MR. JOHN SHATTUCK: Good evening, I’m John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation and we’re going to introduce very briefly Senator Kennedy who will … But we will wait for one moment, if you could, Senator, we have a few technical challenges. But I would like to have everyone join me in welcoming to the podium one of the founding fathers of the Kennedy Library Foundation who also served with great distinction as Chair of the Democratic National Committee and as Chief of Staff of the Senior Senator from Massachusetts from whom you will hear in a moment, our own wise and tireless chairman, Paul Kirk. Paul? (applause)
MR. PAUL KIRK: Thank you very much, John. Good evening all. Thank you to our loyal and generous sponsors who make these forums possible. Thank you as well to good friend Tom Oliphant for his ever-thoughtful and incisive commentary as a prize winning-columnist for the Boston Globe and as a frequent guest on the Jim Lehrer News Hour. And particularly this evening, Tom, for your participation again in advancing political discourse here at the Kennedy Library. On behalf of our board of directors, I offer my own welcome and salute to Senator John Kerry and Teresa for the valiant and honorable battle they waged for the Presidency of the United States this past year. (applause)
It’s my honor this evening to present by telephone Senator Kennedy, who as you know, was truly an impact player in the Kerry for President Campaign. And, of course, you might ask, “So when isn’t Senator Kennedy an impact player?” And here in this room, we should say what would we do without him? And we can say that not only here, but we in this Commonwealth and we as Americans. Even his political adversaries marvel at Senator Kennedy’s passion for the value of politics and his practice of the politics of values day after day, year in and year out. And those who look beyond the buzz word of political values see the real meaning of those words in his vital, courageous, though sometimes lonely voice, on issues of foreign policy. His innate sense of fairness and unflinching resolve in the continuing fight for social and economic justice here at home and at his uncommon skill at moving seemingly intractable legislative conflict toward a common ground without ever compromising his own principles and ideals.
In an age when it’s fashionable to be cynical about politics and politicians, it would be easy to take for granted political heroes who live among us and mean so much to our lives. But not here. Not at the nation’s memorial to John Kennedy. And so as we gather to honor Senator John Kerry with the Distinguished American Award of the Kennedy Library Foundation, let us also say thank you to his colleague, a public servant whose giant heart and strength of character have combined every ounce of mental and moral energy in a lifetime of countless and tireless unselfish service to others. Some have called him the Lion in Winter, but for us he is our Senator for all seasons. If you can hear me, Senator, and if you can hear this audience, they would like to welcome you and salute a special friend, Senator Ted Kennedy. (applause)
SENATOR TED KENNEDY: Thank you so much, Paul, for that wonderful, kind introduction. I have looked forward all afternoon, like so many of you, to be there this evening and to be able to present this award to John. I just talked with him a few moments ago. As one that will be sort of floor managing the legislation which we have on the floor of the United States Senate tomorrow morning, I felt that I had to take the last plane out of Logan. The one thing the Bible teaches us is when you have five nor’easter snowstorms in Massachusetts, the Democrats will prevail. I think that's an important omen for us in ’08 with John Kerry. So I thank you very much for letting me at least say a word.
For Vicky and myself, we are so grateful to all of you for joining us this evening for the special tribute to a wonderful friend, John Kerry. This library has always been a very inspiring tribute to my brothers, and it is also a reminder of what America can be and the difference genuine political leadership can make for our country and its future. John has said that my brothers Jack and Bob inspired him to pursue public service, and John has brilliantly picked up the torch to inspire a new generation.
I've known John in many different ways over the years -- above all, as a friend, but also as a soldier, peace activist, a prosecutor, Lieutenant Governor, Senator, and I’d hoped as President, which means I can’t wait for Kerry ’08. (applause) Not a bad bumper sticker. Actually, John worked as a volunteer on my very first senate campaign in 1962. I’m a little hazy about that. I remember a tall, thin, dark haired, handsome man. That was me. (laughter) I don’t remember John back then. But I’ll never forget meeting him ten years later when he came back from Vietnam and joined the demonstrations on the Mall in the nation’s capital against the war. The returning soldiers were camped out near the capital making their voices heard about the truth of the Vietnam War. I went to visit with the ones from Massachusetts and was introduced to their brave young leader, John Kerry. I had great respect for his leadership of the anti-war movement, and I was also enormously moved by the fact that he had earlier volunteered to serve in Vietnam and served so heroically.
