SAN FRANCISCO - After hearing former U.S. President Bill Clinton criticize her husband, Sen. Barack Obama’s wife cried foul in the increasingly heated battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. 

“We knew getting into this race that Barack would be competing with Senator (Hillary) Clinton and President Clinton at the same time,” Michelle Obama said in a fund-raising e-mail. 

“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.”

Bill Clinton, 61, the U.S. president from 1993-2001, has taken an increasingly aggressive role in campaigning for his wife, a New York senator who is in a tight fight with Obama for the Democratic nomination. 

Clinton is well-known for his talents on the campaign trail and is popular among many Democrats, even though he was impeached in 1998 by the House following his affair with a White House intern. 

Michelle Obama, 44, has a law degree from Harvard and worked at the University of Chicago Medical Center before her husband, a first-term senator from Illinois, decided to run for president. 

She now gives speeches for the campaign, sometimes introducing Obama, other times appearing with politicians such as Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate. 

“While Senator Clinton has a former president in her corner, I’ll put my faith in a movement of a whole lot of people who are ready for change,” Michelle Obama said in her letter that sought online contributions of $50.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking (Michelle Obama during a campaign stop in Las Vegas last week.)

RENO - Nevada, with its mega-casinos, easy divorce and the only legal prostitution in the United States, has a reputation for permissiveness, but woe to those who place the wrong stress when saying the state’s name.

Ahead of Saturday’s voting in Nevada to choose Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, politicians and broadcast journalists alike have often stumbled by pronouncing a long “A” in the middle.

“It is so nice to be in Ne-VAH-da,” Michelle Obama, wife of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, told a large, enthusiastic audience in Reno on Friday morning.

The crowd let out an “ooh” of disapproval and the Princeton and Harvard educated spouse quickly realized her error.

“Ne-VAD-a, Ne-VAD-a, Ne-VAD-a!” she said, repeating the locally favored pronunciation a few more times in public penance. “I know how to bounce back from my mistakes.”

The southwestern state has never seen so much attention in the U.S. presidential primary process before but this year moved up its voting to early in the state-by-state selection process, bringing many candidates, especially Democrats, into Nevada.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

– Photo credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking. Michelle Obama, wife of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, introduces him at Rancho High School in Las Vegas, Jan 18