WASHINGTON: In a historic changing of the guard, Barack Hussein Obama, who defeated the first family of Democratic Party politics with a call for a fundamental new course in politics, was nominated to be the 44th president of the United States Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.
Obama is also America’s first black presidential nominee of a major party who broke the two-decade domination of the Democratic Party by the Clintons — Bill and wife Hillary.
The nomination also brought an end to his often-bitter two-year political struggle for the nomination with Sen. Clinton, who, standing on a packed convention floor charged with anticipation, moved to halt the roll call in progress so that the convention could nominate Obama by acclamation.
And, in an effort to forgo any doubts of lingering animosity between the Clintons and Obama, former President Bill Clinton, in a speech Wednesday that had been anxiously awaited by Obama’s supporters, gave an enthusiastic and unstinted endorsement of Obama.
“Everything I learned in my eight years as president and in work I have done since in America and across the globe has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for the job,” Clinton told a thunderous, cheering crowd in a prime-time speech. “Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States.”
The former president himself was among the most outspoken proponents of that line of criticism of Obama, but to the relief of all present he reversed himself and pointed out that Republicans had used the same line of attack against him when he first ran for president.
“It didn’t work in 1992 because we were on the right side of history,” Clinton said. “It won’t work in 2008 because Barack Obama is on the right side of history.”
The former president said Obama “will lead us away from the division and fear of the last eight years and back to hope.”
Also Wednesday, Sen. Joe Biden accepted the Democratic vice presidential nomination with a tribute to his working-class upbringing and a scathing attack on their Republican opponent Sen. John McCain.
Biden largely fulfilled the mission the Obama campaign assigned him: Humanize himself and Obama, attack McCain, and present a familiar voice and message to the swing voters and conservative Democrats that Obama had difficult courting during the primaries.
Biden was introduced by his son Beau, 39, the attorney general of Delaware and an army reserve officer who is scheduled for deployment to Iraq in October.