Massachusetts thrives on producing people like that. I could imagine John 250 years ago grabbing a bag of tea and throwing it into Boston Harbor. John knew what he was talking about on Vietnam, and he knows what he’s talking about on foreign relations today. We know John today as a senator with 21 years of experience on foreign policy issues, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We know him as a leader in the Senate on so many vital issues that have made America safe and made a difference in people’s lives. He’s a visionary leader who’s been on the cutting edge of many issues before they became popular battles. The prosecutor in him led the fight to add police on our streets through his amendment to the 1993 Crime Control Act. He made sure we had the resources we needed to put the 100,000 new police officers on the streets and communities where they were needed the most, and we know what a difference they made in reducing the crime rate. John pushed to raise the awareness in Washington about the global stakes of the AIDS epidemic. He played the key and vital role in the 2000 bill that provided the most money ever at the time for fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis around the world. He’s been a key voice in arms control, leading the fight for the ratification of the comprehensive nuclear test ban. He’s also been a strong and persistent advocate to protect the nuclear weapons stockpiles in the former Soviet Union so they don’t fall at the hands of terrorists. It may not make headlines every day, but our world is safer today because of John Kerry.
Here at home he’s also been a national leader in protecting the environment. He was one of the first to stand up against drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the Republican Party still hasn’t been able to push that through the Congress. All of us who know John know how hard he fought for the White House. With that same tenacity and determination, we know he’ll keep on fighting the good fight. He’s as determined as ever to achieve his vision of what this great country can again become, a country that creates jobs; a country that stands for education for all; health care for all; civil rights for all; a country that protects our environment; a country that works with our allies and is both strong and respected in the world.
John, our party and our country needs your voice and your leadership. And we look forward to hearing a lot from you in the years ahead. I’m fortunate to serve the people of Massachusetts with John, and Vicky and I are delighted to have such a close friendship with John and Teresa and with Vanessa and Alexandra, too. We love you, John, we’re proud, very proud of you and it’s now my honor to present the Library’s Distinguished American Award to John Kerry for his outstanding contribution to public service. We started this award in 1991 to mark the 30th anniversary of the New Frontier and honor men and women who lived up to that high standard. John Kerry eminently deserves this honor and I’m proud to present it to him now. Congratulations, John. (applause)
MR. KIRK: One logistical detail: there'll be a period for questions and answers after the Senator’s conversation with Tom. And as I understand it, people who have questions should write out on the card their questions and pass them to the volunteers who will be picking them up. So thank you for that, and we hope to have a very interesting evening. Senator Kerry? (applause)
SENATOR JOHN KERRY: Thank you, sir, thank you. Well, I want to thank the Academy the … Oh, that’s last night. (laughter) Actually, that's a speech that everybody would love to give, second only to the speech that I would really love to give, which is, “I, John Kerry, do solemnly swear.” (applause and laughter)
When Teddy called me about this award, I was speechless and he said, “That's a good start.” There's no way for me adequately to express to any of you here how this really does touch me and how important this is to me in measuring life’s journey. And I say that because as Ted just said to you in his introduction, I was inspired by his brothers and I was inspired by him. And that's what brought me to the great cause of public service. So I’m grateful to Senator Kennedy and if anybody here understands why he is on that plane, the last plane out of here getting back to manage that bill, believe me I do, and so do you. I am blessed to serve, and you are blessed to have serve you without doubt one of the greatest United States senators to ever serve in the United States Senate. And we are so privileged here in Massachusetts to have him. (applause) I’m not Teddy’s longest-serving colleague. I don't know how many of you know that. Twenty years we have been in this great battle together. And, you know, it’s interesting, for a person who is … I think he’s about 20 years my senior in the Senate … he was the most valiant, the best partner that I could have had in the efforts over the course of the last two years.
And many people might look at it and sort of say, “Well, you know, he's got every reason in the world to stand back and he ran himself,” and so forth. He was a dynamo unto himself, and we had more fun out there. I got to tell you, anybody who knows Ted Kennedy, you know if you're out there with Ted Kennedy, you have fun. And I will tell you, he was a great foil for me because I would come out to an audience after Teddy had introduced me, and I’d talk about how this fellow had come up to me and asked me what it was like to serve in the United States Senate with an icon like Ted Kennedy, and what it was like to know that no matter how long were I to serve in the Senate, if I served, I would never accomplish what Ted Kennedy had accomplished. And what it was like to live with a living legend like Ted Kennedy. And then I’d stand up and tell the audience, “And the man who asked me that was Ted Kennedy.” (laughter) So we had this ongoing back and forth and give and take.
