They also depend on good people in positions of leadership doing nothing. Let the forces of political darkness who have been ripping apart the fabric of American society for two decades now henceforth to be on notice. Your free pass is over. All Americans should be assured that the First Amendment will stay live and well as long as I am president. People may articulate whatever thoughts they see fit to have associated with their names and their honor. Like Voltaire, I will defend to the death their right to do so. But the bullies and the liars and the hypocrites pursuing the politics of personal destruction should be advised in the clearest terms. And the cowards who bring out the worst of us, dragging us down into their gutters, smearing good Americans to prevail in policy arguments they could never hope to win on the merits, should take notice. Your words will no longer go unanswered, and your attacks will never again be met by silence, quiet chagrin or even seething unexpressed anger. You should feel free to disagree with this government. I hope you will. Your well-intentioned alternative ideas are welcome, and your opposition to our initiatives will serve to keep us sharp and thoughtful in what we do. But if you cross the line – if you attack a president by branding his underage daughter as physically ugly on your national hate radio syndicate, if you smear a witness with personal lies because she tells the truth about a Supreme Court nominee’s pornography obsession, if you challenge the patriotism of those who’ve served while you have hidden from danger, if you impeach a president for the lesser personal failings than the ones you are simultaneously committing yourselves – be advised that henceforth you will be called out and aggressively labeled for what you are. People may accuse my administration of many things, but I warn you that we will not be remembered as the timid patsies you’ve grown used to berating with impunity.
I am honored and flattered to have been chosen by you to lead this great country, and lead is what I intend to do. I will bring Americans home from a tragic war in Iraq and repair, to the best of our ability, the damage done there. I will fulfill the promises made to a forgotten Afghanistan, where real and completely neglected American national security concerns really are at stake. I will demand that Congress give all Americans the national healthcare guarantees they deserve, just as are found in every other industrialized democracy in the world, and not a few developing countries infinitely poorer than us as well. I will return fiscal sanity to our national ledger, restoring a fair tax structure of equitably shared burden and ending corrupt process of corporate welfare that has taken us to the edge of insolvency. I will bring the powers of government to bear on finally rescuing New Orleans, and I will deliver FEMA and every other agency across the American government out from the hands of political hacks and back into the control of competent professionals.
I will apologize to our neighbors on this planet, and not only for the arrogance of our foreign policy which, far too often, has been as egregious as it has been unwarranted. I know many Americans believe this country should never apologize for any of its behaviors. But that is as indecorous and boorish a trait of nations as it is of individuals. A grown-up and mature America can be proud of its achievements and contributions while also admitting its failings. Indeed, our best chance for a future filled with more of the former and less of the latter is the ability to distinguish between the two and the courage to admit those distinctions.
As a first sign of a newly mature America, let me make clear that no longer will five percent of the world’s population generate twenty-five percent of its greenhouse gases while simultaneously actively blocking others from solving a mutual, planetary problem. And to those with whom we share this world I want to say, right here, right now, that this country is profoundly sorry for the many and flagrant transgressions we’ve indulged in these last years. We were afraid and we were foolish. We took your good will and we abused it. We now ask your forgiveness, and we ask your willingness to join us – as fully equal partners – in moving forward to repair the damage done and proactively creating a better world for all. In particular, America from this point forward will meet and exceed the commitments we have made to the UN Millennium Development Goals to assist those less fortunate than us. We will meet the obligations we have made to every treaty we have signed, and we will replace a high-handed arrogance, bullying and unilateralism at the United Nations and other institutions with a true spirit of cooperation, mutual respect and shared responsibility.
And we will go much further. Let me be clear, especially for those who by force of habit and lack of consequence will inevitably attempt in the coming days and weeks and years to obfuscate and lie: I will never compromise American security. There are and may always be threats to free and peaceful nations, and we must be fully prepared to rebuff them, and so we will. But there are other dangers, as well. There is the danger that we will over-react, there is the danger that we will create enemies where they don’t otherwise exist, there is the danger that the profits of military procurement will drive our defense policy instead of the other way around, and there is the danger that we will neglect other forms of security and well-being – education, health, infrastructure and more – by succumbing to fears concerning external threats and draining our resources on unnecessary military expenditures.
