Biden: McCain out of touch

Senator Joe Biden, accepting his place as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, said tonight that he and Barack Obama took very different journeys but share similar stories and the same destination -- the White House.

Biden spoke movingly of his working class roots in Pennsylvania, saying, "My parents taught us to live our faith and to treasure our family. We learned the dignity of work, and we were told that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough. That was America's promise."

"Today, that American dream feels like it is slowly slipping away," he said.

He imagined the worried conversations about high gas prices and stagnant wages around kitchen tables in the homes he passes on the train home from Washington, D.C., to Wilmington, Del. "That's the America George Bush has left us," Biden said.

Republican nominee John McCain "doesn't seem to get it," Biden said, while Obama surely does.

He honored Hillary Clinton, who was almost the nominee. And he paid tribute to Obama, whose readiness for the presidency he questioned last August, but who Biden said had accomplished much in his short time in the US Senate and proved himself in the crucible of the primaries.

"You can learn an awful lot about a man campaigning with him, debating him, and seeing how he reacts under pressure," Biden said. "You learn about the strength of his mind. But even more importantly, you learn about the quality of his heart. I watched how he touched people, how he inspired them, and I realized he had tapped into the oldest belief in America: we don't have to accept a situation we cannot bear. We have the power to change it. And change it is exactly what Barack Obama will do -- that's what he'll do for this country."

Biden listed a series of McCain's votes, with the same refrain: "That's not change, that's more of the same."

"The choice in this election is clear," Biden said. "These times require more than a good soldier -- they require a wise leader. A leader who can deliver change. The change that everybody knows we need. Barack Obama's going to deliver that change."

Biden went after McCain on his strong suit of national security as well, saying the "Bush-McCain foreign policy has dug us into a very deep hole, with very few friends to help us climb out."

Obama showed his good judgment, Biden said, by opposing the Iraq war, and McCain was wrong. Obama was also right and McCain wrong on focusing of Afghanistan in the war on terror, Biden said.

"John McCain was wrong and Barack Obama was right again and again and again on the most important national security issues of our time."