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John Edwards
Member, U.S. Senate (D-NC); Democratic Candidate for President
More than 70 years ago, in the heat of the 1932 campaign, Franklin Roosevelt came before The Commonwealth Club and delivered one of the greatest campaign speeches in that century. Looking out upon a nation struggling and suffering with economic and political crisis, FDR said, "Failure is not an American habit; and in the strength of great hope we must all shoulder our common load."
The man he was running against, Herbert Hoover, actually had a worse job record than George W. Bush - although I know that's hard to believe. The country had endured three long years of disastrous Republican rule, but FDR still looked out at America with a smile, not a scowl. He didn't scare people, and he didn't feed their fears. He did not tell his fellow Democrats that Hoover's errors were their fault, and that the Depression could have been avoided if they had just gotten in Hoover's face. He told the country to disdain fear. He inspired hope and optimism, and he defined our party and our country. FDR knew how to make America work again, how to tap into this country's ingenuity and to build a future filled with promise and possibilities.
We need to offer the American people more than the crass politics of greed - which we see now - and more than the current politics of rage. We need to offer them a new politics of possibility. Elections are about the future. Elections are a contest of ideas. Whether it's the New Deal or a new drive to save the middle class in America and our way of life, ideas and principles matter.
Once again, our country is struggling, and we have a president completely out of touch with the American people. George Bush - I wish he would spend one day doing what I do every day: having town hall meetings, listening to voters, hearing about problems people face, instead of doing what he does, which is lead a sheltered life where he goes to ticketed events - regular people don't come to the events; you have to write a big campaign check to get in. He needs to hear what's going on in America.
When President Bush ran for office, he promised to change the tone in Washington. But the tone is more bitter and more partisan than ever. He promised to reach out to every American, no matter where they came from, but he's left everybody behind except his friends, and he's completely forgotten the working middle class. He promised he'd manage the people's money, and he's turned a $5 trillion surplus into a $5 trillion deficit in three years. He's held secret meetings with lobbyists. He's hiding documents that don't belong to him; they belong to the American people. Most of all, he's just let the American people down. He promised humility with respect to foreign policy, and we've gotten instead arrogance and disrespect. He promised he'd restore honor and integrity to the White House, but all he did was sell access to the White House to the highest bidder.
We should be angry at George Bush for what he's done to us, to our country, our values, our way of life. We know what we're running against - now we have to tell America what kind of future we're running toward. To do that, we need a leader - as was Franklin Roosevelt, as was John Kennedy - who can bring people together. We need a leader who will reach out and lift up the middle class. We need a leader who can reach out to more than just the party faithful, but to every American in every region of the country. We need a leader who has not spent their entire life in politics and a leader who knows what your life is like and what the lives of most Americans are like. And we need a leader who will say, once and for all, we're going to take this "for sale" sign off the White House and put up a sign that says, "for all the people."
Our democracy and our way of life is at risk. What's going on in Washington right now isn't politics as usual; it is politics at its worst. The politicians are so busy yelling at each other that they don't hear the cries of the American people for help. The pundits are so busy scoring the fight, they fail to notice there are millions in this country who are struggling, who want solutions, real answers, to the problems they face.
For three years, we've had a president who's forgotten the problems he promised to solve. But this election is about more than ending the Bush presidency; it's about a new beginning for our country, for the working middle class, for our schools, for health care and our kids - 12 million of them who don't have health care coverage. A new beginning for real and lasting reform in Washington, so the American people have control of their own government and own democracy again. And a new beginning for America's role in the world.
The American people know their best days are in front of them. They need a president who understands that, who shares their optimistic vision for their country.
I have grown up in the shining light of America. What an extraordinary thing that we live in a country where the grandson of a sharecropper, the son of a mill worker, can be a U.S. senator running for president of the United States. This is the very dream that we believe in in America. My life has been blessed with extraordinary success. I've been very lucky; my story, though, should not be an exception. That opportunity should be available to every single American, every child in America today.
Individual families, individual Americans, believe in themselves and believe in their country. This is what I saw for almost 20 years when I stood shoulder to shoulder with these kinds of families in their fights against corporate interests, in courtrooms, against armies of lawyers. I'm proud of what I was able to do for those families. The people that I represented for almost 20 years are just exactly like the people I see every single day on the campaign trail. They face the same problems, the same struggles, and they have exactly the same hope and optimism about their future. But that courage and ability to dream in the face of so much hardship is, in fact, the enduring soul of America.