But the best moment, I think, was shared with my daughter Vanessa when they were down in New Mexico together doing an event with Native Americans. And the event suddenly became very, very serious and Ted and my daughter had to stand there at attention and this dance was taking place and the music was growing louder and louder. And then they had to clasp hands and stand there together while this feather blessing took place, and it was really very, very moving and they were both very touched by it. But at the end of it, as the music grew and the blessing grew and the seriousness grew, Ted leans over to my daughter and says, “I think we just got married.” (laughter)
By the way, I heard the introduction of Ted as the Lion in Winter, and I think that ends with the lion imprisoning his wife and sending her off, so we better end that reference. But I will tell you, Ted Kennedy in the caucus of the Senate, time and again when people are wondering which way we should move, or whether or not this is a cause worth fighting, and sometimes there is some silly talk, and you’ve all heard it in politics and business and life. Ted Kennedy is a guy who stands up there and he calls people back to their senses and back to their moral compass. And I think Teresa would join me in saying to every single person here, we are blessed not just to serve with him, I am blessed not just to serve with him as the senior Senator, but we are blessed in Massachusetts to have a remarkable statesman and an extraordinary committed activist and advocate. And they don’t come better in friendship or in advocacy than Ted Kennedy.
Let me also say to all of you that I just want to be quick so we can get to the back and forth here, which is more fun and more important. I want to thank the Library itself. I want to thank Paul Kirk. I’ve been here many, many times, and your stewardship has been extraordinary here. The friendship and loyalty you’ve shown to Teddy and to the Kennedy family is an example to everybody. John Shattuck, my old friend from university, we used to be the debating team one year at the university and debated against Cambridge and Oxford and Harvard and some other places, and we had a lot of fun together and it’s great to have seen his career of public service. And it’s continuing, even at this moment, and I'm so proud of that and proud that he is part of this evening.
And Deborah Leff, thank you for the job you do in managing this place and all that it represents to us as a treasure here in Massachusetts. And thank you to all of you here. So many of you are friends who’ve been with me along this journey, so many of you are part of the extended Kennedy family and the extended family of our efforts here in this state. And it is a family, and that's the way I look at it after all these years.
I just want to say a couple of words about that, and I haven’t forgotten, I'm going to say something about Teresa, but I want to save it as I come to the end, if you’ll let me. We narrowly lost the Presidency of the United States a few months ago. And I do mean narrowly. I thought that what we put together across the country in terms of grassroots effort and movement was stronger and more significant and more imposing than anything we had done perhaps since that great period of time when we changed the politics of the country 25 and 30 years ago. It was certainly the largest grassroots effort in our history. And I won, thanks to all of you and this effort, ten million more votes than Bill Clinton won when he won reelection in 1996. We won the moderates, we won the independents. We won the youth vote five times the level that Al Gore did in the year 2000. We won unmarried women. We beat and exceeded our targets for turnout in every single location in the country, beat or exceeded our targets. And yet so did they. And that is what has changed in the politics of the last few years, which we have to stop and think about as we go forward. That and some other things.
There's been a profound and negative change in the relationship of America’s media with the American people, of the flow of information in our society. If 77 percent of the people who voted for George Bush on election day believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, as they did, and 77 percent of the people who voted for him believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, as they did, then something has happened in the way in which we’re talking to each other and who’s arbitrating about truth in American politics.
This is important to me not as a Democrat and not to somebody as Republican, it’s important to all of us as Americans. It’s important to us in terms of our Constitution and the fulfillment of the promise of this land. I don't believe that we have to go through a great soul searching about what we stand for or who we are or where the values fit in the debate in America, frankly. I think we know where they fit, and I think we know profoundly as Americans what really makes a difference. But when fear is dominating the discussion, and when there are false choices presented and there is no arbitrator, we have a problem. We learned that the mainstream media in the course of the last year did a pretty good job of discerning. But that there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than the flow of information, and that that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country.
And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is what are we going to do about it? We’re obviously not just going to stand up and complain about it, I’m not. I think we can do a lot about it. If you look at the margin in Ohio -- half the people in a football stadium on a Saturday afternoon -- if they’d decided differently, this would be a different discussion tonight. Less than a percentage point in two or three other states. Many of those states aren’t red, they’re purple, as you’ve head people describe. And the question today is how we’re going to put on the table the real choices for the American people and achieve a new accountability in American politics. That to me is what this award and this evening is about. What brought me into politics, and many of you here, was the sense that we could make a difference, and we did. A 26 year old preacher in Birmingham, Alabama, who changed people’s thinking about relations between people in America and set us on the march towards civil rights. And then the war which drew on and on and out of which ultimately came a sense of obligation about how we were going to stop it and change the face of America. And I remember an old adage then which I wish I had talked about more in the course of the campaign, but we used to say “My country, right or wrong. When right, keep it right; when wrong, make it right.” And that's what we set out to do. (applause) And, ultimately, we created what we are lacking today in American politics, which is accountability. I have colleagues who can vote with impunity against things that they know are in the common interests of the people, but not necessarily in the interest of fundraising or the power of the special interest groups. And they can vote against that common interest and go back home with impunity. As long as people can do that, my friends, we’re not going to change what's happening. What we need to do is go back to what we did when 20 million people came out in the streets of America when the river was lit on fire, called the Cayuhoga River, when we marched and worked and went street to street and house to house and did what we began to do again in this campaign but what you can’t do in four and a half, five months, what you have to do over the course of years.
