Speeches for the New Millennium: September 2008

Hello. Hello everybody. Thank you. Thank you so much. Hello. Yes, thank you.

Let me begin by introducing you to my family. This is my wife. She's my better half. I guess that's a little bit of a cliche, but look at her. Beautiful, intelligent, brave. She works for the rights of every American, especially your rights. She doesn't shy away from poverty or despair. She takes poverty and despair by their necks and fights them into submission. If ever there was a woman who desired that each of us realized the American dream, she is that woman.

And this here is my son. He's 12. Oh, don't be shy, come stand out here, they all want to meet you. Ha ha. This here is my son. He's a little shy. He told me the other day that he wants to grow up to be President, too. That's what I like to hear. That's a child who loves his country. My wife and I like to call him Dreamer. He's like a child of the 60's. He sees the world with the eyes of someone who believes that anything is possible, that all can be turned to good. Call him when he turns 45. Help him, America, to keep that optimism close to his heart. Help him to guard it. Help him to walk his path into our collective futures and he will emerge such a man. And his brothers and sisters and cousins and classmates will all emerge such men and women as this world has ever seen. The future needs these children. America needs these children. Protect him, protect them all, build them all into citizens of this great land and of this great world.

You see how he makes me dream? These are dreams to cherish and fight for...these are dreams that we all have, dreams that we all must bring to pass together.

And here on my left is my beautiful daughter. She just turned eight ten days ago. Come here and hold your daddy's hand, sweety.

My daughter wants me tell you all that she loves you all. That's what she said last night when I asked her what I should say about her. She loves you. And believe me, this child's heart is that big. She loves you all because she too loves this country and its children. She does not look out at you through eyes that have been clouded by the words difference, privilege, inequality. She is a child of the 21st century. She looks out at this world with a soul unencumbered with the horrors of two world wars, of massive genocides, of cruel segregation. She and all the children of this new century are our angels, on them rest our hopes for the future. In them we feel the presence of this world's salvation, of a new chapter in human history the whole world over. I ask each and every one of you to take your children in your arms and to look into their eyes as I so often look into hers. Look long and deep and see the distant waters of a future when this country will stand united for all that is good and decent in this world, where equality means equality, where class doesn't mean keeping those below you always below, where death and destruction have been replaced by peace and understanding and acceptance. Look into their eyes and feel that profound feeling of hope wash over you. Let it inspire you. Live each day for this single goal that my daughter so simply states: That we all can look out over each other and into each other's eyes and say, yes, I love you, all of you.

That's my family. They are my inspiration, they are the source of all of my hope and drive. You know where we come from, you know where we've been, and you know where we're going. And we are all going there together!

Any journey to this point is long and fraught with difficulty. Everything about one's life comes bare to the public's eye. There's a good chance all of you out there "know" more about me than I even know myself. I am an object for your speculation. That, for better or worse, is what it means to run for public office in the United States of America. But I say: Observe. Seek. I am only a man. I am only a man like any man, what faults I have are my own. What frailties I may have are my own. I am a man like any man and I stand before you and ask you to consider everything that has made up my life and to decide, is this a man I can trust, is this a man who can lead, is this a man who is considerate, compassionate, intelligent, understanding, bold, brave, a hard worker. I trust myself to be those things. But I need your trust. I need your consideration. I need you to go out and to say, yes, he is a man like any man, and yes, he is a man who we trust, and yes, he is a man who will lead this country into a future where the dreams of his own children and the dreams of our own children can be grasped and realized. He is the man who must lead America at this pivotal moment in the history of our Union.

But how do I think of myself? How do I interpret the experiences that have led me to this momentous day in my life and in the history of this country?

My mother and father are hard-working Americans. They do not belong to the upper class. No, my life growing up was not a struggle. I cannot claim that. But I know what it means to be solidly middle class in this country. Compared to so many places in this world, it is a comfortable, even a privileged existence. But as I grew up, my parents instilled in me this one, all-important belief: life for us may be easy, life for so many Americans may be easy, but for those not so fortunate to be a part of this country's middle class, for those who depend on minimum wage jobs, whose annual salary fall well below a poverty line whose bar rises almost daily, for those people, we must fight to reimagine and reenergize the American dream. My parents were educators in a part of the country where education is still seen as a privilege out of reach for the majority of high school graduates. This is a crazy notion. It is not a perception that can continue in America's future.