Right now, America has no national enemy in the entire world. Not China, not Russia, not even North Korea. And yet the amount that we spend on the military in this country vastly exceeds that which is spent by every other country in the world – nearly 200 of them in total – combined. Surely, that is too much. Surely, what was once mere paranoia now flirts with outright insanity when it can be said of any country that it has no national enemies, that it spends more on security than all of the rest of the entire world combined, and yet that it simultaneously denies healthcare to its children because it claims such extravagances cannot be afforded. Dwight David Eisenhower, a five-star general, liberator of Western Europe, supreme commander of NATO, conservative Republican and former president – a man who therefore knew about as much as anybody ever will about the military, about national security, about war and about international relations – left us a warning about this very danger. Even at the height of the Cold War, Eisenhower saw looming large the internal threat of a military-industrial complex – a nexus of profits and politics and war – that would have a mind of its own, that would take control of our government, that could plunge us into unnecessary wars, and that at the very least would remove food from the mouths of our children, books from our schools, and medicines from our bedsides. Fifty years have come and gone since Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation. It is five decades past the time that we should have heeded his wise advice, but it is not too late to start, and I pledge that this new administration will do so now.
I will also call upon Congress and the nation to get serious about education at all levels, funding it fairly and generously, and spending unprecedented resources to send unprecedented numbers of students to college at low cost, just as America once did in wiser times. I will place the resources of the federal government behind a life-and-death effort to create alternative sources of energy – because that is truly what is at stake – just as America once pushed itself strenuously to defeat totalitarianism or to go to the moon. We will invigorate our economy with this energy project, with a national campaign to develop stem-cell solutions to killer diseases, and with a commitment to not only restoring our badly sagging infrastructure but also to enhancing it with 21st century technologies other countries have already adopted ahead of us. And while we are doing this, we will commit ourselves to returning to and surpassing the principles of economic justice at home and abroad which once created a robust middle class in this country, as well as hope for those struggling with less.
When I was a young man and America was, it seems to me, so much younger a country, much of the talk of our national political dialogue was about lifting people out of poverty. By the time I myself served in an administration, I’m ashamed to say that we had forgotten the poor altogether, and the supposed party of the people that I helped lead at the time spent its energies pandering to the middle class, and too often only pretending to do even that. By the time the other party came to power following us, even the middle class was now forgotten by those who spoke the rhetoric of national unity, but divided us every way imaginable, at every opportunity, for purposes of crass political gain and economic plunder of our commonweal. But let us today be as clear as we can be on this subject: We are all in this together, we Americans. If our government is failing the least affluent of us, it is failing all of us. If it is serving only the richest amongst us, it is not serving any of us. In the last three decades our country has returned to the Gilded Age of the 19th century, with yawning canyons opened up between an absurdly wealthy minority whose riches have been magnified enormously, and the rest of the country, who have stood still economically for more than a generation. This is inexcusable in the richest country in the world, and it will not be excused any longer. We must return to our ethical foundations and recall our national unity, we must reject a culture of greed which has corroded our moral fiber for decades now, and we must roll up our sleeves again and get back to work at guaranteeing prosperity and opportunity for all Americans, not just the privileged few. Corporations must understand that their existence is at base a licensed societal privilege, granted in return for demonstrated decency and the same restraints on self-serving behavior the rest of us apply every day. Americans – and others outside our borders equally – are workers and we are consumers, but we are humans first, and we demand to be treated with the requisite dignity and respect attendant to that status.
It is equally crucial that we become serious about political reform in this country. A senior figure in the Republican Party once said that "America has the best Congress money can buy", and he was uncomfortably accurate in claiming so. This is shameful for a country which likes to be seen as the world’s greatest democracy, and it is grossly expensive in every sense of the word. The link between money and politics must be broken forever. I will ask Congress – and you hearing me today should demand of it – that we adopt fully publicly-funded election campaigns as the only form permissible across the country, and that we make voting upon any legislation in which any legislator has any personal interest whatsoever – including campaign contributions – a punishable crime. We also need to amend our Constitution to finally remove the Electoral College from our presidential election process, so that never again can the democratic will of the people be denied, and we need as well to end the stranglehold of two parties on our political process. It is obscene and counterproductive that not one other party has even a single seat’s worth of representation in a Congress of 535 people. Adopting a proportional representation electoral system, or even a hybrid that includes proportional representation, will give voice to other ideas than those of two parties, and will inject needed vigor and health into our political dialogue. Equally crucial to maintaining our democracy, the corporate monopolies over our communication channels must be broken, and the fairness doctrine restored and expanded.
There is so much more to do, but this is a beginning, and represents an enormously challenging agenda of restoration and progress without yet contemplating our many other needs and shared aspirations. But we can do these things. We’ve done harder things in our past. Yet Americans should not lack clarity that it will take the efforts of all of us to make it happen. So much of our dream will be stillborn if we lack the effort and the will to bring it alive. So much of it – especially the political reforms that are the key to opening so many other doors – will be resisted by those who’ve long enriched themselves at the public trough, while we were looking the other way. But all of it is eminently possible if we will it.
