Obama’s Remarks at Montana Democratic Dinner

Well it is great to be here in Butte, America and I’m looking forward to campaigning in Montana over the next few months. I know that some folks have been saying that for some reason, these caucus states out West don’t really count all that much in this process. Well I say tell that to the record number of Americans who turned out for us in Idaho, and Wyoming, and Utah, and Colorado, and I’ve got a feeling that we’ll see the same kind of enthusiasm and excitement about the democratic process from the good people of Montana.

We are now entering the second spring of this campaign. We’ve been at this so long, babies who were born the day I announced my candidacy are walking and talking.

But the reason this is no ordinary election is because this is no ordinary time for America.

We have more than 150,000 Americans in the middle of two wars – brave men and women on their second or third or fourth tour of duty in Iraq; a place where we’re spending $400 million a day to help a government that refuses to help itself; a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged.

At home, we have millions of Americans who stay awake at night wondering if next week’s paycheck will cover next month’s bills – who wonder why two jobs or even three jobs aren’t enough to put your kids through college anymore, or pay for health care, or fill up your gas tank; who don’t know if their pension will be there when they retire or if their job will disappear along with 232,000 we’ve lost this year; who don’t understand why they’re putting a For Sale sign up in front of their house while the CEOs of the company that tricked them into risky loans are walking away with $20 million.

Most of all, we’ve lost faith that our leaders can or will do anything about this. For too long, too many in Washington have been either out of touch or out for their own survival. They cling to the policies of the past or a tired politics that values scoring points against your opponents over solving problems for the people who sent you to Washington – a politics that exploits our differences instead of focusing on the hopes and values we share as a nation.

No one embodies this failed leadership more than the man whose name won’t be on the ballot this November for the first time in eight years – George W. Bush. He ran as a uniter but divided like no other President. He promised a humble foreign policy but led with an arrogance that destroyed generations of good will and good standing with the rest of the world. He promised compassion and conservatism but gave us eight years of policies that were neither – policies that have led to record debt and greater inequality than at any time since the Great Depression. So I don’t know anyone who’ll be shedding all that many tears when George Bush finally takes that road back to Crawford in January.

But in this election, we have to ask ourselves, what road will we take? What’s next for America? What kind of future do we want for our children and our grandchildren?

That’s what’s at stake here. That’s why not only Democrats, but Independents and Republicans have turned out in record numbers all across the country. It’s because we know that this moment of great challenge is also a moment of great opportunity. We know that this election is our chance to start over; to finally come together and solve the problems we’ve been talking about for decades; to put America on a different path – a better path.

The Republicans running for President could’ve offered this path, but their primary became nothing more than a contest to see who was best qualified to run for George Bush’s third term. John McCain won that contest, and now he’s offering four more years of the very same policies that failed us for the last eight.

But we already know where that road leads. We’ve been there before. And at this moment of challenge and opportunity, we can’t afford to go back.

We can’t afford four more years of the kind of judgment that led us to invade a country based on faulty intelligence and a misunderstanding of the real threats that we face.

We can’t afford four more years of a foreign policy that asks our troops to risk their lives in a country that won’t take responsibility for its own future; where we’re mired in a war that isolates us from the world and distracts us from the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

We can’t afford four more years of an economic policy that offers just one solution to every problem under the sun – tax breaks for the biggest corporations and the wealthiest few who didn’t need them and weren’t even asking for them. That’s not a policy, it’s a dogma, a tired and cynical philosophy that says there’s nothing this nation can do or should do for workers without health care, or children in crumbling schools, or families who are losing their homes, so we should just hand out a few tax breaks and wish everyone the best of luck.

George Bush called it the Ownership Society. But what it really means is that you’re on your own. If your premiums or your tuition is rising faster than you can afford, you’re on your own. If the factory you’ve worked at for thirty years closes its doors and sends your job overseas, tough luck. If you’re a child born into poverty, you’ll just have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone. If you’ve got the money to hire a Washington lobbyist, you’ll get the help you need. If you’re an insurance company or an oil company looking to veto universal health care or investments in renewable energy, you’ll get your wish. Meanwhile, everyone else can just fend for themselves.

Well, the results are in. Crushing job losses. Record gas and health care bills. Stagnant wages. And here’s the most important and telling point – the pain is trickling up. The notion that Wall Street could rig the system against ordinary Americans and somehow never pay the price has been proven wrong. The sub-prime pirates, who lined their own pockets at the expense of millions of homeowners, have taken our economy into a tailspin.

This is the Washington we’ve come to know, but this is not what Washington has to be. This is not the America we believe in.

We believe that in this country, we rise or fall as one people – as one nation.

We believe that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street is struggling. We know that when there is a child in Bismarck who cannot read or a young woman in Boston who cannot afford college, we are all poorer as a nation. We understand that we have a responsibility to the communities with empty streets and the workers who’ve watched their jobs disappear – because their future is our future; because their prosperity is America’s prosperity.

We are here because we believe in a fundamental ideal that has always been at the heart of this nation’s progress – that I am my brother’s keeper; that I am my sister’s keeper; that out of many, we are one.

We know that government cannot solve all of our problems, and we don’t expect it to. We don’t want our tax dollars wasted on programs that don’t work or perks for special interests who don’t work for us. We understand that we cannot stop every job from going overseas or build a wall around our economy, and we know that we shouldn’t.

But that is not an excuse to spend another four years doing nothing. We can’t afford to give John McCain the chance to carry on George Bush’s can’t-do, won’t-do, won’t-even-try style of politics. We are a better country than that.

