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International Herald Tribune - Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party presidential nomination Thursday night, declaring that the "American promise has been threatened" by eight years under President George W. Bush and that John McCain represented a continuation of policies that undermined the nation's economy and imperiled its standing around the world.
The speech by Senator Obama of Illinois — in front of an audience of nearly 80,000 people on a warm night in a football stadium refashioned into a vast political stage for television viewers — left little doubt of how he intended to press his campaign against McCain this fall. And he linked McCain to what he described as the "failed presidency of George W. Bush" in cutting language that seemed intended to reassure nervous Democrats that he had the spine to take on what has proven this summer to be a scrappy Republican opponent.
"The record's clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time," Obama said. "Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush was right more than 90 percent of the time? I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to take a 10 percent chance on change."
"America, we are better than these last eight years," he said. "We are a better country than this."
The speech by Obama loomed as arguably the most important of his campaign to date. It was an opportunity to present himself to Americans who were just now beginning to tune in on this campaign, to make the case against McCain and to offer what many Democrat said he has failed to offer to date: a idea of what Obama stood for, beyond a promise of change.
With his speech, Obama closed out his party's convention here and prepared for a quick shift of public attention to Republicans as McCain names his running-mate on Friday and his party begins its convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Monday.
He delivered it in a most unconventional setting, becoming the third nominee of a major party in the nation's history to leave the site of his convention to give his acceptance speech at a stadium.
In this case, it was Invesco Field, set against the Colorado Rockies and about a mile from the Pepsi Center where he had been nominated the night before, a site aides said was chosen to signal a break from typical politics and to permit thousands of his supporters from across the country to hear him speak.
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