The speech that Barack Obama gave last night in front of 84,000 delegates and Coloradans was not as inspiring as his speech after the Iowa primary or as brilliant as his speech about race, but it certainly had heavy doses of both. This was his most purposeful and direct speech to date. It had to be. By most accounts, he did exactly what he was supposed to do and exactly what was needed — he went at John McCain like John McCain has been going at him, and he did it with quite a bit more grace, eloquence, and intelligence. This is where McCain will lose every time, and this is where Barack Obama can change the minds that are still open to be changed. It was an amazing, effective speech. I nodded in agreement through much of it. My favorite parts were when he said "we are a better country than this" and his appeal for bipartisan compromise on the issues of abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration. But in between all the nodding, there was one thought that stayed in the back of my head: We are going to have a black president.

I was far from being alive in 1963 — my parents themselves were just children — and the impact of Dr. King's speech forty-five years ago has always been muted by my post-civil-rights upbringing. Yes, I know well what things were like for blacks in the decades and centuries before I was born from history books and movies and from stories told by family elders. I feel deeply for the young versions of these relatives and for so many like them, but the truth is that I was learning of these things in honors classes at my public school, flanked on all sides by white classmates, or from my comfortable suburban home on my tree-lined block, where our white and Asian neighbors invited us over for barbecues and sent their children to our house for sleepovers. I knew, but I couldn't know. I had an optimism and an idealism that many others' life experiences prohibited them from having. But here is one thought that I shared with those elders, many of whom are long gone, and my parents, who were reared during the heart of the Civil Rights movement — I never really thought I would see a scene like I saw last night in my lifetime. And its not only that it was a black man up there on that stage, but that it was a black man whose policies so many agree with, a black man who can really effect change, a black man who can win.

It was a great speech, but for me and for many others, it was so much more than just that.