And we have to do what we did in 1970 when 12 congressmen were identified as the Dirty Dozen and 7 out of 12 of them lost. And you know what happened after that? We passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the EPA. And those laws and that success have carried this country for almost 30 years. But today, we’re going backwards. We’re going backwards on almost everything by which you really measure the quality of life, which Robert Kennedy in a brilliant speech in Kansas reminded us of so eloquently. We’re going backwards on children, more of them uninsured than ever before in America; backwards on health care, more Americans uninsured than ever before in America; backwards on the quality of air; backwards on the quality of water; backwards in our relationships with children and who protects them and how you protect them; backwards with our relationship with the rest of the world as we walk away from global warming or other important efforts -- under-fund proliferation, counter-proliferation efforts as Graham Allison would tell you, or others.
So all of these are choices, and what this library stands for and what the lives that are honored here stand for, and what Ted Kennedy is doing by going back to Washington tonight, what that means is this fight must be engaged again. The people I met across this country made it so clear to me. What a wonderful, unbelievable education. I can’t tell you how much I was privileged to learn. And Teresa, who was by my side throughout this effort, without whom I could never have done what we did day in and day out, who I think and know to this moment would have made a brilliant First Lady for this nation, I believe she …(applause) One of her real connections to people, which made such a difference in Iowa and New Hampshire and places, was when she stood up and talked to people about the life she had led in a dictatorship and what she had learned seeing a father who only voted for the first time when he was 71 years old. And what it meant to lose property and to lose rights and how precious it was, this ability to go out and stand up on a soapbox and make a difference in a country the way we did. And she and I met people who just moved us to the bone -- people like Joey Dubois, New Hampshire, a veteran who now is going to see $250 increase in his access to the VA, who has his disability money deducted from his pension money and winds up in deficit as a consequence in a wheelchair for lifetime service to his country. And I know one thing. Our value system tells us that we shouldn’t be asking Joey Dubois to sacrifice more today so that I and others in this room can get a tax cut and the gap between the wealthy and the poor will grow higher in this nation. (applause)
I met a fellow named Albert Barker in Erie, Pennsylvania, 50-some years old. He’d had a big operation; he had huge, thousands of dollars of medical bills. And he was worried about how he was going to pay them off because his company, because the health insurance got so much more expensive because he was sick, which is what you need health insurance for. Cut off the health insurance. He’s on his own. That’s an ownership society, he’s on his own, and he's out there trying to figure out what he’s going to do. Well, let me tell you something. When I look at 11 million children who have no health care in America and it’s growing, and 45 million Americans -- five million more Americans in the last four years who have no health care -- and I sort of question this thing of values. Well, I’ll tell you something, folks. I go to church and I pray and I believe in God and I understand what the book of James said when it said, “What does it mean, my brother, to say you have faith if there are no deeds?” Faith without works is dead. And I happen to believe, as I think many of you do, that health care is not a faith-based initiative. It ought to be available, accessible and affordable to all Americans. And that's long overdue. (applause)
So let me just close by saying this to you, and we can engage in this conversation. We lost an election, but we didn't lose our moral compass. We didn't lose our sense of direction. We didn't lose our outrage at excesses, at the dissembling, if you will, of a real dialogue in our nation. And that is what has to now take us back to do the work that John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, inspired us to do, that Ted Kennedy continues to do, that is so critical to recreating accountability in this nation. And that means we have to do … Teresa used to always talk out there about the great face of America, which was the Peace Corps. The greatest, non-military, most extraordinary call to service in our nation’s history now replicated in other ways that are so important to this institution: City Year, Youth Build, Eli Siegel who’s so involved with service. We need a new call to service, my friends. We need to renew what the greatest generation gave to us.
My mother, as many of you may have read in the course of the campaign, was American, came from Boston; her father came from Boston, but he happened to be doing business in Europe when the war broke out. And she was over there at the time, and she trained to be a nurse and trained to give back. And right up until the moment the Germans came into Paris, she was working in Paris doing care for the refugees and care for the wounded. And she didn't even know that the Right Bank of Paris had been evacuated because they had been working so hard. And then the day the Germans came in, she escaped on a bicycle with her sister and left the city.