I have stood by in recent decades watching the unraveling of something beautiful, destroyed by the worst amongst us, acting for the basest of motives. America was never a perfect country, but we were a global model for many of our achievements, and we should have been, for we had truly achieved much. It was therefore with surprise and grief that I watched as we turned our forward motion into a backward regression, and one which went further than imaginable. At first I thought that the effort, awful as that was, was only to unravel the last decades of our national history, destroying the social safety net, the civil rights, women’s rights, environmental consciousness and labor peace we had built at such great cost and struggle. But then I saw that it went further, and there has also been a destruction of the principles of good governance we adopted a hundred years ago, returning our country to the cronyism and incompetence and government-for-hire of the nineteenth century. As time went on it was clear that the regression went even further back still, deeply assaulting the very notions of constitutional government, democracy and separation of church and state, and thus casting us back into the Dark Ages of monarchy, superstition and religious wars which our Founders so bravely fought to replace with something so much better. But even a regression of centuries does not do justice to the damage that has been done. As elemental foundations of Western Civilization such as the right to habeas corpus and limited governmental power have been unceremoniously shredded these last years, I have watched as we have stepped even further back in time, into the gray mists of eleventh century feudal England. Astonishingly, we have traveled backwards as a society this last generation, not just years or decades, and not even centuries, but rather a full millennium.
So many people have given so much – often including their lives – so that these liberties and achievements of a thousand years could be realized for the benefit of all of us. It is shameful enough that we have not sacrificed of ourselves to add to this exalted list. But it is infinitely worse still that we have unraveled the gifts given to us as such expense, foolishly neglecting their value. Let there be no mistake: An America with eleventh century values will not last long in the twenty-first century. History has been passing this great nation rapidly by these last decades, not least because of the speed at which we’ve been traveling in the other direction. I have many interests and passions as a person and as a president, but I can assure you that national suicide is not one of them. If there was a way that I could, I would say thank you today to every person who has ever sacrificed to make the lives of today’s generation safer, easier, happier and better. I cannot, but what I can do instead is to honor those contributions by leading this country in their preservation and their enhancement, adding our share to these great works for the benefit of those who come after us. The least we can do to preserve our great fortune as the inheritors of Magna Carta, the Constitution, the New Deal and more is to keep them intact. If we’re better than just that, we will also seek to deserve that good fortune as well, by adding our own contributions, borne of our own sacrifices.
Someone once said that people get the government they deserve. Today, I call on Americans to deserve more. I call on Americans to invest more. I call on each of us to recognize that the responsibility for good governance can never be delegated, any more than a parent who abdicates child-rearing duties has any right to expect a mature, responsible and happy adult to emerge twenty years later.
The forces of darkness in American society never fail to run down our government and never fail to diminish those who serve in it. Let us leave aside that this government they deride is the same one which defeated fascism and communism, which took humankind to the moon, which sent a generation of former GIs to college, and which brought Social Security and Medicare benefits to countless seniors in place of the abbreviated retirement years full of poverty and ill health they could otherwise have expected. And let us leave aside, also, the fact that when these same people who deride our government have gotten control of it, they have set new records for incompetence, cronyism, corruption, arrogance, mismanagement and failure. These are crimes egregious enough, but even if we forget all of that for a moment, remember this: We live in a democracy. When these agents of our moral decline berate the government you chose, they berate you. And so they have continually in our time, mocking, patronizing and degrading you with their cheap tactics of division, diversion and hate-mongering. You may think they care about racial strife or about hordes of immigrant invaders or about every aspect of everyone’s sexuality, but they don’t. Rather, they care that you not care about what is truly important, and they insult you with their patronizing diversions.
Government is not the answer to all problems any more than the market or any other mechanism is. But government can do incredible things. And government is the product of our choices and our collective will. I call upon all Americans, beginning today, to invest the time and energy necessary to make our government the best we can make it. As John Kennedy once reminded us, each of us needs to ask what we can do for our country, and we can begin that process by spending a few hours every week turning off our televisions and educating ourselves about our public issues, so that never again can those with sinister intentions prey upon a nation weak with indolence and vulnerable in its ignorance.
There is much greatness in our country and in our history and in our bones. There are tremendous challenges that demand from us the creativity and courage and determination we’ve generated in the past to leap equally daunting hurdles.
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