“America, we are better than these last eight years,” Obama said in his rousing speech to 80,000 delegates, Democrats, and Denverites. “We are a better country than this!”

Wearing his journalist’s hat, Loose Cannon could nitpick aspects of tonight’s acceptance address. For starters, John McCain certainly never said the middle class starts at a salary of $5 million a year—he made a joke about that to Pastor Rick Warren while saying that he didn’t want to raise taxes on anyone. And when Obama promised to give 95 percent of working Americans a tax cut, while saying that President Bush’s attitude toward the poor was that they were on their own—well, actually, the tax cut legislation Bush authored and signed into law in 2001 has meant that millions of working Americans no longer have to pay any income taxes at all.

This kind of thing, along with the frequent attacks on McCain’s record, his views, and his party come out of a Democratic Party catechism that holds that the mean-boy Republicans invariably run negative campaigns—and that they, the Democrats, have been too nice. The argument is erroneous, but I won’t deconstruct that entire line of reasoning tonight: As John McCain said in an ad that ran on television: this night belonged to Barack Obama.

It’s more than that, of course, as Obama himself noted. It’s everybody’s night. Some more than others.

I was on the stadium floor during Obama’s address, and when he finished, I saw four African-American women crying as they watched the spectacular fireworks. They said they never expected to live long enough for this moment. One of them explained that she was on the National Mall in Washington 45 years ago this very day when Martin Luther King Jr. dared the United States of America to dream the dreams of its founding documents—that all of us are created equal. “Oh, if Martin could see this…” the woman said. Her voice trailed off, and she caught a sob. She was crying for joy, but also out of sorrow for the many generations of Americans, no longer living, who never were able to experience her kind of joy.