So many things need to be addressed. We have so much work to do. Just talking about it I get ahead of myself. I come from a middle class family, for most of my life I have been a member of the middle class. Because I will be called out for it in the papers tomorrow, I will not claim to still be a part of it. But compared to most of my colleagues, I can assure you that if I am part of the upper class today, I can't imagine what they call the class they belong to. So I believe to my very core that I speak to all of you as a person who understands your lives, who understands that even with some privilege, life in this country can still be a struggle and a challenge. And this is an important point. I believe that it is a fundamentally American point. This country's middle and lower classes are working their fingers to the bone to realize a life where they are simply getting by. We should all be doing better. We can all be doing better.

This has shaped my life and my view of this country and of the world. I thank my parents for this. I consider myself lucky. My opponents cannot make these same claims. Or they cannot make them with the same foundation beneath them. I have little doubt that they have talked to many people, people like my parents, people like the young men and women who flip burgers at the McDonald's on the outskirts. I have little doubt that they know how to listen. But I ask you, can a person whose life has been one of privilege from the day they were born truly understand the plight of the lower and middle classes in this country? They will tell you that they can, that they understand, that they know and feel your pain. This is impossible. I have walked in your shoes and even now, I have not thrown those shoes away. I walk in them every day of my life and I will continue to walk in them as long as I live. Why? Because those shoes are a symbol of what America is all about. They are a reminder of my childhood, of my parents, and of each and every one of you. I will walk in those shoes until the day I die and I will wear their soles thin and ragged fighting for an America where an honest man and woman can earn an honest living for doing honest work and be honored by America's promise that this is a land for dreamers and hard workers, a land founded on the premise that we are all created equal and deserve the equal rights that allow us to go out and achieve the dreams we have. I ask you, and I ask America, is that so much to ask?

So how did I reach this point? How did I come to be standing here before all of you?

As a child I wanted to be a fireman. Like most boys. You know the big red truck, the ladders. Now, though, things have changed. Who was it that planted this seed into my head...that's a question I ask myself every day. Was it my economics professor in college who pointed to a single day on a graph showing many many years of data, saying, "On this day, the economy of the 20th century breathed its last and, economically speaking, the 21st century began." That took my breath away. A president, a leader--I think that someone who presumes to rise to this position, must be able to grasp notions as grandiose as this. Was he right? We could debate that until the end of time. But what he taught me was that one can view the world through a lens that is so all-encompassing that no detail, no second of any day, is too small to escape consideration.

Yes, people will turn their noses at me and call me an intellectual whose head floats in the stratosphere so far above what's going on down on the ground. I don't want to hear it. You and I, we come from the same ground. You and I, we have walked the same path. The distance between us is far smaller than you can ever imagine. Like that tiny piece of economic speculation by my professor so many years ago, we cannot even begin to imagine that there is a single moment in anyone's life that leads them one way or another. So I stand before you to say, listen to my story, do not discount me without listening through to its end. We are working this out together. That is something we will always be doing. I am not leaving this path and I am not leaving you as we walk along it together.

So maybe it was him. Maybe it was my sociology professor who opened my eyes wide to the inequalities that exist in every corner of the globe. Even in our own backyards. You know, if you grow up in middle class suburbia, this is a fact that catches you in your tracks. Certainly not in America! That's the exact thought I had. You know that only 28% of American adults have earned bachelor's degrees? That's a fact. And that's an all time record. There's an inequality there. Less than 1 out of every three of us has had the opportunity, the privilege, to finish college. But that's not even the worst of it. The poverty line for an individual in the United States now stands at $11,000 and $21,000 for a family of four. Now, I'm sorry, this is boring, but let's do a little math. A year from now, the Federal Minimum Wage will rise to $7.25 per hour. Now, if you worked 40 hours per week for all 52 weeks of the year, never taking a break, you could earn $15,000. Okay, so that's above the poverty line. But let's think about a few things. How much is the cheapest medical insurance? How much is insurance on that car you have to drive 10 miles to work every day through rush hour traffic? How much is a gallon of gas? How much is rent? How much does it cost to feed yourself? How much is it going to cost to turn on the heat when winter comes?

I could almost cry, America, I could almost cry right here before you all at the thought that someone, somewhere believes that you are not living in poverty if you are making more than $11,000 a year. And what, America. What are we doing to show our appreciation to the legions of Americans who are stuck working these jobs, working harder than the CEO's of this worlds largest companies. Scraping together every last penny to make ends meet every day of their lives. What, America, are we doing for them?