And she wrote my father at the time, who was in the service, in the Army Air Corps and said, “You have no idea how many things, how useful people can be right now. There's something for everybody to do.” That is what should guide us all, because this is a moment in America where, believe me, there is something for everybody to do and a crying need for us to get it done. I’m so honored by this award tonight. This will encourage me and keep me fighting for these goals and these hopes. Thank you very, very much. (applause)
MR. TOM OLIPHANT: Just to keep with the Senator’s reference to the Academy Awards, this part of a Kennedy Library event is sort of like that show on cable where that pseudo intellectual guy in New York interviews movie stars. This is a conversation, they call it. And many of you already have been kind enough to send up written questions. Please don’t be bashful if more of them occur to you. But the way this works is I’m going to start off by asking most of the stupid questions in a conversation with Senator Kerry, and then I will switch over to the queries you’ve been so kind to send up. And please, if the spirit moves you, respond to it.
I got the impression listening to you that you’ve been doing a fair amount of public speaking in the last year. (laughter) And it made me actually think back -- I was thinking of this on the plane coming up here this morning -- that it was 35 years almost to the day that I first had a conversation with you about Vietnam at Concord Regional High School where you had gone to compete for the Democratic congressional management that Father Drinan ultimately won a year before we went to Washington.
SENATOR KERRY: The first of many brash acts.
MR. OLIPHANT: The hair was messier, actually a lot longer, for both of us. And I was wearing sneakers, not shoes.
SENATOR KERRY: I remember.
MR. OLIPHANT: What I remember most of all is the passion and anger in your voice. And I was wondering, first of all, how much of that 27 year-old kid is still rattling around inside your 60 year-old body? (laughter)
SENATOR KERRY: Thank you for aging me rapidly. The answer is a whole bunch, and I hope you felt some of that. I’m ready to, I think, try to help go back to a level of militancy that has to stand up and fight to change what we have to change. And I believe that. You know, there's a collision course right now and I think most of you can sense it. But you look at the depth and the irresponsibility of where we’re heading in terms of the euro, the value of the dollar, the dependency on foreign capital to buy America’s debt, particularly the Japanese and Chinese, which creates its own revolving cycle that prevents us from doing some of the things we need to do because we lose leverage with that dependency.
You look at the choices we’re facing now, for instance, on social security. I mean, what is this really about? The tax cut, making it permanent over the next ten years, is three times the total gap of social security over that period of time. So if you just nipped what is about to be made permanent by a small percentage, you don’t have the discussion that you're having. It’s a phony discussion geared towards the undoing of the three-legged stool that has served this nation since Franklin Roosevelt: private savings, social security, Medicare, all of which are struggling today. And the danger of taking the one thing that is an insurance program against poverty -- not a retirement program -- and putting it in the private sector is just stunning.
So I think we have on every score … I mentioned the environment; I talked about children; you look at education; you start measuring what's happening with respect to jobs and job loss and the types of jobs being created -- the middle income squeeze in America, the loss of the middle class, the gap that grows. I mean, all of these could be changed so quickly with a different set of choices. And there's a profound anger in me, and I think in many people in my generation, that what we began, that journey we began 35 years ago, has come to this kind of collision where we ought to be working cooperatively to really solve problems and find the common ground. I believe in finding that common ground. And, you know, my judgment is we need to go and build on what we built, Tom, in the course of this campaign. If we build on it, they will come.
MR. OLIPHANT: Let me take that maybe a little further, then. Because in some respects, as a national political figure, there hasn’t been someone in your shoes, really, since Adlai Stevenson in 1952. So could I get you to talk a little bit more about what you mean about moving on, particularly given the reality of minority status in the country and now that you’ve had time to ponder the nature of your role, how you have defined it and what some of the benchmarks are that we might watch as you move forward?
SENATOR KERRY: Tom, I can’t give you the benchmarks; other people will decide the benchmarks. But what I'm going to do is go out and fight, and I intend to lead on those issues that I think really affect the families that I met over the course of these last months. There's a woman named Laurie Sheldon in Canonsberg, Pennsylvania. We were doing a town meeting on a porch, called our porch meetings. And she stood up, sort of quivering, and I’d been talking about the middle class squeeze and what was happening as people work two or three jobs, and yet their income is squeezed and everything’s gone up. Health care premiums have gone up $3,500 over the last four years. The taxes at local state level went up, so the tax burden on the middle class actually went up while the tax burden on the most wealthy in America went down. As we all know, the cost of education went up simultaneously, and so on average, the average family in America has gotten squeezed, and this woman just personified it. This was a person, husband, wife working. He worked for U.S. Airways, she was working at the time, and she pointed to her two teenage daughters who were standing down the line and she said, “You know, Senator, I am tired of having to say no to my daughters. We say no all the time.”