We’re the nation that built the largest middle-class in history by giving the Greatest Generation – including my grandfather – the chance to go to college on the GI Bill and buy a home with an FHA loan. We provided a dignified retirement with Social Security and the chance for workers to organize, and unionize, and bargain for a better living.

We’re the nation that’s pushed the boundaries of progress and innovation by laying railroad tracks across a continent; by investing in the promise of the Internet; by fueling the discovery of the greatest medical breakthroughs in history.

We’re the nation that’s led the world not just by the might of our military, but by the strength of our diplomacy and the power of our ideals; by talking not just to our friends, but to our enemies; by defeating the ills of communism with the goodness of democracy; by rebuilding war-torn societies and sending Peace Corps volunteers to the forgotten corners of the world.

That’s who we are as a nation. That’s the America we believe in. And that’s the America we can be again.

In this election, the other side has chosen to run as the party of yesterday. That’s why we have to be the party of tomorrow. We know our ideas are better. We know our policies are what America needs right now. And that’s why no matter how long or heated this primary contest gets, I believe that either Senator Clinton or I would do a far better job of leading this country over the next four years than John McCain.

But I also believe that if we truly hope to meet the challenges of our time, our party must offer not just new ideas, but new leadership. We can’t just bring new policies to Washington, we have to bring a new kind of politics to Washington.

We have to be the party that says we’re not going to take money from lobbyists. Instead, we’re going to take them on, because we will not allow their money or influence to drown out the voices of working Americans anymore.

We have to be the party that restores people’s faith that their leaders say what they mean and mean what they say; that they aren’t just telling us what we want to hear, but what we need to hear about the challenges we face.

We have to be the party that rallies not just Democrats, but Independents and Republicans to a common purpose. I don’t want to be the President of just Blue States or Red States, I want to be the President of the United States of America. That’s how we’ll change this country.

I believe we can tell the special interests that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I’ve taken on the lobbyists in Illinois and in Washington, and I’ve won. I’m the only one in this race who doesn’t take their money, so when I’m President, I won’t be answering to them, I’ll be answering to you – the American people.

I believe we can bring Democrats and Republicans together to finally make health care affordable and available to every American. That’s how I expanded health care to 150,000 children and parents in Illinois. That’s how we’ll cut your premiums, stop insurance companies from denying you coverage, and give you the same kind of health care that Members of Congress give themselves.

I believe we can stop giving billions in tax breaks to people who don’t need them and didn’t ask for them and start giving them to people who do – working families, and seniors, and homeowners who are struggling in this economy. And while we’re at it, we can take away those tax breaks to companies who ship our jobs overseas and give them to companies who create good jobs right here in America.

I believe that five million of those new jobs can come from investing in alternate sources of energy like wind power, and solar power, and biofuels that can also end our dependence on Mideast oil, bring down the price of our gasoline, and give our children a planet that’s clean and safe.

I believe that to help our workers compete for good jobs with anyone in the world, we can guarantee every child a world-class education. We can stop talking about how great our teachers are and start rewarding them for their greatness, with better pay, and more support. And we can finally make college affordable by telling our young people that we’ll help pay for your tuition if you’ll help serve your community after college.

And I believe that the United States of America can remain the last, best hope of Earth. We can end this war in Iraq, win this war in Afghanistan, rebuild our alliances, and restore our moral standing by leading the world against the common threats of the 21st century – terrorism and nuclear weapons; poverty and climate change; genocide and disease.

We can do this as a country. It won’t be easy. It won’t happen overnight. And it’ll take more than one election or one president. The change we need will take an entire nation that’s ready to work for it, and fight for it, and most of all, believe in it.

Because real change always comes from the bottom up. That’s why I’m so proud of the campaign we have run – a campaign where millions of Americans, working door-to-door, neighbor-to-neighbor, are already changing this country. More than one point three million contributors, with an average donation of just $100. That is what change looks like. That’s why I have such hope.

But we also know the obstacles that stand in our way. We know that from now until November, the status quo will fight back with the same old politics that seeks to divide us by race and region; gender and party; the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon; the kind that speaks to our fears instead of our hopes.

We can choose to listen to all this. We can allow it to distract us from talking about jobs, or health care, or Iraq for yet another year and another election. Or this time, we can choose to end it.

I love this country not because it’s perfect, but because we’ve always been able to move it closer to perfection. Because through revolution and slavery; war and depression; great battles for civil rights and women’s rights and worker’s rights, generations of Americans have shown their love of country by struggling and sacrificing and risking their lives to bring us that much closer to our founding promise. And as long as I live, I will never forget that I am only standing here because they did.

This is a country where my grandfather signed up to defend after Pearl Harbor and my grandmother sacrificed on a bomber assembly line – a country that thanked this small-town Kansas couple with a college education and a chance to raise my mother in a home of their own.

It’s a country where the letters and prayers of my father were answered – a young Kenyan who wanted nothing more than the chance to study in a magical place called America.

It’s a country where the improbable love of my parents was actually possible; where my mother could raise me without much money but still send me to the best schools in the nation; a country where I’ve seen hope triumph in neighborhoods that were devastated by joblessness and poverty; where I’ve seen ordinary Americans find justice in a courtroom; where I’ve seen progress made for working families who need leaders who are willing to stand up and fight for them.

That is the country I love. That is the promise of America. And in this election, if we can shed our cynicism and our doubts and our fears; if we remember that we rise or fall as one people, and that we can meet any challenge that comes our way if we meet it together, then I believe that this generation will do its part to perfect our union and keep our promise alive in the twenty-first century. Good night, God Bless, and as they say here in Butte, “tap ‘er light.”