Voters and pundits hungry for the details of Barack Obama's vision for America's future got them on Thursday when Obama formally accepted his party's presidential nomination, in an nearly 50-minute address to a packed Denver stadium.

Obama hammered Republican rival John McCain and at the same time offered his policy prescriptions in matters of national security, taxation and energy, among other things. With some notable exceptions, the early reaction from bloggers Thursday night was overwhelmingly positive.

"It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety," notes The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, a disillusioned Republican and outspoken Obama admirer.

"What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric," Sullivan writes on his blog The Daily Dish. "If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check."

Traffic on the micro-blogging service Twitter immediately surged in the wake of Obama's speech, in which he officially became the first African American to win the nomination of the Democratic party.

More than 6,500 tweets poured through the service in just 20 minutes Thursday night – most of them brief, two-line assessments of Obama's performance on a historic night, the 45th anniversary of civil rights leader Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. (Obama is the most popular person on Twitter, according to the tracking service Twitterholics.)

"Obama nailed it tonight for me," writes swhitley. "I may not agree with all of his policies, but I think his message of hope for our country means more."

"I want to have Barack Obama's babies," writes fluxrad.

And Brian Lerner tweeted, "It's hard to imagine there are people in this country that can not at least feel inspired by Obama even if they do not plan to vote for him."

Obama covered many of his key themes Thursday night, but there was an unusual fierceness to his oratory, which aimed at McCain's record on specific issues like a guided cruise missile.

For example, among many other points, he asserted that McCain has sided with President Bush more than 90 percent of the time.

In addition, he addressed many of the criticisms of the Republicans, saying that he would cut taxes for middle-class families instead of raising them. He also pledged to spend $150 billion over the next 10 years in renewable sources of energy, including wind and solar power as well as biofuels. He predicted that that investment will lead to five million jobs that "pay well and can't ever be outsourced."

Obama hit back at the Republicans on all of the major fronts on which they've been attacking him,* The Atlantic'*s Sullivan notes: national security, his personal patriotism and his ability to relate to the average middle-class family.

"I've said it before – months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away," Sullivan concludes.

An Atlantic colleague of Sullivan's wasn't so generous. Megan McArdle, who blogs on economics, blasted Obama's promise to end America's dependence on Middle East oil, dismissing as empty political rhetoric.

"It doesn't matter what we do: drill, research alternative energy, raise

CAFE standards ... in 2018, we'll still be using oil," writes McArdle on her blog Asymmetrical Information. "Even if we discovered a magic source of clean renewable energy tomorrow, we'd still be using a lot of oil, because transitions of that magnitude take time."

Others, though, appreciated Obama's unapologetic case for an active federal government – an unusual tact, they note, after decades of Democrats trying to campaign and win over what was an increasingly Republican-leaning electorate.

"From a Democratic perspective, he made the argument for government, something we haven't heard in a while," writes Robert Arena, a web-marketing strategist who writes for the left-leaning AMERICAblog.

Obama "moved into ample detail on what he wants to do with the economy and made the case for a failed Bush/McCain foreign policy," Arena wrote, voicing a common sentiment among Democratic bloggers. "I've been looking for the details for a while, and while not a wonky speech, there was enough there there to hang your hat on."

"And, perhaps most importantly, he defended himself and put the screws to the Republican Party for the failure of the last eight years. On the question of being ready to be commander in chief, Obama answered the question with a clarity and passion I haven't seen from him yet.

"All in all, a very Presidential speech."

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