Barack Obama on Wednesday became the official Democratic presidential nominee after Hillary Clinton went onto the convention floor and called on delegates backing her to endorse her former rival.
Barack Obama on Wednesday became the official Democratic presidential nominee after Hillary Clinton went onto the convention floor and called on delegates backing her to endorse her former rival.
With that choreographed gesture, Mrs Cinton brought a formal end to one of the most bruising nominating contests in modern US political history and made Mr Obama the first African-American nominee of a major US party.
”With eyes firmly fixed on the future, and in the spirit of unity with the goal of victory, with faith in our party and our country, let’s declare together with one voice right here, right now that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president,” she said.
In a concession to Mrs Clinton, the Obama campaign agreed for her name to be put forward for nomination alongside his in a formal roll call of delegates.
The gesture allowed Clinton supporters a final chance to register support for her before the New York senator called a halt to the roll call and released her delegates to fall behind Mr Obama.
Mrs Clinton’s intervention was part of carefully-planned efforts to unify the party around Mr Obama ahead of his acceptance speech on Thursday in front of 75,000 people at Denver’s Invesco stadium.
In her speech to the convention on Tuesday, Mrs Clinton urged her supporters to campaign for Mr Obama as hard as they had campaigned for her and put the divisions of the past year behind them.
