What is Obama's dream? He dreams of an America which is not a warmongering nation and that has a foreign policy based on dialogue and interaction. At the same time, he dreams of a World where the people live together in harmony. Is this too much asking from the World by the son of a Kenyan citizen who is now ready to take on Washington?

In a striking gesture of unity after all the months of bitterness, Mrs Clinton took the microphone to formally ask that the vote be suspended and that the convention approve the Obama nomination by acclamation.

"With eyes firmly fixed on the future, in the spirit of unity... let's declare together in one voice, right here right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president," she said, reading from a script.

"I move Senator Barack Obama of Illinois be selected by the convention by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party" she added, lifting the roof of the convention hall. Her request was instantly accepted by Nancy Pelosi, the convention's presiding officer.

Mrs Pelosi then announced that Barack Obama had accepted the nomination. Senator Obama's acceptance of the nomination before 70,000 people is set to be an extraordinary political event. The task at hand is to energise the party and reconnect Obama's "colourblind" vision for the country with those Republicans who were briefly enthralled by his electrifying promise to unify America's angry and divided politics.

Tonight, millions of Americans – and millions more around the world – will hang on his every word. But John McCain, whose campaign is ratcheting up the attacks on Obama's inexperience with every hour, will be watching too. Even Obama's decision to choose the experienced political warhorse Joe Biden as his running mate has not given him the hoped-for "bounce" in the polls.(a compressed version of www.independent.co.uk article)

Yet, during the past eight years, it is Obama's extraordinary ability to rise to the occasion that has marked him out from the crowd. Campaigning this week in four battleground states – Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and Montana – he has worked late into the night with a pen and yellow pad, crafting in longhand what is expected to be the speech of his lifetime.

Mr Obama has given hundreds of stump speeches over the past two years, some of them inspiring, many of them repetitious. But it is an address delivered in 2002 to a group of war protesters in which he flatly stated his opposition to the invasion of Iraq that he considers his best.

"I don't oppose all wars," he said. "What I am opposed to is... a war based not on reason, but on passion, not on principle but on politics." That seemingly foolhardy, if prescient, statement made him the only top-tier presidential candidate flatly to oppose the war before it was launched. Until 2004, he languished in the backwaters of Chicago, an obscure state senator – the lowest form of pond life in national politics. Then he was noticed by John Kerry, the Democratic candidate of that election year. Wooden and uninspiring, Kerry was on the lookout for a talented black politician. After seeing Obama skilfully work a room of white voters, he soon invited him to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.

It was just 17 minutes long but the speech captured America's attention. The speech, which Obama insisted on writing himself, was hailed as a classic by the political world and earned him comparisons to John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

It has become part of the myth of Obama's effortless rise as a political phenomenon. But behind the legend lies a cunning, an extraordinary ambition and an unrivalled attention to detail that he learnt going door to door as a community organiser in Chicago's South Side.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Show/Hide comments

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment