And now it is time to heal, and time to end the division, and time to rally behind the two people who have been elected to lead the United States and, in many ways, the free world: Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Now it is time to set aside partisan bickering and political posturing and raise our voices in unison for all that our hopes stand for, for all that our wishes encompass, for all that our dreams entail.
Now it is time to become One American Family, one truly United States, and work together for peace, for prosperity, for the dignity of all people, and for the future of the world.
We have all had our say. You have had yours and I have had mine. As Sen. John McCain graciously said last night, “the American people have spoken, and they have spoken very clearly.”
The selection has been made, and now we can move forward as a group and give this decision every chance to play itself out for the good of all our people. It is time now to end any griping or complaining and to avoid becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It is time to stop saying whatever we can to be discouraging and doing whatever we can to be obstructing. The choice of behaviors is ours.
I have just come back from Europe on Monday, and I can tell you that the people there are rejoicing today. A survey on Sunday in Denmark showed 85% of the people favoring the man who American demonstrated yesterday that it also hugely favored. In France a few days earlier the figure was 95%. A survey of 22 nations overseas by CNN in the past few days showed that our new President-Elect was favored by the majority of people in every country – and in all but a tiny handful of the other countries in the world.
Barack Obama won every one of the so-called Battleground States. He won Virginia. He won Florida. He won Pennsylvania. He won Ohio. He won Colorado. He won Nevada. We won New Mexico. He even won Indiana–which, like Ohio and Virgina and Florida, have been reliably Red for so long.
There can no longer be any serious argument about who America preferred in this election. Mr. Obama — President-Elect Obama — won every Swing State in the country, and many of the crucial Red (formerly) States. The victory was decisive. Not marginal, not questionable, but obvious and decisive and, as John McCain himself said last night, “very clear.”
And so, something very special happened in the United States last night, and now, if all of the American people will give Barack Obama their honest and true support in the months ahead, something very special can continue to happen. And America can once again be one of the true lights of the world.
Let us all congratulate John McCain for a campaign well fought, and Barack Obama for a campaign well won. Mr. McCain’s concession speech yesterday was extraordinarily gracious – as befitting a man who truly puts his country first. So let us now do as John McCain himself invited and urged us last night to do: let us move forward together, and make history together, as we recreate ourselves anew, in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about who we are – as a nation, as a people, as a species inhabiting a wonderful place called the Earth.