Obama: ''We are a better country than this''

DENVER, Aug 29 (Reuters) Barack Obama, preparing to take a historic step as the Democratic presidential nominee, launched a sharp assault on Republican rival John McCain and promised to reverse the economic failures of the last eight years.

Obama, the first black White House nominee of a major US party, said McCain had supported the policies of President George W. Bush that were responsible for the faltering US economy and decline in US global standing.

''We are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look just like the last eight,'' Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery to the Democratic convention today.

''On November. 4th, we must stand up and say: 'Eight is enough,'''he said. ''We are a better country than this.'' Obama said McCain was out of touch with the day-to-day concerns of Americans and had been ''anything but independent'' on key issues like the economy, health care and education.

''It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it,'' said Obama, who has been criticized by some Democrats for not taking a tougher line against McCain.

''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 was set to deliver the biggest speech in a career filled with big speeches later in Denver's open-air football stadium before an expected 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 acceptance 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 election.

The speech kicks off a two-month sprint to the general election against McCain, who tried to steal the limelight with word that he has chosen his running mate and will appear with the choice on Friday in Ohio.

''Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush was right more than 90 per cent of the time?'' Obama asked, citing McCain's voting record in the Senate.

''I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to take a 10 per cent chance on change,'' he said.

Former Vice President Al Gore, the Nobel Prize and Academy Award winner who lost a disputed election to Bush in 2000, said things would have been very different if he had won.

''I doubt anyone would argue now that election didn't matter,'' Gore told a stadium filled nearly to capacity with flag-waving emocrats, describing Obama as ''a clean break from the politics of partisanship and bitter division.'' Obama, an early opponent of the Iraq war, promised to ''end this war in Iraq responsibly'' but said he would finish the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and would be willing to use US military power when necessary.

''As commander-in-chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm's way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home,'' Obama said.