Now, that's the problem of the heart of America today. People in rural America … as with Joe Manchin, the new governor of West Virginia yesterday, he was telling that in West Virginia 45 percent of the folks there don’t have any sewer connection. They have no general public sewer connection. Kids are traveling two and a half hours to school and two and a half hours back from school on a bus; they get up at 4:30 in the morning to get to school. Folks, we can do better than that in this country. And certainly if the choice is between giving Teresa Heinz and John Kerry and a bunch of other people a tax cut versus giving the middle class of America and those struggling to join it a break, I know what my value system tells me we ought to do, and that’s what I'm going to go out and fight for. (applause)
MR. OLIPHANT: I thought it might be helpful to ask you to talk about the condition of the country in the context, actually, of the reason Senator Kennedy needed to take that last plane tonight and the context of what is going to be on the floor of the Senate tomorrow, which is not a subject that normally excites Americans or maybe interests a lot of journalists. But Democrats and Republicans have been shouting at each other about bankruptcy now for a decade. And perhaps in the context of what you’ve just been talking about, if you could introduce the subject of bankruptcy as a window on the condition of working families in America today and explain some of the stakes that are going to be involved in the coming days?
SENATOR KERRY: Well, it’s very interesting and it's complicated in some ways. First of all, let me make clear something. We have some serious challenges and we have some serious problems, obviously. We’re still the most remarkable country on the face of the planet with more opportunity to affect these things, if we choose to. And there is an awful lot when you see what people are doing out there in their personal efforts and other efforts, it’s quite extraordinary at the local level. If we could get people to translate that more into the civic agenda at the national level, we’d be a lot stronger. But bankruptcy is a reflection of what's happening, it’s a reflection of this tension, this struggle, these two directions you can go in. There are more personal bankruptcies at any time in the history of our nation. One of the reasons there are more bankruptcies than at any time in the history of our nation is obviously the economy and what has happened, and what people have been encouraged to do with credit and debt. And as people assume more debt … I think there was a book written on it just the last year or so called The Middle Class Trap …
MR. OLIPHANT: Two incomes, yeah.
SENATOR KERRY: Yeah, which talks about how for two income earners who go out and then they mortgage the home and they’ve got the college loans and they don’t fit in a place that gets help and all of a sudden they're overextended on the credit cards and one of them loses their job; the whole house of cards comes down very, very rapidly, and they're in serious trouble. And banks, as you all know, how many of you get how many solicitations a week to take out a credit card at “Zero percentage APR for a year” and so forth? And then you don’t read the fine line, as most people don’t, and way down in the tiny print at the bottom, if you miss one payment over whatever number of days, boom, you're at 27 percent and all of a sudden people are cascading.
So the bankruptcy reform is to try to do several things. Do you need reform? Yes. Am I for reform of bankruptcy? Yes. But reform to me means something different from what it does to a lot of people who want to just allow the lenders to have carte blanche to go out, no pun intended, and start holding people accountable in ways that don’t provide adequate warning, adequate standards, adequate enforcement and a balance between how you extend a credit and how you hold people accountable. I’m all for restoring a sense of value to it. It used to be that 20 and 30 years ago in America, there was a real stigma that was attached to being bankrupt. Today, people will file it and run away, which is why you need a reform. But you've got to have a balance on the other side, that's what we’re fighting for in Washington. It’s the absence of balance which characterizes almost every piece of legislation that comes along.
MR. OLIPHANT: If I could take your answer and then step back even further, lurking behind this discussion that's about to begin in the Senate is the condition of the economy itself. And listening to you speak a second ago, as well as last year, there is a view today in the administration in certain circles in New York, I would argue, that the economy has at last stabilized and that it is growing at a non-inflationary rate that is capable of generating new employment opportunities without any serious risk of inflation. Is that your view of the condition of the country? And can you explain the difference?
SENATOR KERRY: No, and I don't think it’s the view of most thoughtful people on Wall Street, to be honest with you. I was talking with several of them last week and they manage very significant funds and they're very deeply involved in the transactions of our nation. And they said to me, “Please explain to me, Senator, why Washington is so incredibly indifferent to the reality of where we find ourselves?” And they found it hard to even rationalize what Chairman Greenspan had said over the course of last week. Now, why do I say that? Well, folks, you have to create about 300,000 jobs a month just to keep up. We are still at a point where we haven’t got an administration that’s created one net new job, net. Now, net is important. Are they creating 150,000 or whatever it was? Yes, but that doesn’t get you ahead of the game. And with a workforce that's increasingly growing, as young people are and our population is, we’re going to increasingly have to create more jobs and be able to create better kinds of jobs. And that's the second problem. You see an awful lot of jobs that are still going abroad, companies … Just today we saw the Federated/Mae consolidation. Consolidation after consolidation. Now, I’m not against all consolidations, but you’ve got to be creating something underneath that provides people with a level of opportunity that fulfills the promise of the country.
