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Anger over Bill Clinton’s insult of Obama hangs over DNC

TESTING 1, 2, 3: First Lady Michelle Obama does a sound check at the podium in Charlotte yesterday. She speaks for real tonight. (
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CHARLOTTE, NC — Democrats are cringing over the latest Bubba brouhaha, but so far, they’re giving Bill Clinton a pass for his newly revealed 2008 comment that “a few years ago, this guy [Barack Obama] would have been carrying our bags.”

“It’s offensive. You’re calling on a black man to carry your bags,” fumed delegate Sylvia Moore-Russell, a native New Yorker who moved to Charlotte.

“Bill Clinton is a loose cannon,” she said. “We sometimes give him too much of a pass. But what are we going to do, sweep Bill under the rug? There’s too much dirt.”

She said that now, before Clinton’s big speech tomorrow at the Democratic National Convention, “would be a nice time for him to apologize” for the racially insensitive remark he allegedly made about Obama in a conversation with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Clinton allegedly made it while trying to convince Kennedy to endorse his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the bitter battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, according to The New Yorker magazine.

Kennedy nevertheless endorsed Obama.

Clinton’s “bags” remark sent shock waves through the Charlotte convention, as delegates and Democratic big shots labored to find an excuse for him.

“We all say things we may regret in the heat of political battle,” said Barry Hobbins, Maine’s Senate minority leader and a convention delegate.

New York state Sen. Ruth Hassell-Thompson, of Westchester, decried Clinton’s alleged remark for being “in very poor taste.”

“But that was then. This is now,” she backpedaled. “Bill Clinton’s number-one goal is for Democrats to win the White House.”

The Clinton camp bristled at questions about the racially charged comment.

“That’s a two-year old (false) story recycled and sourced to someone NOT ALIVE, are you actually asking me that?” blasted Clinton spokesman Matt McKenna in an e-mail to The Post. “And because you work for the Post, I have to say this: I don’t have anything for you on the record.”

President Obama publicly ignored the controversy and instead focused his wrath on Mitt Romney.

Obama blitzed Romney with a series of gridiron gibes during a campaign stop in football-crazy Ohio, saying, if elected, the Republican nominee would guide the nation to a “losing season.”

Obama told union workers in Toledo that Romney’s tax plan “sounds like unnecessary roughness” against the middle class. He later traveled to Louisiana to view recovery efforts after Hurricane Isaac.

Republicans weren’t clearing the field for the Democrats in North Carolina, where a new Charlotte Observer/Elon University poll shows Romney with a 47-43 lead in the battleground state.

Romney running mate Paul, Ryan arrived in North Carolina yesterday to counter the Dems, and delivered an unflattering comparison between Obama and former President Jimmy Carter.

“Simply put, the Jimmy Carter years look like the good old days compared to where we are right now,” Ryan said.