Obama is officially crowned the democratic presidential candidate at the DNC.
The DNC is unfolding. Who will it be? Will it be presumed Democratic nominee-in-waiting Barack Obama? Or will it be Hillary Clinton, the feisty underdog?
In a symbolic show of unity on Wednesday night, delegates united behind Obama who became the first African American presidential nominee in American history.
Barack Obama had done it, surviving numerous controversies, most notably his former disgraced pastor, Jeremiah Wright's fiery anti-American rants, to reach the epitome of the Democratic Party.
There were wild cheers. Tears flowed, especially when former Obama rival Hillary Clinton, ordered a stop to the role call vote that many of her supporters demanded, in a last gasp effort to sway superdelegates and win the nomination.
It just wasn't to be. Voters had spoken during Obama's 11-state winning streak. Superdelegates decided. This is Obama's time in the spotlight.
Obama started by introducing his running mate, Delaware Senator Joe Biden, describing his pride in “the whole Biden family on this journey with me to take America back”. It sounds like Obama is suggesting that the US has been “stolen” by Republicans.
Accepting the vice-presidential nomination bestowed on him, Biden said “And I realized (that) he has tapped into the oldest American belief of all. We don't have to accept a situation (that) we cannot bear. We have the power to change it”, in effect joining Obama's “change” bandwagon.
States endorsed Obama one after the other. When it came time for New York to declare their presidential candidate, Clinton endorsed Obama and the proceedings were halted. In fact, Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton,offered Obama what seemed like a ringing endorsement: “Everything (that) I learned in my eight years as president and in the work I've done since, in America and across the globe, has convinced me that Barack Obama is the right man for this job”. Wait a minute. Clinton wasn't even positive all the time about his wife. So, he is probably saying all this stuff just so that John McCain won't win instead of true support for Obama.
Congratulations for Obama came from most of the most powerful Democrats:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: "For the past eight years, the man in the Oval Office has tipped his hat over his eyes, kicked back his chair, and snoozed at his desk. Charged with protecting our national interests, he slept on duty while his vice president conspired with oil industry cronies. Tasked with cutting off funding to terrorists, he slept on duty while oil shortages worsened, oil prices soared, and dollars by the ton were delivered to terrorists' banks in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Faced with a new kind of war, this president and his vice president helped their friends the old-fashioned way: through war profiteering, tax cuts for billionaires, and in many cases out-and-out corruption."
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, a former presidential candidate: "No one can question Barack Obama's patriotism. Like all of us, he was taught what it means to be an American by his family: his grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line in World War II, his grandfather who marched in Patton's army, and his great uncle who enlisted in the army right out of high school at the height of the war. And on a spring day in 1945, he helped liberate one of the concentration camps at Buchenwald."
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright under Bill Clinton: "Senator McCain claims to already know everything a president needs to know, but the first qualification any leader needs to have is the ability to learn. We need a president who is not wedded to 20th century thinking, who can forge a network of power and principle that will keep America strong and safe in the 21st century." This is very interesting as a political veteran is supporting someone who could be classified as a virtual political novice. What's more interesting, Albright workedfor Bill Clinton, an Obama arch-nemesis, in the "90s
Iraq war veteran and Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Penn.: "When I returned from Iraq, I realized we didn"t just need change over there, we also needed to change how we treat our veterans here at home. For eight long years, we've had a president who rushed to stand with soldiers at political rallies but abandoned them at Walter Reed. We've had a president who spent billions on private contractors but not on body armor for our troops. We've had a president who was there for the photo ops, but AWOL when it came to doing right by our veterans. It is time for a change." So Murphy is an Iraq war vet and part of Obama's target market (I.e. people Obama needs/wants to get).
