By DPA
Washington : A victory speech delivered by Democrat Barack Obama after the Iowa presidential caucuses has been hailed by commentators as a classic of American political oratory.
Senator Obama, who aims to become the country’s first African-American president, surprised pollsters by taking 37.6 percent of the Democratic vote in Iowa, eight points ahead of second-place John Edwards (29.8 percent) and third place Senator Hillary Clinton (29.5 percent), who had been the presumed front-runner until Thursday.
On the Republican side, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee also defied expectations, taking 34 percent of Iowa’s Republican vote over the next closest rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who took 26 percent. Senator John McCain and former senator Fred Thompson tied for third with 13 percent.
The race continues Tuesday in the New Hampshire primaries.
Obama’s win of a state presidential nomination vote was not the first for an African-American. Jesse Jackson ran strong campaigns in 1984 and 1988, winning at least a dozen state primaries.
In his speech, Obama said: “They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do. You came together as Democrats, Republicans and independents, to stand up and say that we are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come.
“You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington. To end the political strategy that has been all about division and instead make it about addition.”
He added: “We are choosing hope over fear. We’re choosing unity over division, and sending a powerful message that change is coming to America… I’ll be a president who ends the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and put a middle-class tax cut into the pockets of working Americans who deserve it.
“I’ll be a president who harnesses the ingenuity of farmers and scientists and entrepreneurs to free this nation from the tyranny of oil once and for all.
“And I’ll be a president who ends this war in Iraq and finally brings our troops home, who restores our moral standing, who understands that 9/11 is not a way to scare up votes but a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the 21st century.”
Obama said: “For many months, we’ve been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path.
“It’s not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.”
He added: “Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire. What led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. What led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause.
“Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.
“That is what we started here in Iowa and that is the message we can now carry to New Hampshire and beyond. We are not a collection of (Republican and Democratic) states. We are the US. And in this moment, in this election, we are ready to believe again.”