Now, where could we do that? I think most significantly, and this is what I fought so hard for in, of course, the campaign, in energy independence. You get security benefits, you get health benefits, environment benefits, job economic benefits -- all four come from this one sector, which if we were to pour our energy into it the way we did in the early days of discovery, whether it was DARPA or other things that we’ve done with government effort, we could begin, I am convinced, to change the politics as well as the economics of our nation for the long term, for the better. That is completely absent. State of the Union message, did we hear it? Are we on that direction? Is this the great adventure that President Kennedy set us off on when we went to the moon? It ought to be. I often said during the campaign what we need to do is go to the moon right here on Earth, and it ought to begin with energy independence, and I think there are so many ways we could begin to do it. (applause)
MR. OLIPHANT: Before I shift to foreign policy for a second, before we go to the questions from the audience, I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about the condition of the economy. How long can the America you describe continue on the path its on before there is another cyclical event?
SENATOR KERRY: Tom, I can’t tell you. I can tell you nobody on Wall Street …
MR. OLIPHANT: What's the danger, then? When is …
SENATOR KERRY: Let me come back. Nobody can tell you. If anybody could, you know, they’d be making a lot of money and doing something different. But what we do know is there's a certain cycle going on right now, and the question is to define it fully as I began to a moment ago. It’s much more complicated than just the things that I put out there. But look folks, China is growing stunningly; India, growing stunningly. Less developed nations obviously have this huge advantage in the marketplace and have the ability to be able to compete in the production of goods of one kind or another in ways that we can’t. Productivity has saved us for a long period of time. We’ve been able to have these massive productivity increases, but that's diminishing right now and diminishing significantly.
So unless we create the next wave of productivity so the next wave of jobs are produced goods so Americans can sell them at a higher value added, we got a problem and I think we’re on the wrong course. The course we’re on is not sustainable, which is why so many people on Wall Street are deeply concerned about where we’re going, why the euro is where it is, why the dollar’s sinking. There's a whole cycle going on here, and it’s part and parcel of our overall fiscal policy coupled with the choices that we are making here at home. Make a different set of choices, this country could take off, and part of it is in our trade relationships and what we do with respect to opportunity with less developed countries, which gets to foreign policy.
MR. OLIPHANT: Exactly, I was about to thank you for the segue, particularly regarding China and India. It seems to me now three years after that awful day -- more than three years, in 2001 -- that there is more to this new world than simply, or not simply, but the threat of international terrorism. Or even the spread of nuclear weapons. That there's an international economy a lot of us barely understand. There are pandemics, there are struggles by people for self determination and to be free. It took a few years after World War II before there evolved a theory of the world for the Cold War era, and I was wondering where your thinking is in just describing this post-9/11 world and the basic challenges it poses to us?
SENATOR KERRY: Well, it’s a huge question. Obviously, in fact, I'm writing a book right now about this sort of security challenge and where it fits. But let me just share with you a few thoughts about it, Tom. This is a moment of unbelievable global opportunity in my judgment. And I think if you measure this administration, the first four years are defined by the fact that a President had to do a repair job trip abroad. You can make your own judgments about the degree of that repair. I think it was a trip that demanded a more significant commitment from other countries to the enterprise of the Middle East, at least, and a more significant set of goals and standards with respect to the three great challenges of security, or four great challenges of security: three different proliferations -- nuclear, chemical, biological -- and the challenge of the human condition: less developed countries, AIDS, failed states, and so forth.
I think that we are the world’s leader still and the world is still waiting for the leadership that puts on the table a sufficiently exciting and realistic set of achievable goals with respect to those challenges. And right now, Iraq still clouds it. Now, I'm going to say something that may be heresy in some circles here. We all understand how I felt about how the President went to war and clearly I thought that should have been done differently and it was without the planning necessary for our troops and for the success and so forth. And it is yet a question how it will turn out.
But I will tell you this, now that we are there, and I have said this throughout the campaign, I made it clear that we ought to be successful. It is imperative to try to be successful. And there are ways to do that. I was recently on a trip to the Middle East; I was in Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and then on the way back I met with Chancellor Schröder, Prime Minister Blair, and President Chirac. And I met in Egypt with President Mubarak. And what struck me was their readiness and willingness given the right tone to the dialogue and given the right engagement on a series of issues, their readiness to really begin to honor this notion that everybody has an interest in the outcome of the Middle East and of Iraq. But I still don’t see them doing what I heard them willing to do. I’ll give you an example. President Mubarak said to me, “I don't understand. We’re training 446 troops. We could be training 500, 600, a thousand every five or six weeks. Why haven’t we been asked to do that?” Similarly, in Jordan, with the King of Jordan, I learned we could be doing a great deal more on the ground in Jordan.
