Text of Edwards' Speech on May 24

U.S. Sen. John Edwards, speaking to Democratic activists at a "house party" in Manchester, N.H., May 24, 2003:

Thank you all for having me. And thank you all for coming out on a beautiful, rainy Memorial Day weekend. We're glad to be here.

Let me start by just by saying a few words, if I can, just about politics. Because I actually have a really clear view about what I think it's gonna take for us to take the White House back in 2004. I think we're going to have to be willing to take this fight right at George W. Bush in the toughest possible way. I've been all over the country. I've met with Democrats. I've met with independents. I've met with some Republicans. And I'm telling you, people are hungry for a choice. They want a real alternative. And I think we have a responsibility to give them that choice. I can tell you I feel a personal responsibility to give them that choice.

So if I can just start with simple things. This is the choice Americans will get if I'm the Democratic nominee for president. First, they'll have somebody who comes from them. You know, my dad worked in a mill, a textile mill, all his life. My mother's last job was working in the Post Office. I was the first person in my family to be able to go to college, which was a big thing, a really big thing in my family, something my parents were very proud of. And when I got through college, and then I got through law school, I spent almost two decades as a lawyer fighting for the same kind of people that I had grown up with. People like my dad, people that worked in the mill with him.

These are basically the people I had known all my life. And so I, in courtrooms all over North Carolina, represented kids and families just like those I had grown up with against very powerful opposition - usually against big insurance companies or big corporations. And my job was just to give them a chance. You know, to fight their fight, to try to level the playing field a little bit. Just like Washington, D.C., you know, in courtrooms those people are always very well-represented. You know, you never have any problem getting big corporations and insurance companies represented. You move around in Washington, D.C., you can't move without bumping into a bunch of people who are representing them. Well, my job for almost 20 years, was to give the kids and the families that I represented an even shake in courtrooms. And I was proud of what I did.

I think it's a good thing to fight for people who can't fight for themselves. And when I ran for the Senate, it was basically just as extension of what I had done my whole life, to fight for the same people that I had fought for as a lawyer, the people I had grown up with, folks that I thought represented most of America, people just like you. And people who are being betrayed by this president every single day. They are the reason I want to be president. I mean, it has been the cause of my life to fight for working people. It's where I come from.

One of things that will happen - and you all have seen this before, because you have a lot of politicians, a lot of national politicians come through New Hampshire. Sometimes you have people come through who have this very carefully crafted message that some Washington political consultant has come up with. This comes from right here (points to his heart). This is my life. It's where I come from. It's my own family. It's what I spent my whole life doing, first as a lawyer, then as a United States senator. And it is what I will do as president.

You know, if I can be personal about this for a second, people like my father, people like my father, I promise you he has not a single lobbyist in Washington. He's not an insider. The only chance he has is that his president will stand up for him. That his president will have the back bone to fight his fight and will have some ideas and vision about how to make his life better. Well, that's what I'm about.

Now that's compared with the president that we now have, who you all know comes from a completely different background and completely different place. Among other things, his father was president of the United States. I hope we still we believe in America that the son of a mill worker can actually beat the son of a president for the White House. (Applause.) But if you're where I am, and you see what's happening to the country - and you all can see it too, I'm sure - you've got this small group of insiders who are running this country, you know.

They look down on all the rest of us, and they kind of tell us what they think we need to know, you know, when they think we need to know it. They make all those decisions. And if you think for just a minute, what we really have is a government of the insiders, by the insiders, for the insiders. Most Americans are left behind every single day. And I just want to say something about this president, because I keep hearing him talk about this. You all have heard him say it, and you've read it in print, too. The president keeps saying he wants to have a debate about values in 2004. Well, we want that debate. I want to debate with this president about values. Because his values are not the values of mainstream America. They are not the values of the American people.

The values that all of us grew up with, you know, fairness, opportunity, responsibility, hard work. Here's the difference between us and them, the difference between me and George Bush. I value hard work. He values wealth. He wants to make sure the people who have it get to keep it. I want to make sure that everybody has a real chance to do well in this country. That is the fundamental divide between Democrats and Republicans. It is certainly the fundamental divide between George Bush and me.

Do you remember him traveling the country and saying during his campaign that he was going to bring "prosperity to every forgotten corner of America?" (Laughs from audience.) Yeah, well, let's just take a minute to think about - talk about responsibility - to think what he's brought us. Two-point-six million jobs lost. Four and a half trillion dollars lost in the stock market. A five-point-six trillion dollar federal budget surplus gone. We're in deficit spending. And it is so important for us to always remember that it took a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to overcome the deficits created by two Republicans, and then it took a new Republican president a grand total of two years to put us back in deficit. You know, working families have lost over four hundred billion dollars in retirement savings.

