|
DENVER, Aug 29 (Reuters) Barack Obama, poised to take a historic step as the Democratic presidential nominee, promised to reverse the economic failures of the last eight years, end the war in Iraq and restore the US reputation abroad.
''We are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look just like the last eight,'' Obama, the first black White House nominee of a major US party, yesterday said in excerpts of his remarks prepared for delivery to the Democratic convention. ''Eight is enough.'' Obama took direct aim at Republican rival John McCain and linked him to President George W Bush's policies.
''Don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country.
Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe,'' he said.
''The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans -- Democrats and Republicans -- have built, and we are to restore that legacy,'' he said.
Obama will give the biggest speech in a career filled with big speeches later yesterday in Denver's open-air football stadium before 75,000 supporters on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's ''I Have a Dream'' speech -- a landmark in the US civil rights movement.
The televised speech by Obama, who was formally nominated on Wednesday, gives the first-term Illinois senator his biggest national audience until he meets McCain in late September in the first of three face-to-face debates before the November 4 election.
|
