. The Democratic Party's greatest rock star, 61, talking about the achievements of the past, his hair an electric white, and failing to fill a small arena in the state where his primary victory in 1992 clinched the presidential nomination for him. Before Obamamania, in the heady days last year when Mrs Clinton looked inevitable, it was her husband who was expected to be the campaigner dazzling huge crowds and raising record sums of money.

The former President is working tirelessly to save his wife's imperilled campaign ahead of Tuesday's make-or-break contests in Ohio and Texas. He held five events in Ohio yesterday, and will speak at seven in Texas on Monday.

He and Mrs Clinton's top aides have said that if she fails to win both states, her White House hopes are almost certainly finished. New polls yesterday showed Mr Obama slightly ahead in Texas and having pulled into a statistical tie in Ohio. Mrs Clinton raised an extraordinary $35 million ($17.5 million) in February, only to hear that her rival has raised at least $50 million.

Yet there is a powerful sense that Mr Clinton is not just fighting for her, or even for his own legacy, but against a galling sense of injustice that his status in the Democratic Party as its swaggering baby-boom hero is being rapidly eclipsed by an untested arriviste 15 years his junior. One of Mr Obama's central arguments has been that the Clintons are part of the problem, central characters in the villainous partisanship of the 1990s, figures from the past against his promise of a new, less divisive future.

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