One of the reasons I want to be on the stage with George Bush in 2004 is I have a question for the American people: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" I mean really, I was a lawyer for 20 years. This is the easiest case I ever had to argue. (Laughs from audience). We have so much to work with. But we're gonna have to talk about not just what he's doing wrong - that's overwhelming. The question is, How are we going to make it right, how are we going to fix it? Well, here's what I'd do.

First, I would do something to try to give this economy a serious shot in the arm. In the short term, we have to spend some money. We ought to provide help to states and municipalities who have the worst budget crisis they've had since World War II. We ought to help families that are facing increased energy costs. We ought to help businesses put money back into the economy.

We ought to do what the Senate failed to do yesterday. I was there voting and fighting this fight along with Senator Kennedy and others. We ought to expand the availability of unemployment coverage to those who've lost their jobs. They aren't going back to work because there's no jobs - not because they don't want to go back to work. They're trying desperately to go back to work. Well, the president wants to pick and choose the people who get help when they're looking for a job.

We want to make sure the people who've been hurt through no fault of their own and their families are struggling and suffering get the help that they need and that they deserve. None of that is going to work unless over the long haul we actually start operating this government in a responsible way again. The single most important component of that is to stop this tax cut to the top 1 to 2 percent that's scheduled to go into effect in 2004. (Applause.) We could save one and a half trillion dollars over the next 20 years by doing that. But the president wasn't satisfied with that. You know, now we've got a new tax cut with more gimmicks and tricks than anything you have ever seen. They claim it's gonna cost 350 billion dollars.

First of all, it's gonna cost way more than 350 billion dollars. They've got these provisions sunsetting -- this looks like Enron accounting. It is so hard to follow, where they stop, where they start, and they know as a practical matter they're never gonna stop. I've seen some estimates up to 800 billion dollars. I've heard some people even suggest it's another another trillion dollars in tax cuts. Whatever it is, it's too expensive. It's budget busting. it's driving this deficit deeper and deeper, which means our children, our grandchildren are going to be left with responsibility, and it's loaded up for people at the top. You know, what a shock. Here we go again. We've seen this movie, haven't we? And we know what works and what doesn't work. This has never worked. It's not gonna work now.

What would we do? What are the things that we believe in investing in? Well, I serve on the Senate Education Committee, and it almost makes me almost nauseous to ride by that Education Building in Washington and see that big banner going across the top: "No Child Left Behind." You know, this president is leaving millions of kids behind every single day. He's underfunding his own education plan by ten billion dollars this year.

So, you never, by the way, hear him say a word about what we all know is true: We still have two public school systems in America. One for the haves, and one for the have-nots. You live in an affluent community, the odds are that your child may get a pretty good public-school education. You don't, they don't. So what are we going to do about it? Here's what I'd do. First, I would spend money at the national level to pay teachers better.

We need to get good people into the teaching profession and keep the good teachers that we have. Second, I would say to good teachers who we want to go to work in chronically disadvantaged areas, we'll give you bonus and incentive pay, if you're willing to do it. We need to give good teachers a real reason to go to the school where we need them the worst. We ought to say to young people, "If you're starting college, we will pay for your education if you're willing to spend at least five years when you get out in a school in a chronically disadvantaged area." (Applause.)

And the federal government should meet its responsibility to fully fund special education. We could largely eliminate the education funding crisis that you have here in this state if the federal government just met its responsibility. That's not just true in New Hampshire, by the way. It's true all across the country. We've now shifted that responsibility. You've got a federal mandate from Washington for which the money is not being provided so you get stuck. The local, municipal, state governments are all being stuck with this responsibility. Talk about responsibility.

We ought to meet our responsibility. This president's not doing it. We ought to do it. If we had the kind of leadership we should have, we would do it.

We ought to invest in early childhood programs. You know, it's the place where we can have the most impact on the lives of young people. We ought to invest in after-school programs. My wife, Elizabeth, and I have started two after-school programs in North Carolina. When we started the first one, Elizabeth worked over there almost all full time the first few years. I have seen the affect these programs can have on the lives of young people. You know, we had computers and volunteer tutors, and it was free for high school kids, from the time they got out of school until 10 o'clock at night. You know, it would never occur to this president - it's a perfect example of how out of touch he is.

Why in the world, this president would think, would a parent need a place for their child to go in the afternoon? He never had to worry about that. Why would anybody have to worry about that? Well, here's why? Because 40 years ago 70 percent of our families had at least one parent home all the time. Now it's 30 percent. We need to give these kids a place to go. The other thing we ought to be doing: We have half a million young people in America this year who are deciding not to go to college because they don't think they can afford it.

Rising tuition costs have driven them out of the market. They're making life-altering decisions at 17 and 18 years of age because they don't think they can pay for college. Well, I've got an idea, a plan. It's simple. I call it "College for Everyone." It says if you're a young person qualified to be in college, and you're willing to work 10 hours a week, your first year of school, we'll let you go tuition free to a state university or a community college. Every young person in America who wants to go to college ought to have the same chance I had. We're all affected by our own life experiences. I know how important it was for me to go to college to be able to do the things that I've been able to do.

Another thing we ought to be doing. We have a crisis in investor confidence in America. You know, this whole issue of corporate responsibility that you've heard talked about. I'm proposing what I call a Shareholders' and Workers' Bill of Rights. You know, we ought to put some real teeth in the law to make sure that workers and shareholders are being protected.

What I'm proposing would do three things. One, to make sure that what we just saw happen at American Airlines never happens again. For those of you who didn't follow this, basically what happened is that executives at American Airlines were negotiating with the workers to try to keep the company out of bankruptcy. The workers were making huge concessions. They were doing what most good people in this country do. They were doing the right thing. They wanted to keep their company in business. They were wiling to make concessions.

But what they didn't know is while they were making all these big concessions, the people at the top of the company were putting millions and millions of dollars into a trust fund to protect their own pensions. This is not the kind of thing that should happen in America. We should not allow people at the top to protect themselves while they take advantage and monkey around the pensions of working people. It's just wrong. It's fundamentally unfair.

The second thing we ought to do is that over the last 30 years, worker pay has gone up about 10 percent. CEO pay has gone up over three thousand percent during the same period of time. Now I want to make clear, I don't have any objection to a CEO who's running a company and doing a great job - there's nothing wrong with that. That's what we believe in in America. But what souldn't happen is the CEO pay going up by millions and millions of dollars while they value of the company is going down, when the workers are losing the values of their pensions.

That's what shouldn't happen. So, I'm proposing two things in order to deal with this. First, that we say companies are required to tell us everything that the CEO is being paid. You know, the Chicago Bulls never had any problem justifying what they we're paying Michael Jordan. Well, if these companies, publicly held companies, are going to may millions and millions of dollars, we ought to see what CEOs are being paid and why - every piece of it. Second, pay should be tied to performance of the company. So that we can't have the value of the company going down at the same time CEO pay is skyrocketing.

And the last piece of this is to give shareholders and workers a place at the table. ... So that they don't find out that after the fact, in some secret meeting in a board room far away, something they never knew about has happened, happened to their company, happened to their employer, and as a result, happened to their investment and their pension. They ought to be involved in the decision-making process.

We need to help democratize this process. I would say, on all these subjects, that I just talked about, these are values questions. You know, I said earlier that we want a values debate. These are values questions. Because what we as Democrats believe in is fairness, responsibility, hard work, everybody having an opportuinty. Well, that's the fundamental divide between me and George Bush.

This is a debate I want. I want this debate with this president, because, first of all, I will not cede a single vote in America to him. I will not cede a single state. We can compete with this president everywhere in America, because this message is a message the American people need to hear.

Health care. I'm on the Senate health care committee, too. You know, we're in there fighting this battle every day. Some of you mentioned to me earlier that you were very concerned about the health care crisis in America. Actually, in about four or five weeks, I'm going to be laying out in detail my health care plan. I can tell you what the principles are because we've been writing it.

First, it's to make sure that all 9 million children in America who don't have health coverage, to make certain that they all covered, number one.

Number two, to make sure that we have many more choices available to people than they have now. Number three, that we help businesses that aren't able to provide health care to their employees now by giving them tax credits that allow them to make coverage available to their employees. And fourth, and I want you to listen now. When you hear politicians talk about this subject, this is critical, and you sometimes don't hear it. We have to do something about cost. You can't continue to have the cost of health care go like this (motions upward), because they're aren't enough tax dollars in America to deal with that. In order to do it, we're going to have to take on this culture in Washington that says you can't take on the big insurance companies, you can't take on the big HMOs, you can't take on the big pharmaceutical companies. And it is a powerful culture. I'm here to tell you, I deal with it every day.

Senator McCain and Senator Schumer and I, just to give you one example, we had a bill on the floor of the Senate to try to close down the loopholes that are being used by pharmaceutical companies to file one patent after another after another on the same product. You know, they get a patent when they do the research, they develop a new product, they get a patent. Nobody has any problem with that. But then when the patent's about to run out and the generic's gonna come in the market and bring the cost down for everybody, then they get a new patent.

They take the same pill and they put it in a brown bottle instead of a clear bottle. I'm dead serious. This is what's happening. Or they put two lines across the pill instead of one. All for the purpose of keeping the price up and keeping their monopoly. But we tried to fix this. We got a great vote on the floor of the Senate, but we've not been able to get it signed into law. Why? Because this president is married to the pharmaceutical industry. Married to them. And I'd told that story a few weeks ago at another event. When the event was over, this gentleman walked up to me and sort of leaned over. He said, "Senator, if President Bush is married to the pharmaceutical industry, I want you to know he's a bigamist, because he's married to a lot of other special interests at the same time." (Laughs from crowd.) I told him, "I'm gonna start using that."

