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CHARLOTTE, N.C. – President Obama’s plans to deliver his acceptance speech on Thursday evening at an outdoor stadium rally has been foiled by a forecast of rain and heavy thunderstorms, aides said Wednesday, forcing organizers to scramble and move the final night of the Democratic National Convention indoors.

His appearance at Bank of America Stadium here was an effort to reprise the enthusiasm that surrounded Mr. Obama’s campaign four years ago at Mile High Stadium in Denver when he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination before nearly 80,000 supporters. The campaign viewed the stadium as more than a scenic backdrop, but an opportunity to organize thousands of grass-roots activists.

“We have been monitoring weather forecasts closely and several reports predict thunderstorms in the area,” said Steve Kerrigan, the chief executive officer of the Democratic convention. He said the venue change was an effort to “to ensure the safety and security of our delegates and convention guests.”

It was a disappointment for the Obama campaign, which had been working for months to build a crowd of at least 65,000 supporters for the president’s speech on Thursday. Campaign officials hoped that a packed stadium rally would answer the lingering questions about whether the energy surrounding Mr. Obama’s re-election bid is less than his first race four years ago.



A day after Jim Messina, the campaign manager, pledged to go forward with the outdoor speech “rain or shine – unless there’s a safety issue,” organizers concluded Wednesday morning that the weather was too unpredictable. The campaign dismissed suggestions that they would have had trouble filling the seats, which were distributed to people who volunteered on the campaign or waited in line for hours to get tickets.

“We will, no question, fill the seats,” said Dan Gross, an Obama campaign worker who has been overseeing preparations for the rally since June. “But it’s how do we fill the seats? How do we get these people involved who would not be typically involved in the convention?”

The president will deliver his speech at the Time Warner Cable Arena, which can hold only a fraction of the crowd. He will address the ticketholders in a telephone conference call on Thursday afternoon, aides said, and will make plans to return to North Carolina before Election Day for a rally.

Four years ago, Mr. Obama won North Carolina four years ago by 14,177 votes, a margin so slim that it would fill only one-fifth of the seats at Bank of America stadium. It was that narrow victory, the smallest of any state in the nation, that helped influence the decision to have the president accept the Democratic Party’s nomination from the field where the Carolina Panthers play their home games.

Henry Martinat, a volunteer for the Obama campaign here in Charlotte, waited in line for five hours two weeks ago to get a ticket to the speech.

“I was passing out generic bottled water to these people who were sitting in the sun for five hours,” Mr. Martinat said. “I told them this is commemorative Obama water.”

Four years ago, Mr. Obama became the third major presidential candidate to leave the site of his convention to give an acceptance speech at a stadium. Organizers planned that speech after John F. Kennedy’s appearance in 1960 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the only other such address to be held in an outdoor stadium in the modern television era.

Here in North Carolina, the outdoor speech was always risky, considering that summertime rain and thunderstorms are far more common than in Denver. In 2008, the campaign produced a raft of meteorological data showing it had rained on the date of the speech, Aug. 28, only once in 20 years.

But Mr. Messina and other campaign officials were committed to trying to reprise the stadium rally here. A day before canceling the outdoor speech, he told reporters, “It’s going to be a special moment, and we’re really excited about it.”