If we want to change America, then we have to change the way Washington works every single day. We've got to show the American people that we work for them. We want no part of this cycle of campaign cash and corporate giveaways. I am proud to be the only presidential candidate who has never taken a dime from PACs or Washington lobbyists, and I want to ban those lobbyist donations for good. We don't want these people walking the halls of Congress. The very people they are lobbying for, they're holding fundraisers for them that night. There's no way for our democracy to work the way it's supposed to work when that happens; the interests of most Americans get left behind. I also want to stop the revolving door that exists in Washington between lobbyists' shops and top government jobs. We ought to demand full disclosure from lobbyists. And we ought to put an end to the war profiteering that's going on in Iraq now. Every day we get a new piece of information about some company - in today's news, Halliburton - making millions, in some cases billions, of dollars from taxpayer funds in profiteering in Iraq.
There's an auction going on in Washington today. They're selling out and selling off our country piece-by-piece. If we give this crowd four more years of unchecked power, they will change America forever. Our challenge is to rescue our democracy from that crowd of insiders that are running our country now and to give it back to the American people.
It's been a time-honored tradition for the Democratic Party to do everything we can do to help working Americans, so they can build a better life for themselves, their families, their kids. In the last 20 years, we have seen a sea change in America. Working middle-class families, 20 years ago, were saving 10-15 percent of their income; they had a nest egg, some financial security. Today, most families are not saving; they are going into debt, teetering on the edge. They are one health care problem, one layoff, one financial problem from disaster, from bankruptcy. If you are a child in a middle-class family this decade, it is more likely that your parents will file for bankruptcy than they'll file for divorce.
Take these middle-class families facing financial insecurity, and along comes George Bush to make their lives worse. You'll hear all the other Democratic presidential candidates say they are against George Bush's tax cuts for the rich. So am I. But there is something bigger and more radical going on with our country. This president is in the process of shifting the entire tax burden in America from wealth and the wealthy to work and the middle class. He wants to get rid of things like the capital gains tax, the dividends tax, the estate tax, all taxes on either income on wealth or wealth. It's an enormous mistake, and it undermines our economy and our democratic way of life. Look at when we've had real, sustained economic growth in America in the last 50 years: right after WW II up to about 1970, when the middle class was becoming stronger and expanding; the same thing happened in the last few years of the Clinton administration. It's the middle class that's the driving force in this economy.
Over the last century, century and a half, around the world, countries losing their democracy are countries where the middle class shrank, became weaker, where they became a country of the rich and everybody else. This is what we're talking about. We can't say to a nurse's aide who's working two jobs and raising two kids by herself that we're going to raise her taxes by $1,400. Think about what that $1,400 can do for her. She can buy clothes for her kids. She can pay for her mortgage.
We hear a lot about which candidate for the Democratic Party can best engage the partisans for the election of 2004. Politically engaged citizens are great Americans, they should be lifted up and applauded for what they do, but quiet families - they're great Americans, too. These are the people who are struggling to put food on their table each night. These are the people who are going to churches and synagogues and mosques every week, wondering whether their hard work still means something in their country. If some of us don't hear their voices, then maybe it's because we're not listening.
These families don't think politicians talk about their values too much. They think politicians live by their values too little. They think George Bush has betrayed the values that made our country what it is. Hard work, responsibility and trust are not just words; America is looking for a leader who is true to those values, who was raised with them, who's lived their whole life by them, and who will lead this country with them. We should not cede this values debate to George Bush. Some in my party would like to run away from this debate. They want to say to Americans: We want to change the subject. You can't tell voters what to believe or what to consider. Voters get to decide what they're going to consider. And values matter in most of America. The voters in America, they're going to consider everything. They're going to consider issues like education and health care and jobs; they're also going to consider cultural issues.
People will allow you to disagree with them, even if you disagree with them completely, as long as you treat them with respect and listen to what they have to say. Where I come from, voters are looking for answers, not attitude. They're tired of Democrats stopping in for a visit and saying, "Well, we know what's best for you." Voters don't want be looked down on, and they aren't looking for a handout. They want you to listen to their concerns, and to give them a chance to do what they're capable of doing.
The president says he wants to have a values debate in 2004. We ought to give him exactly what he's asking for. And here's why: This president's values are not the values of the American people. Halliburton got a $1 billion no-bid contract. These are the president's friends, his supporters. Those people are getting taxpayer money while we have 12 million children in America with no health care coverage. This administration values wealth over work. They believe in special interests over the interests of most Americans. They believe in secret meetings - like Dick Cheney and the lobbyists for the energy industry setting our energy policy behind closed doors. They value the privileged few over everybody else.
We're mad at George Bush, and we ought to be mad at him for what he's done to our country, our values, and what he's done to our way of life. But anger will not change America; our actions will change America.
