Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday night with a hard-hitting address at a 75,000-seat stadium that blended flashes of the Illinois senator’s soaring rhetoric with a litany of policy proposals intended to ease the lives of a struggling middle class.

Mr Obama, the first African-American to win a major party nomination for president, said the country was at a crossroads after eight years of Republican rule, and challenged voters to raise their expectations: “America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.”