This is not a policy speech. We'll go into all of that later. But I want you to keep that question in mind. I want you to keep those $15,000 in mind. Imagine two parents working minimum wage jobs with two kids. Hey, they're above the poverty line! What are they going to do with those kids? Who's going to be there to take care of them, who's going to make sure they go to school and do well, who's going to make sure that they are ready for and that they can get into college?

Sociology was depressing. But a woman who I think was very wise once said to me, "I don't like the word challenging. Challenges are simply opportunities." Now, I don't fully agree. I don't think of challenge as a word with negative connotations. But I always keep that thought in the back of my mind. The trials and tribulations of the world may very well be depressing. Let's be honest. They are. But one cannot confront them with eyes that see nothing but a wall looming ahead. One must believe, as that woman did, that every challenge, no matter how imposing, is an opportunity to make this world, make anything, a better place. So maybe I owe it to sociology. That wouldn't be a bad place to begin.

But it could have been anything. Shakespeare, for all I know. He was an incredibly politically aware writer. Or my first year Spanish classes. All anyone needs is a seed. That seed is cultivated by our teachers, by our peers and mentors, by our parents, and by society in general. We all build each other up, we all grow together. So I have to say: Thank you. And that goes to all of you before me today. Thank you.

So then along came law school. You know, it's funny. When you're in college and you get toward the end, senior year is there, lots of work, everybody's stressed out, you're there talking to your friends, and it's always the same. "There's always law school." I'm not sure why that is. People don't go and say, well, there's always med school. I mean, this world could probably use a few more doctors than it can lawyers. But anyway. There's always law school. And that's where I went.

Many people will argue over the coming months that this is where I got the notion to run for President. Fair enough. I disagree. I think law school may be the place that many people find the confidence to go out and do great things. That is certainly true for me. But I like to think that my kernel of ambition came from those professors who first inspired me many years before. Or perhaps my American History teacher in high school. Or perhaps my fourth grade teacher who was really the first person to open my eyes to just how much there was to explore and understand in the world.

I see a few of you falling asleep out there. That's okay. I'll skip ahead a few chapters to the exciting parts. This is mostly for the kids out there to think about. You look up here at me and you think, man, how did he get there. Well, I don't have an answer. These little stories are the best I can do.

I left law school and got a cushy job practicing corporate law. When you're young and in debt and looking for success, this seems like a great path. It's certainly the path to follow if you want to make money. And, I'll be honest. I wanted to make money. That's the most basic form that the American dream takes. Success equals money. It's a simple equation.

You start to remember things though, when you're up there in your high-rise office, looking down on so much of the world. When you're up there, then you really are in the stratosphere. Then you really aren't down on the ground. You aren't doing the work of the people. It's hard to even say who it is you're helping. Who it is you're serving.

So I gave that up. And that was a hard decision. I'd had a taste of "the good life." I'd been on top. And I'm only human. Like I said, I am only a man. Man, the human race, we are creatures who desire comfort and ease. I gave that up. And I came back down to where I had begun. I came back down and felt the firm ground beneath my feet and I felt as if I had come home. This is where I belonged.

I took a job as a public defender. Perhaps this is where that seed first emerged from the ground, yearning for the sun and the air. From the first day, I was humbled. And you know, it wasn't until 1963 that the Supreme Court ruled that everyone, regardless of their ability to afford representation, had the right to seek council. America, that was a momentous and important day. But there, from day one, I could see how much work we still had before us. We had no money. We worked tirelessly on cases that we had no chances of winning. So many of the people I worked with would never be acquitted for their crimes. We were doing the best we could do with the kind of justice we had to deal with. Was this a fair system? No. Not even close. But it was a start. It still is a start.

From the moment I stepped into that job and started work, I could hardly sleep. I was troubled. To sleep was to open my eyes to a nightmare world. Where was the equality that this country of ours was founded on? Where was the notion that everyone, regardless of race, creed, or color has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? We, America, had failed these people. Not, necessarily, then. Not as they were sitting in jail. But as children. As adolescents. As parents and friend and family and brothers and sisters. As a society, we had failed these people. So many of them had lost the will to dream of a better future. So many of them were just struggling to get by. So many of them turned to crime not out of a malicious urge but out of a perceived necessity. The human survival instinct.

From day one, I could think only one thought: America, we can do better. America, we MUST do better.

