|
Obama vows to transform US
11/02/2007 08:12 - (SA)
Springfield - Barack Obama on Saturday laid claim to lead a new generation of Americans, invoking the legacy of anti-slavery icon Abraham Lincoln to launch his quest to become the first black US president.
The charismatic 45-year-old US senator demanded an end to the "tragic" war in Iraq and said he felt a call of destiny in the 2008 election to purge cynicism from politics and transform his nation.
"Let's be the generation that ends poverty in America," Obama told a crowd of thousands huddled in temperatures of minus 11 degrees Celsius, in the Midwestern hometown of former president Lincoln.
Huge American flags draped nearby buildings as a crowd estimated by local police at more than 15 000 erupted, as Obama strode to centre stage, to the pounding beat of U2's "City of Blinding Lights."
"Let's be the generation that finally tackles our health care crisis ... let's be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil," said Obama, who spent his formative childhood years in Hawaii and Indonesia.
After rocketing to the top tier of US politics in only two years, Obama jumped into a field already dominated by senator Hillary Clinton, plotting to return to the White House as America's first female president.
The son of a Kenyan economist and white American mother pledged to bring American troops home from Iraq and combat global warming, as he took his chance in the most open US White House race in 80 years.
He reminded crowds in Illinois, and at a later stop in Iowa that unlike Clinton, he had opposed the war in Iraq from the start - though he was not in the US Senate when the 2002 vote to authorize the invasion was taken.
"It's time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else's civil war," he said.
But after only two years in Congress, the political phenomenon who has some giddy supporters whispering comparisons to assassinated former president John F Kennedy, admitted some may view his campaign as premature.
"I recognise there is a certain presumptuousness - a certain audacity - to this announcement."
"I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change."
Lincoln
Beneath a cloudless blue sky and with a piercing winter sun which helped his choreographers suggest a new dawn in US politics, Obama was framed by the red-domed Illinois Capitol where Lincoln, Republican president from 1861 to 1865, warned "a house divided against itself cannot stand."
"If you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching before us ... if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our slumber and slough off our fear ... then I'm ready to take up the cause," Obama said.
Obama consciously echoed Lincoln, who many Americans consider to be their greatest president, saying, "divided we are bound to fail."
"The life of a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer tells us that a different future is possible," said Obama who once referred to himself as "a skinny kid, with a funny name."
"Beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people. He tells us that there is power in hope."
Despite the hype, Obama must confound sceptics who warn idealism can die a quick death on the campaign trail, confront the mighty Clinton election machine and face down a challenge from 2004 Democratic vice presidential pick John Edwards.
Obama later flew to Iowa to start a weekend campaigning in the crucial state which holds one of the first nominating contests in the presidential race next January.
"I want to win, but I don't just want to win, I want to transform this country," Obama told several thousand Democratic voters at a town-hall meeting in Cedar Rapids.
On Monday, Obama heads to New Hampshire, on the trail of Clinton, who was in the northeastern state for the first time in her campaign on Saturday.
Obama instantly became the most credible African-American presidential candidate yet to mount a White House campaign and is seen as having a real shot, in the most open White House race for 80 years.
But he told CBS television network in an interview to air Sunday: "If I don't win this race it will be because of other factors - (that) I have not shown to the American people a vision for where the country needs to go."
- AFP
|
News
