– By DAVID ESPO

MATTHEW DALY

The Associated Press

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – First lady Michelle Obama lovingly praised her husband Tuesday night in a prime-time Democratic convention speech as a devoted husband and caring father at home and a “man we can trust” to revive the nation’s weak economy as president. She beckoned the country to return him to the White House despite agonizingly slow recovery from recession.

“He reminds me that we are playing a long game here … and that change is hard, and change is slow and it never happens all at once,” she told a nation impatient with slow economic progress and persistently high unemployment of 8.3 percent. “But eventually, we get there, we always do,” she said in a speech that roused Democrats packed into their convention arena and blended scenes from almost 20 years of marriage with the Obamas’ time in the White House.

Mrs. Obama, given a huge ovation and emotionally describing herself as the “mom in chief,” made no mention of Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But those who preceded her to the podium on the first night of the president’s convention were scathing.

“If Mitt was Santa Claus, he’d fire the reindeer and outsource the elves,” declared former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland in one biting speech.

Tapped to deliver the keynote address, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro said Romney was a millionaire politician who “quite simply, doesn’t get it” when it comes to the needs of the middle class. Referring to the Republican’s support for mandatory health insurance when he was governor of Massachusetts, he said, “Gov. Romney has undergone an extreme makeover, and it ain’t pretty.”

Polls made the race for the White House a tight one, almost certain to be decided in a string of eight or 10 battleground states where neither the president nor Romney holds a clear advantage.

Delegates cheered as a parade of speakers extolled Obama’s support for abortion rights and gay marriage, for consumer protections enacted under his signature health care law and for the auto industry bailout he won from Congress in his first year in office.

“He said he’d take out bin Laden, and with our great SEAL team, he did,” declared former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine in one of several references to the military raid that ended the life of the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

She walked out to the crowd’s cheers as the band played Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours,” the song he sang onstage at Obama’s Denver convention four years ago.

The president was back home in the White House after a campaign appearance in Virginia as delegates cheered every mention of his name from the convention podium. He promised he’d be watching on television when his wife spoke.

“Believe it or not, when we were first married, our combined monthly student loan bills were actually higher than our mortgage,” she told the convention. “We were so young, so in love and so in debt.”

She confided that at family dinners in the White House with her and their daughters, the president joins in “strategizing about middle school friendships.”

Michelle Obama’s poll numbers are better than her husband’s, and her speech was aimed at building support for him, much as Ann Romney’s remarks at last week’s Republican National Convention were in service to her husband’s presidential ambitions.

“When it comes to rebuilding our economy, Barack is thinking about folks like my dad — who worked at a municipal water plant — and his own grandmother, a bank secretary,” the first lady said.

The weak economy hung over the convention as it dominates the election.

Obama “knows better than anyone there’s more hard work to do” to fix it, Castro said. He said that after the deep recession, the nation is making progress “despite incredible odds and united Republican opposition.”

He declared that 4.5 million jobs have been created since the president took office — though that number refers only to private-sector employment gains over the past 29 months and leaves out state and local government jobs that continue to disappear each month.

Castro, the first Hispanic chosen to deliver a keynote address, was unsparing in criticizing Romney, suggesting he might not even be the driving force on the Republican ticket this fall.

“First they called it ‘trickle down, the supply side,’” he said of the economic proposals backed by Republicans. “Now it’s Romney/Ryan. Or is it Ryan/Romney?

“Either way, their theory has been tested. It failed,” Castro said. Romney’s running mate is Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.

The divide over taxes goes to the core of the campaign.

Romney and the Republicans favor extension of all of the existing Bush-era tax cuts due to expire on Dec. 31, and also want to cut tax rates 20 percent across the board.

Obama, too, wants to keep the existing tax cuts in place — except for people with earnings of $250,000 a year or more.

Democrats criticized Romney last week for failing to offer a detailed plan to fix the economy. But nowhere in their own convention’s first evening of speech-making did anyone present proposals for reining in deficits that now exceed $1 trillion annually.