I was a public defender for three years, working on the south side of _____. Every morning I would take the bus downtown to the jail to visit my clients. Every morning I would come face to face with the same sad stories. The man who couldn't make his rent and one day decided to start selling marijuana on the side. The woman whose children were beginning to starve because she couldn't afford to feed them and made the unfortunate decision to begin stealing to make ends meet. The young man who got his girlfriend pregnant when they were both sixteen and did the honorable thing and agreed to marry her after she insisted that she would not get an abortion. Three years later he was running drugs just so he could give them a home while it became clear that he was suffering horrendously from depression and taking out his fear and insecurities on the wife and child he was desparately fighting to protect at the same time. I talked with murderers and rapists. Arsonists and kidnappers. For the longest time, riding the bus on my way to work, I feared for my life. The cards were stacked against every one of these people. I would represent them to the best of my abilities. But in the end, I'd be lucky if I could get any kind of deal at all for one in ten of them. They hated me. I was on the outside. I couldn't possibly understand the things they had to go through every day of their lives.

I don't forgive the crimes those people have committed. There was hardly ever any question about their guilt. My job was not to give them a "get out of jail free" card. But I want you all to consider this. With privilege, with a fancy lawyer, time, money. Half of those cases would have been thrown out. If you don't believe me, start looking at court statistics. This is not a system built on fairness. If justice is blind, then whatever I saw was not justice.

So I say it again. I want you to say it with me. America. We must do better. We must.

We must fix our inner city schools. We must reduce class sizes and hir more teachers. We must increase, dramatically, the number of after school programs available to children and make sure that they ARE available to everyone, without question. We must expand the reach of public education to ensure that everyone, every single child, graduates from high school. We must give our children the support they need to succeed. For those who find school challenging, for those who don't feel as if they fit in. For those who feel lost and without direction. For those who simply need someone to see them struggling, who just want a hand to reach out and take them in, to help guide them, to give them the support and confidence they need to make it. America, we must give them this support. Our society needs this.

I do not want to hear of people driven to crime because America has not given them the opportunity to succeed. Yes, there is the old adage, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." But before we, America, can ask that of them, we must give them the opportunity to do for their country as that old saying demands. This is not a free hand out. There are strings attached. But we find ourselves at a moment so pivotal in our history that we must, we absolutely must place all of your bets on our children and the future that they will so soon begin to forge.

I was a public defender for three years. Those were the most frustrating and rewarding years of my entire life. So often it felt as if I were making no difference at all. So many days I listened to people's life stories and felt a sense of helplessness so deep that I worried I might not be able to buoy myself up again. But so many of those people just wanted someone to hear them. To give them the time of day and truly care. And when I stood before a judge and pleaded their cases, I became, every one of my colleagues became, someone whom these people could finally trust. Someone who believed, deep down, in their basic human decency, no matter their crime. Remember. In this country you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Remember that. These people had never once felt that to be true. From the day they stepped out of their parents houses and breathed the air of their futures they felt a sense of guilt. What was their crime? Was it their skin color? Was it their poverty? Was it their desire to have a better life?

In the end I felt I could be doing more. I didn't just feel that way. I knew I had to do more. I left my job as a public defender. I had to find another path. I had to spread these people's stories. I had to make their visions of America visible to all. I had to climb upward and speak from the mountain top. I had to begin fighting for them, for everyone struggling to make ends meet, for everyone frustrated by the disappearance of their unique American dream. If I had to, I would dream for them. I would climb to the mountain top and remind them of the dream. I felt the deep desire to inspire them to stand up and look skyward once more.

I ran for governor of _____ on little more than a dream. My main rival at the time was an incumbent governor in a state enjoying some of its best economic times in decades. Unemployment was low, taxes were low, the schools in 80% of the state's districts were reaching national standards or exceeding them. I was running as a challenger in a time when one could have argued with great ease that there was no need to make changes to the system. Maintain the status quo. Keep your hands off and let things keep moving forward as they are.

But I am a restless man. I am a tireless believer that we can always, always do better. There were still those schools, those 20% who weren't doing so well. And in _____ it turned out that 20% represented more than 200 schools. That was shocking to me. We were calling times golden when more than 200 schools weren't giving students the chance to succeed. Now, I know that you might say that it was the students in those schools who weren't meeting the state's benchmarks and that the teachers were working tirelessly to little effect. Maybe they were. I am the last person to blame anything wrong with our schools on the teachers. Teachers are our last greatest resource. So I started digging. I saw our children as the foundation of my aspiration to be governor. It turned out that while 80% of our schools were reaching state benchmarks, more than 30% of our students were not. That is shocking. Even more shocking was the fact that the state was measuring schools based on averages of all scores so that one student who was acing state tests and one who was scoring at the 50% level could be taken together and seen as two very average students. The system was broken. One in three students were not meeting what were very modest state standards.

