Forty-five years to the day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, Senator Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for the president of the United States with a great speech of his own. Surrounded by an enormous, roaring crowd (estimated 84,000), Senator Obama promised a clean break from the broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of the last four years Thursday night as he embarked on the final lap of his bid to become the nation's first Black president.
He vowed to cut taxes for nearly all working-class families, responsively end the war in Iraq and break America's dependence on Mideast oil within a decade. By contrast, he said, "John McCain has voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time and we can’t afford to take a 10 percent chance," a cutting indictment of his Republican rival — on health care, education, the economy and more.
"I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don't fit the typical pedigree" of a presidential candidate was as close as he came to the long-smoldering issue that may well determine the outcome of the election.
Fireworks lit the night sky after Senator Obama concluded his speech. His wife, Michelle, and their daughters Malia and Sasha joined him as the country music anthem "Only in America" filled the stadium. Vice presidential running mate Senator Joseph Biden and his wife, Jill, joined them onstage.
Senator Obama delivered his 44-minute nomination acceptance speech in an unrivaled convention setting, before a crowd of unrivaled size, with the backdrop that suggested the West Wing of the White House, and the thousands of convention delegates seated around the podium in an enormous semicircle.
Representative John Lewis, who was present on the day of this 45th anniversary of Dr. King’s memorable speech spoke from the convention stage. "Tonight we are gathered here in this magnificent stadium in Denver because we still have a dream," said the Georgia lawmaker, who marched with King and still has the scars to show for it, supported Senator Hillary Clinton, then switched his support to Senator Obama later in the primaries.
The rise of Senator Obama reminds me of Moses and the children of Israel about to go into the promised land. God did not allow the Moses generation to enter into the promised land because they still had a mentality of being captives. They saw themselves as victims. In fact they saw themselves as grasshoppers and they saw the people who occupied the promised land as giants. They had a slave mentality whereas Joshua and his generation envisioned themselves as victors and held onto the promises of God. They saw themselves as winning. Senator Barack Obama is of the Joshua generation with new ideas. As a man think, so he is…
The Moses generation still remembers the “White Only” signs, the water hoses, the attack dogs, the burning crosses and the bodies hanging from trees. The Moses generation holds their breath, hoping that Obama didn’t mess up or God forbid, nothing happens to him. The Moses generation sees the outdoor speech as a possible set up for a repeat of that horrible day in Dallas 45 years ago in November. The Joshua generation sees possibilities. The Joshua generation sees way to make things better.
Senator Obama was the first to deliver an outdoor convention acceptance speech since President John F. Kennedy did so at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1960.
In his speech, Senator Obama pledged to jettison President Bush's economic policy — and replace it with his own designed to help hard-pressed families. "I will cut taxes for 95 percent of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class," he said. He also promised to break the country's dependence on Mideast oil. He said that Washington has been talking about doing it for 30 years "and John McCain has been there for 26 of them."
"We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country," Obama said. "I will never hesitate to defend this nation." He said McCain had no standing on foreign policy, not after backing the Iraq war from the start and rejecting timetables for withdrawal now accepted by Bush. "John McCain stands alone in his stubborn refusal to end a misguided war," he said. Obama's pledge to end the war in Iraq responsibly. "Sen. 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?
Senators Obama and Biden leave the convention on Friday for Pennsylvania, first stop on an eight-week sprint to Election Day. This was once-in-a-campaign opportunity to speak to millions of voters who have yet to make up their minds between McCain and him and Senator Barack Obama hit a homerun. Although this was an acceptance speech but it sure felt presidential – sort of like an inaugural speech.
As Senator Obama was walking out onto the platform to deliver his acceptance speech I imagined the civil rights heros of the past looking on smiling through tears of joy; there was Martin hugging his wife Coretta Scott King, standing next to Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks, Ralph David Abernathy, Thurgood Marshall, C.K. Steele and Fred Shuttlesworth who both helped MLK organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), there's Stokely Carmichael, and the four students who staged a sit-in at the Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, Emmett Till, James Meredith, Medgar Evers, the Black and White freedom riders who rode busses throughout the south to integrate public transportation and were beaten for their troubles, there is the four little girls that were bombed while at Sunday School, and the three young men (two of whom were White) who were killed while working to register Black voters in Mississippi, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and the countless others who suffered along the way to this historic day.
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