Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times
Senator Barack Obama joined Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. on stage on Wednesday. More Photos >
DENVER — Barack Hussein Obama, a freshman senator who defeated the first family of Democratic Party politics with a call for a fundamentally new course in politics, was nominated by his party today to be the 44th president of the United States.
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The unanimous vote made Mr. Obama the first African-American to become a major party nominee for president. It brought to an end an often-bitter, two-year political struggle for the nomination with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, standing on a packed convention floor electric with anticipation, moved to halt the roll call in progress so that the convention could nominate Mr. Obama by acclamation. That it did with a succession of loud roars, followed by a swirl of dancing, embracing, high-fiving and chants of “Yes, we can.”
In an effort to fully close out the lingering animosity from the primary season, former President Bill Clinton, in a speech that had been anxiously awaited by Mr. Obama’s aides given the prickly relations between the two men, offered an enthusiastic and unstinting endorsement of Mr. Obama’s credentials to be president. His message, like the messenger, was greeted rapturously in the hall.
Mr. Clinton asserted, as Mrs. Clinton had when she spoke to the convention on Tuesday night, that the nation needed to elect a Democrat to restore the damage he said President Bush had done to the country, at home and around the world.
“Barack Obama is ready to lead America and restore American leadership in the world.” Mr. Clinton said. “Ready to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States.”
Mr. Clinton was followed by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Mr. Obama’s choice for vice president, who used his speech to set out the Democratic case against the Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.
“Our country is less secure and more isolated than in any time in recent history,” Mr. Biden said. “The Bush-McCain foreign policy has dug us into a few deep holes with very few friends to help us climb out.”
“These times require more than a good soldier,” Mr. Biden said. They require a wise leader.”
In an address that was at turns personal, emotional and barbed, he said, “Today the American dream is slipping away.”
“John McCain doesn’t seem to get it,” Mr. Biden said. Barack Obama gets it.
To the delight of the crowd, at the conclusion of his address Mr. Biden was joined on stage by Mr. Obama, who made a point to thank Mr. Clinton — with whom he has had a prickly relationship — for his leadership as president. The historic nature of the moment quickly gave way to the political imperatives confronting Mr. Obama, who arrived here in the afternoon and is to accept the nomination Thursday night before a crowd of 75,000 people in a football stadium. After days in which the convention often seemed less about Mr. Obama than about the two families that have dominated Democratic politics for nearly a half-century, the Kennedys and the Clintons, he still faced a need to convince voters that he has concrete solutions to their economic anxieties and to rally his party against the reinvigorated candidacy of Mr. McCain.
The roll-call vote took place in the late afternoon — the first time in at least 50 years that Democrats have not scheduled their roll call on prime-time television — as Democrats sought to avoid drawing attention to the lingering resentments between Clinton and Obama delegates. Yet the historic nature of the vote escaped no one, and sent a charge through the Pepsi Center as a procession of state delegations cast their votes and the hall, slightly empty at the beginning of the vote, became shoulder-to-shoulder with Democrats eager to witness this moment.
As planned, it fell to Mrs. Clinton to put Mr. Obama over the top. He was declared the party’s nominee at 4:47 p.m. Mountain Time after Mrs. Clinton, in a light blue suit standing out in a crowd that included almost every elected New York official, moved that the roll call be suspended and that Mr. Obama by declared the party’s nominee by acclamation. The vote was timed to conclude during the network evening news broadcasts.
“With eyes firmly fixed on the future in the spirit of unity, with the goal of victory, with faith in our party and country, let’s declare together in one voice, right here and right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president,” Mrs. Clinton said.
“I move that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois be selected by this convention by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States,” she said.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, standing at the lectern, asked for a second and was greeted by a roar of voices. A louder roar came from the crowd when she asked for support of the motion.
When the voting was cut off, Mr. Obama had received 1,549 votes, compared with 231 for Mrs. Clinton.
The hall pulsed when Mr. Clinton strode onto the stage for a performance that became a reminder of why Democrats had considered him a politician with once in a generation skills. There were no signs that screamed “Clinton,” but Democrats waved American flags in quick tempo to welcome him to the stage. Again and again, Mr. Clinton tried to quiet the crowd; they ignored him.
“You all sit down: We’ve got to get on with the show!” he said as the applause lingered on for more than three minutes and his wife watched from the floor.
Without mentioning Mr. McCain by name, he offered a sharp denunciation of him and Republicans as he made the case for Mr. Obama.
“The Republicans will nominate a good man who served our country heroically and suffered terribly in Vietnam,” he said, “He loves our country every bit as much as we all do. As a senator, he has shown his independence on several issues. But on the two great questions of this election, how to rebuild the American Dream and how to restore America’s leadership in the world, he still embraces the extreme philosophy which has defined his party for more than 25 years.”
“They actually want us to reward them for the last eight years by giving them four more,” he said. “Let’s send them a message that will echo from the Rockies all across America: Thanks, but no thanks.”
For Mr. Obama, the nomination — seized from Mrs. Clinton, who just one year ago was viewed as the obvious favorite to win the nomination especially against an opponent with a scant political resume — was a remarkable achievement in what has been a remarkable ascendance. It was less than four years ago that Mr. Obama, coming off of serving seven years as an Illinois state senator, became a member of the United States Senate. He is 47 years old, the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya.
Mr. Obama’s nomination came 120 years after Frederick Douglass became the first African-American to have his name entered in nomination at a major party convention. Douglass received one vote at the Republican convention in Chicago in 1888; Senator Benjamin Harrison of Indiana went on to win the White House that year.
Making the moment even more striking was the historical nature of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. She was the third woman whose name has been entered as a candidate for president at a major party convention. As she moved to end the roll-call vote, some women in the hall could be seen wiping tears from their eyes.
The presidential candidate is typically an absent figure during the first few days of a convention. In this case, Mr. Obama’s vacuum was filled by the Clintons and the tribute paid to the party to Mr. Kennedy on Monday night. What has taken place over the past two days might have politically necessary and even helpful, but it did not go far in helping Mr. Obama achieve some of the critical goals of this convention.
As a result, he is under considerable pressure Thursday night to use this speech in an ambitious setting, a football stadium, to present a fuller picture of himself, Americans who might have doubts about whether he is ready to be president, and begin presenting a picture of what he would do in the White House. For Mr. Obama, the final appearance is not the coda to a convention; in many ways, it may prove to be his entire convention.
Mr. Obama, who arrived in Denver just after 3 p.m., was at his hotel in downtown Denver with his wife and daughters when he learned that he had been nominated by acclamation.
Kitty Bennett, John Broder and Janet Elder contributed reporting.
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