I rail on this again and again and most people come back to me and ask: So what? Here is the answer. It is very simple. It applies not just to individual cities, to individual counties or states. No, it applies to this entire country.

Without a well-prepared, well-educated youth, ready to take on the challenges of tomorrow, America as we have known it will cease to exist. Our position in the world depends on the minds and abilities of our citizens. And our children are tomorrow's citizens. All of us standing here today, we can only do so much. We can only pave the way for them, shore up some of the challenges of the past, prepare to face the challenges of the future. But as our day fades to twilight, our children will face the dawn. And they MUST be prepared.

This was my foundation. But it turned out, not surprisingly, that school success was directly linked to funding and that inner-city schools and schools that were serving poor, predominantly minority neighborhoods were the ones with the lowest test scores, the lowest graduation rates, and the smallest number of graduates going on to college. From there the trends were all too familiar. There was a shortage of funding for social service programs in these same areas. A huge percentage of the population was living at or below the poverty line. Jobless rates in these areas were the highest in the state. People were beginning to abandon their neighborhoods for the suburbs. And I mean abandon. You've seen pictures of Detroit. That's what we were starting to see in our cities. Empty houses were becoming playgrounds for vandals and drug dealers. Funding for police was being channeled to more wealthy areas of cities and crime in poor neighborhoods was on the rise.

So it turned out, sadly, in truth, that I did have legs to stand on. That I did have a platform to confront what my opponent was calling the best of times.

I ran my campaign on a simple premise. Let's tell the truth. Let's see what people come up with when we turn the spotlights one what were some very BAD times for people. We got slammed from so many corners. But the wonderful thing about telling the truth is that the facts don't lie. You can't tear apart a truthful argument forever. At its core is an indisputable fact. We made our arguments, we pointed out opportunities to make changes, to make the "best of times" better. And we let our opponents tear into us. At times we felt like sacrificial lambs. It hurts the ego, it hurts the motivation to be torn into day in and day out. But when all the thrashing was done, there was the core of each of our arguments and all the commentators and detractors left scratching their heads.

This, of course, is not how we won the election. Once truth had been laid bare, we took our message to every corner of the state and wasted nothing. We didn't sugar coat our words. Things could be better. Things could be a lot better. Change, progress, forward movement. These are quintessential human desires. Maintaining the status quo goes directly against these. My campaign pushed hard. We got out the vote in areas that had been historically underrepresented for as long as anyone could remember.

The rest is history. It was a hard campaign and it got ugly. I actually harbor a great deal of sadness at how things unfolded. We do not yet live in a world where the word politics refers to the honest debate of ideas that are critical to the health and future of a state or country. Today, yesterday, and no doubt tomorrow, politics will remain a word with negative connotations. It is a word about that talks to taking advantage of weakness, of appealing to emotion, and of addressing the challenges we face with as little conviction as necessary so as not to be stuck with an unpopular stance to defend.

But I am here today to say this one thing. Even if you have ignored all that I have said so far. Hear this:

I am here to say that the politics of yesterday can no longer stand. I will give everything in my soul to change them. And I am counting on you to call me out. I am counting on you to yell out, "Hey, don't forget your promise! Don't play that stupid game! You're better than that. America deserves better than that!"

The politics of yesterday die here today.

Eight years have passed since I was sworn in as Governor of ______. And I am not here today to talk about my record, my successes and failures. I will say that I think my record speaks for itself. It is defensible. It is imperfect. But I have not wavered from my promise and the thing that has always driven me forward. I promised that things could be better, that my government would be open for all to see, transparent, and always have an ear to lend to the citizens who put us there in the first place.

So, today, I stand here with my family behind me, with all of you and the future before me to say that we will bring back to America the glorious promises on which this great country was founded. We will be truthful. We will not shy from the truth or bend it or cover it up. From today on we march forward together, hand in hand, a common purpose before us. We must forge a universal American language. We must forge a universal American hope. And we must, above all, forge a presence in this world where we are once again a beacon of hope for all who should happen to look upon us.

Thank you, God bless and God speed. Let's get to work. Thank you. Thank you, America. Good night.

Speeches for the New Millennium

Day 3a: AC's Statement

Day 3: Bad news

Day 2: Who am I, Who are You

Day 1: The World is Dying

Day 1a: Correction

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