This is a powerful speech that evokes the best of the 2004 DNC convention speech and also just makes the McCain campaign look small. YouTube is not making nice with the embed so you'll have to go to the link to watch it. I promise you it's worth it. I've transcribed some of it below.
We've been waiting for someone to say this. UPDATE: Video
At a defining moment like this, we don't have the luxury of relying on the same political games, the same political tactics, that we've become accustomed to. This slash-and-burn politics that divides us from one another... which the challenges and crises we face right now, we can't afford to divide this country. By race, by class, by region, by who we are, by what policies we support. Let me tell you something, because I know you've been hearing a lot of stuff lately. There are no real parts of the country and fake parts of the country. There are no pro-America parts of the country and anti-America parts of the country. We all love this country. No matter where we live. Or where we come from.
The sad part is that this should be elemental. As much as the netroots is seen as a place for partisan warfare, there's no categorical desire for this to be so. We bring the necessary firepower to the battle. And so has Senator Obama. But the dishonest, dishonorable campaign of John McCain's simply deserves to be called out in this fashion. McCain seemingly has no understanding of the seriousness of the moment. He doesn't get what we are facing right now. And so he has made, in Obama's words, a big campaign about small things. And he has attempted to distract and obfuscate and all the other de rigeur elements of Republican political warfare. And it has rung completely false when we are fighting two failed wars and dealing with a protracted economic meltdown.
Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, young, old, rich, poor, gay, straight, city dwellers, farm dwellers, it doesn't matter, we're all together [...] The men and women from Virginia and all across this country who serve on our battlefields. Some are Democrats, some are Republicans, some are independents. But they fought together, and bled together, and some of them died together under the same flag. They didn't serve a blue America, or a red America, they served the United States of America. Nobody should forget that.
There's also a part in there saying that those who supported the war or those who supported Republican policies are patriots. That may dismay some people. This is the "unity shtick," says Obama, and Republicans are fundamentally not interested in unity, and debate is healthy in the political sphere. And I agree with that. What I believe Obama is doing is making the fringes of the debate, what the McCain-Palin campaign have defined themselves as entirely these last few weeks, UNACCEPTABLE. Broadly unacceptable. We can disagree about issues, we can have our own views about how to pay for services or manage foreign policy or promote economic growth. But the questioning of patriotism, the denigrating of opponents as un-American, this is what cannot stand. And an Obama victory would seek to render illegitimate those kinds of attacks for good. It won't totally work, of course, but each generation must have its own "Have you no decency" moment, a moment that makes the screamers and the demonizers and the haters look small. Microscopic. It is a moment that marginalizes this kind of hate. It's the old man sputtering about "that kind" in Twelve Angry Men as the other jurors in the room look on in horror and recognition. It's the families watching television as hoses are sprayed into the bodies of civil rights workers in Alabama. It's Joseph Welch, the Secretary of the Army, looking into the face of Joe McCarthy and telling him what kind of a man he was.
This was a cheering moment amidst the sewer that into which the right is trying to turn this election. It puts the stakes of the election into the proper context.
I'm asking you to believe. Believe in yourselves, believe in each other, believe in the future we can build together.