Forty-five years after Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, Barack Obama made his own history and in his own unexpected way.

The night was a statement on race in America, of course. But the statement was more a whisper than a shout. On a night when the first African-American accepted the nomination of a major party to run for president, Obama barely mentioned race and, in fact, only once alluded to King himself — "a young preacher," he called him "from Georgia."

It was a night that said how far we'd come on race and how far we haven't come, and how the difference may be resolved, at least in part, come November.

If it was a night steeped in history, the crowd of nearly 80,000 provided the filmmakers and the documentarians a soundtrack of Rocky Mountain thunder. The night sky was lighted with camera flashes competing with bright, unbelieving smiles. The flag-waving crowd, many in tears, provided enough people-powered electricity to make Al Gore proud.

Obama, the son a Kansan and a Kenyan, is the product of King's dreams, and the moment when he took the stage, after a short film about his life, was so rich that it almost defied words.

But Obama is the candidate of words, the candidate who casts spells with his speeches, the candidate labeled a celebrity because he attracts crowds of which mere politicians can only dream.

And so, in 45 minutes, Obama spoke of promises of a better America and promises, he said, that George Bush had not kept.

And he wondered aloud, to the crowd's approval, about John McCain's judgment, asking "what does it say ... when you think George Bush has been right more than 90 percent of the time."

Before the speech, I wandered through the crowd, and you could feel that the weight of the night and the excitement of those who were fortunate enough to get tickets.

I talked to an African-American alderman from Chicago who begins to cry and I talked to a delegate from Colorado who keeps texting his friends that he's right there, on the front row of history, looking up at the faux Greek columns decorating the stage and knowing that this history needed little dressing up.

If the pundits had failed to understand the logic of Obama's convention strategy, they must understand it now. The idea was to lay the groundwork for Obama to be able to effectively take the fight to McCain and the Republicans before a TV audience that would have dwarfed any that had ever seen him speak.

It began with Michelle Obama making the case for being a mom and a daughter and a wife in a family that any American would recognize. It was Ted Kennedy saying this contest was sufficiently important for him to leave his hospital bed. It was the Clintons ending the latest round of their psychodrama by conceding, in the end, electing Obama was more important than even the conduct of the Clinton wars.

Through the four days, there was hardly any mention of race. If this election is to be an election on race, Obama loses. He knows this. He knows his history. On this night, John Lewis, the old civil rights icon, spoke. And two of Martin Luther King's children spoke, one evoking her father's line of "let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado."

But they spoke early. And it was clear that when they finished, that would be the end of that theme for the evening. When Al Gore, the son of the South, who grew up in the crucible of the civil rights battles, took the stage, he never mentioned race and he never mentioned history and he never mentioned Dr. King.

We heard a lot about Lincoln, who went from Illinois to the White House. And we heard about Kennedy, who gave his acceptance speech in 1960 at the Los Angeles Coliseum. We heard about energy and national security and we heard it all woven together with attacks on McCain. But the attacks weren't just attacks. Obama was getting at the idea that somehow he is not as American as McCain, that there's an otherness — insert word celebrity — about him that Americans aren't ready to accept.

"I love this country," he said to the crowd, "and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America — they have served the United States of America.

"So I've got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first."

He would end with Obama eloquence, with the words that "promise is our greatest inheritance," and with the hope that in the words of the Scripture, we should "hold firmaly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess."

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com