SPRINGFIELD, ILL. — Sen. Barack Obama formally launched his bid for president Saturday, his eyes on history and feet rooted in the frigid Midwest as he pledged a new generation of leadership to end the war in Iraq and banish "the smallness of our politics."
In a speech that recalled his soaring remarks to the 2004 Democratic National Convention -- the speech that launched his political rocket flight -- Obama sought to set himself apart from the large Democratic field of White House hopefuls, and from the Washington establishment he joined two years ago as a senator representing Illinois.
He cited a familiar litany of woes: poverty, underperforming schools, soaring healthcare costs, hard-pressed wage earners, reliance on foreign oil, and the Iraq war. But the larger problem, he suggested, was a rancid political system that perpetuated those ills instead of solving them.
"What's stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics, the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points," Obama said.
"The time for that kind of politics is over," he added. "It's time to turn the page."
More than 15,000 people showed up for Obama's announcement, police said. The crowd formed a small sea of covered heads -- temperatures were in the low teens -- at the base of the old state Capitol, where Abraham Lincoln served, orated and, finally, lay in state.
The 45-year-old senator's announcement -- his breath visible in the cold -- marked a fully committed candidacy that, if successful, would make him the nation's first black president.
Obama is generally regarded as one of the top three Democratic White House hopefuls -- behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, ahead of former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina. But Obama is also among the least experienced of the more than a dozen candidates running on both sides, a political phenom whose success to date grows more out of style than accomplishment.
Conceding "a certain presumptuousness, a certain audacity" in his announcement, Obama suggested that the brevity of his stint in Washington should not be viewed as a demerit. "I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change," he said, offering his seven years as a state senator in Springfield as an exemplar of the politics he wished to practice.
