Gerard Baker: comment | Across the Pond: blog | Democrat Convention: pictures | Convention in quotes | Excerpts from Obama's speech

Barack Obama last night sought decisively to dispel the lingering fears around his historically-charged presidential run, telling America that the "greatest risk we can take" would be to continue the politics of the past that had kept Democrats out of the White House for eight years.

An exultant crowd of more than 75,000 people packed into a sports stadium, with millions more watching across the world, to witness him accept the Democratic nomination.

"We are better than these last eight years, we are a better country than this," Mr Obama declared, as he predicted November's election would be a defining moment when voters "restore America's promise" by rising up "to insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time".

Times Archive, 1963: Let freedom ring

'All this will end one day. We will hew hope out of the mountain of despair'

• Topic: The assassination of Martin Luther King

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• Excerpts from Barack Obama's speech

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• What did America make of it?

He strode out on the stage at the mile high Invesco Stadium on the 45th anniversary of the "I Have A Dream"civil rights speech delivered by Martin Luther King, knowing that his bid to be the America's first black president remains a source of both inspiration and suspicion.

"I get it," said Mr Obama, "I realise that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don't fit the typical pedigree, and I haven't spent my career in the halls of Washington.

"But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring."

It was the same spirit, he said, that in 1963 had led Dr King to reject fear and frustration to tell a crowd "of every creed and colour, from every walk of life" that in America, "our destiny is inextricably linked - that together, our dreams can be one".

At the end of a Democratic convention in which his party has put on a carefully-crafted public display of unity, he went out of his way to praise both Hillary Clinton - with whom he had fought an epic battle for the nomination and her husband, Bill,the former president whose White House record has sometimes been slighted by Mr Obama.

The bulk of his speech, however, was devoted to addressing those voters who still think his exotic roots are too different, his politics too elitist or his experience too thin to be president.

He linked his own extraordinary inter-racial and international family background to the direct experience of ordinary Americans struggling with daily lives. In the faces of soldiers returning from Iraq he saw that of his grandfather who had marched with Patton's army, while the students struggling to get through college reminded him of his mother who did the same while bringing up two children on food stamps.

"These are my heroes. Theirs are the stories that shaped me. And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as President of the United States," he said

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