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Obama: 'This election has never been about me. It’s been about you'

By Todd Spangler / Detroit Free Press

DENVER – Outlining his vision of a resurgent, revitalized nation, Barack Obama entered the pantheon of groundbreaking African Americans tonight, accepting the Democratic nomination for president and calling for a “new politics for a new time” shorn of partisanship and division.

Taking the latest step in an improbable journey that has seen him become the first black presidential nominee for a major U.S. political party, the 47-year-old who was born in Hawaii, raised by a single mother, educated at Harvard and elected to the Senate four years ago joined Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. among African-American heroes, role models and icons.

“I get it,” he said during a historic speech before 75,000 people at Invesco Field at Mile High, where the Democratic National Convention concluded. “I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don’t fit the typical pedigree, and I haven’t spent my career in the halls of Washington.

“But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s about you.”

Thomas A. Wilson Jr., a 61-year-old African-American physical education teacher in Detroit, was among thousands of Michiganders who watched the speech at home. Tears welled in his eyes.

“I never thought I’d live to see the day that a man who looked like me would become the presidential nominee,” Wilson said. “This is one of the reasons I’m proud of this country, as people from a vast array of ethnicities have put their prejudices and bias aside.”

Obama referred to the troubled Michigan economy.

“A nation of whiners?” he said in a reference to a comment a former adviser to his Republican opponent John McCain had made earlier this summer. “Tell that to the proud autoworkers at a Michigan plant who, after they found out it was closing, kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever.”

Employing the trademark flourishes of rhetoric that marked his campaign from the beginning and persistent themes that buoyed it during a rough-and-tumble primary season, Obama spoke on the 45th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. — but, rather than dwell on the historic nature of his own accomplishment, he used the event to give voice to an aggressive agenda for change.

From middle-class tax cuts and a plan for eliminating dependence on foreign oil to programs for health care and breaks for companies that keep jobs from going overseas, he talked in specifics about a list of priorities, calling for both government activism and individual responsibility — and demanding bipartisan solutions.

”The challenges we face require tough choices, and Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past,” he said. “What has also been lost is our sense of common purpose. And that’s what we have to restore.”

McCain — who is expected to announce a vice presidential nominee today before his party’s convention begins Monday in St. Paul, Minn. — took notice of Obama’s accomplishment even as the Democrats in Denver pilloried him.

McCain aired a TV ad saying, “Too often the achievements of our opponents go unnoticed. So I wanted to stop and say, ‘Congratulations.’

“Tomorrow,” he added, “we’ll be back at it.”

Crediting McCain — a former Vietnam War prisoner of war — for his service to his country, Obama kept to the Democratic mantra of linking him at nearly every step with President George W. Bush, whose popularity has plummeted as his final term nears its end.

Obama delivered his speech at a cavernous pro football stadium filled with media members, Democratic Party rank and file and screaming, cheering fans on a night featuring remarks by former Vice President Al Gore and music by Stevie Wonder. Obama’s speech set out not only to describe the improbable journey that brought the former community organizer “with the funny name” to this place but to detail the future he sees for America and how it differs — as he sees it — from that offered by McCain.

“Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you can’t afford to pay and tuition that is beyond your reach,” he said.

While outlining his specific plans for creating jobs, cutting taxes and ending the war in Iraq, Obama directed some of his strongest phrases at the Republicans and McCain — likely ending any accusations he wasn’t hitting back hard enough against GOP attacks that label him as inexperienced and liberal.

McCain, he said, has “subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.”

“In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is, you’re on your own,” he said. “Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — even if you don’t have boots.”

Meanwhile, he also reintroduced himself to the crowd and the nation with details of his life story — “the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren’t well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.”

The event — moved to Invesco Field on the last night of the four-day convention after three days in the Pepsi Center — was intended, Obama’s campaign said, not to capitalize on what McCain has chided as Obama’s celebrity, but to give access to grassroots supporters in Colorado. Democrats say the state is in play this year after usually voting Republican.

Voter registration forms and applications for mail-in ballots were at the event. Would-be volunteers willing to call a dozen people on behalf of the campaign were given phone banks to work from, with prime seats for the speech offered as a prize.