Actually, I'll say a couple of other things quickly and then start taking questions, because I don't want to keep you too long. But there are at least two other issues that I need to mention. One is the situation in Iraq now, America's role in the world. I think it is so important. I think there is actually a great opportunity in Iraq right now, a great opportunity for us to help rebuild relationships that have been damaged. in the reconstruction of Iraq and in the establishment of this transitional government, the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, all these international institutions should be involved. We should welcome their involvement.

It gives us a chance to re-engage with the international community. On top of all that, I don't think the American people want to pay this tab by themselves. I think they'd like to have help. And it brings legitimacy to what happens in Iraq, particularly in the establishment of the transitional government. You all know this, but I can tell you having been in these parts of the world over the last year and a half or two years, from the Middle East, to Turkey, to Afghanistan and Pakistan, also in Europe, nobody doubts that we're the most powerful nation on Earth.

No one doubts that, you know. And we as Democrats, we want to keep America strong. We will keep America strong. You know, we need to maintain our strength, our economic strength, our military strength, our political strength. But we should use it to lead and promote the things we care about, like democracy and freedom and human rights. But it is absolutely critical that we lead in a way that brings others to us instead of driving them away. (Applause.)

The one thing I'm completely certain of is that - this is not some abstract discussion - every family in America will be safer and more secure in a world where America is looked up to and respected. It's just that simple. We have great opportunities to move in that direction. We need to take advantage of them. (Applause.)

I want to finish with a subject that I've actually spoken to a couple of you about this morning - a subject that's near and dear to my own heart. I hope that at least some of you, and I hope all of you, care about it. I serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee. I see these judges that are coming for life-time appointments to the federal bench from the White House. Some of these judges, they will take your rights away. It is no more complicated than that. And it is so important for us as Democrats to stand up and be strong on this issue.

You know, I grew up in the South. I grew up in the civil-rights movement. I grew up watching people struggle and suffer in the cause of civil rights. We can't go backwards. We must go forwards. And that means we're gonna actually have to have judges that we know will enforce our civil rights laws. It also means, by the way, that this president is dead wrong about the affirmative action program at the University of Michigan. (Applause.)

I filed a brief in the United States Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan's position. I feel a personal responsibility to lift up people who today - not 40 years ago, today - still suffer the effects of discrimination every minute of their lives. We live in a country where African Americans make about half of what white Americans make. We have work to do. And it is not just civil rights at stake. Equal rights are also at stake. A basic issue of equality - a woman's right to choose is in jeopardy every minute this president is in the White House. And you'll never hear him say a word about another fundamental issue of equality: women making 76 cents on the dollar doing the same work men are doing.

How in the world are we going to have true equality in America until women are paid exactly the same way men are paid for doing the same kind of work? (Applause.)

And a subject people in Washington will tell you, "Be careful, don't talk about this. You know, this is not a good idea politically." This is a subject that I believe in deeply. I think it goes to the heart and soul of what makes this country great. And as long as I am a candidate for president, and when I am president, I will continue to champion this cause.
We cannot, in an effort to protect ourselves, in an effort to fight a war on terrorism, allow people like John Ashcroft to take away our rights, our freedoms (applause).

Those things go to the heart and soul of what makes this country great. We cannot let them change the fabric of America, which is what this is about.

Now, you probably can tell. I'm doing this many hours a day, seven days a week. I have so much energy and passion for this cause, and it is such an important cause. We've learned over the last couple of weeks that a front group called the Americans for Job Security are about to put up billboard here in New Hampshire and in Iowa and may run television ads - they'd like to run television ads, I think they're trying to figure out if they're able to - attacking me.

This is a group that is run by Dave Carney, who is a Republican activist apparently here in New Hampshire. He has ties to the Bush White House. He himself, I think, has some experience in the Bush White House. But the bottom line is: It's a front group, and they are on attack. They've announced that they're gonna attack me in Iowa and in New Hampshire. Well here's what I have to say to them: Bring it on. (Laughter. Applause.)

Because I am going to stand up for the same people I have stood up for my whole life. This is not a fight for me. This campaign is not about me. This is a fight for regular Americans. It is a fight for the future of this country. And there is no less at stake than the direction of America.

So the reasons that I am here today is to ask for your help in this campaign. For those of you who haven't committed, who haven't decided who you're gonna be for, join me in this cause because it is such an important cause. If this message is heard, not just here in New Hampshire, but all across America, there is one thing i am certain of: In 2004, we will have a new president in the White House. (Applause.)