From USA Today:
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean announced Monday that Obama will deliver his acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High, home of the Denver Broncos football team. The stadium can seat about 76,000, nearly four times the crowd that can be accommodated at Denver's Pepsi Center, the basketball arena where the Democrats will hold their nominating convention. ... The decision to make the acceptance speech — traditionally the most coveted of convention tickets — more widely accessible is "symbolic of what Sen. Obama's campaign is all about — opening up the political process," Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, one of Obama's convention co-chairs, told reporters.
From the Washington Post:
Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean said yesterday that moving the speech to Invesco Field at Mile High, home of the NFL's Denver Broncos, from the Pepsi Center, which seats 19,000, would drive up costs and complicate security planning. But he said the extra aggravation would pay off with a dramatic Rocky Mountain tableau that reinforces Obama's grass-roots style and historic ascent. "Senator Obama does not look at this as his convention; he looks at it as America's convention," Dean said of the Aug. 25-28 national convention. "It's going to be new. It's going to be different. It's going to be incredibly exciting." But it is not unprecedented. John F. Kennedy delivered his acceptance speech before 80,000 people at Los Angeles Coliseum in 1960. Kennedy chose the outdoor arena to maximize the impact of his acceptance speech, with its call for voters to join him in blazing a "new frontier." ... Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius joined Dean in announcing the change of venue... She noted the overflow crowds that Obama attracts to his events and said, "The final night of the convention, the most coveted ticket, will now be available to almost 74,000 people."
From the New York Times:
Borrowing from the political repertory of John F. Kennedy, Senator Barack Obama will accept his party’s nomination outside of the main Democratic convention hall this August, in the Denver Broncos’ football stadium that seats more than 75,000 people. ... The move will also be rich in historical resonance. Mr. Obama, who will be the first African-American presidential nominee for a major party, will give his acceptance speech at Invesco Field on Aug. 28, the 45th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” address. And he will be the first nominee to give his speech outside the convention hall since Kennedy did so in 1960, when he drew a crowd some estimated at 50,000 at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles. Though clearly enticed by what they believe will be a powerful television image of Mr. Obama speaking before tens of thousands of people, his aides said Monday that they hoped to open the convention to regular voters who typically did not attend party conventions. The Pepsi Center, with a capacity of 21,000 people, would accommodate only the usual convention crowd, party officials said. “This convention is meant to be opened up to the American people,” Howard Dean, the Democratic Party chairman, said in a conference call with reporters.
From Reuters:
With Americans returning to work after the Independence Day holiday weekend, both candidates turned to the No. 1 issue for voters -- the economy -- in a bid to win support from people wrestling with home foreclosures, job losses and the soaring cost of gasoline. In a speech to reporters after mechanical trouble forced his plane to make an unscheduled stop in St. Louis, Obama called for a $50 billion stimulus package to fight foreclosures and offset high energy prices. He said he would tighten rules for credit card companies and relax bankruptcy laws to help those struggling with debt. Obama, a Democrat, said Republican McCain, like unpopular President George W. Bush, would favor the wealthy over the middle class if he won the November election. "He trusts that prosperity will trickle down from corporations and the wealthiest few to everyone else," the Illinois senator said in remarks originally scheduled for delivery in Charlotte, North Carolina. "I believe that it's the hard work of middle-class Americans that fuels this nation's prosperity." ... Obama rejected McCain's tax claims and said the Arizona senator's tax plan was designed to help the wealthy rather than the middle classes. "Only a quarter of his total tax cuts will go to the middle class, less than a quarter," the Illinois senator said. "Ninety-five of people in America would get a tax cut under my plan. ... "Every independent observer who has looked at John McCain's plan says that his plan would add $200- to $300-billion a year in deficit spending," [Obama said]. "He hasn't specified how he would bring it down. His own campaign has acknowledged that they don't have specifics."
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