So I don’t believe we’re even training forces at the rate … and you all heard that debate with Condi Rice and with the administration over how many troops are really trained. I don't think we’ve put the real agenda in front of the nation, in front of the world, that engages the United States or the world in a way that can advance our security and our economic interests simultaneously in the way that we ought to be. Proliferation is another example. Coming away from that meeting with Putin, as he did, without some of the breaking of the bureaucracy that's standing in the way of sufficiently containing the nuclear weapons that we know we already have is a huge missed opportunity, and it’s dangerous.
When I wrote my book The New War back in 1996 or ’97, I wrote of the example of a suitcase in Oman that was discovered with I forget how many grams of nuclear materials in it attempting to be sold on the black market for some $250 million. Folks, that was almost ten years ago. And as a former prosecutor, I’ll tell you, the ones you get are far fewer than the ones who get away.
So the need to contain this material, if you're going to talk seriously about a war on terror and containment, is beyond anything that I’ve seen in terms of this leadership effort of the United States. So bottom line is we need a new model, we need a new standard, and I hope the President will grab that brass ring over the course of the next months.
MR. OLIPHANT: The one fast follow-up I'm going to do before I read the first question, therefore, involves Iraq. And that is to ask you if there is any fundamental tenet of current administration policy in Iraq with which you disagree?
SENATOR KERRY: I disagree with the way in which they have failed. Look, I said during the campaign specifically there are four critical elements to success. Number one was to set up the possibility of elections and have elections, and I supported that. I thought it was a very important piece. But number two was the sufficient training so they can defend and take over themselves. Number three is the delivery of services, which is still enormously problematic. And number four was to bring the international community to the table sufficiently that there is a shared enterprise in the transformation of the government, the political reconciliation that must take place.
I see currently a foot dragging and a potential dropped ball with respect to three of those four at this moment. So Iraq remains very much a question mark. Are there hopeful signs? In some ways, there are. It was stunning that folks came out to vote. It was stunning that they stood up to terror. It's a great statement about what they really want to have. But it’s also because of the structure within which it took place, it underscores the challenges of that political reconciliation and the training and the capacity to provide security. Iraq is really, sort of, as Tom Friedman described it the other day, teetering-tottering. And it’s something we all hope … There are good signs, but it’s something that could go the other way still. None of us want that to happen, none of us. It is not in America’s interests, it is not in the world’s interests for this not to come out successfully.
MR. OLIPHANT: Thank you all in advance for these questions, many of which are very helpful. And I apologize in advance to the extent that we don’t get to all of them. The first one, Senator, has to do with values and religion, which you briefly addressed from there. “I know you to be a man of conscience and also, as it happens, a serious practitioner of your religion. Please tell us something about the values you hold most dear and how they inform your policies.”
SENATOR KERRY: That's a great question. I think conscience, truth and the community, the solidarity that I learned. Solidarity is a word we grew up with in the context of Catholicism and Christianity. It’s also within Judeo ethic and I think even if you look at other religions, you’ll see a strain of that sense of sort of the commonality or purpose, whether it’s Confucianism, Hinduism or otherwise. I think that is something that is not practiced enough, and I think that religion to some degree has been politicized and distorted in a way that becomes dangerous in the body politic of our country. Why do I say that? I think faith ought to be expressed. I think people ought to articulate, and you can’t truly have faith if you're not willing to live it in some way, as I said, in the works and deeds. But what I grew up and learned is that there's no one simple issue by which it is all measured, it is in the totality of your actions. And so it was that we were taught to care about poverty and taught to care about unjust war and taught to care about the human condition and about other relationships. And I think your faith manifests itself in all of those things.
So I think what we need to do is have this talk about values. I welcome it. I absolutely welcome it whether it is on the issue of choice or otherwise. To be pro-choice is not to be pro-abortion. And Roe v. Wade does not support … (applause) And there was a very interesting article in The New York Times over the weekend -- I think it was The New York Times -- about what would happen if suddenly Roe v. Wade disappeared. Are we going to criminalize? Are we going to enforce the criminalization? What will the penalty be? The article ended with the sentence, “Be careful what you wish for.” And I think it’s very interesting for us. I’m going to go out and take this issue on. I think we ought to in every respect and every single level. We ought to be talking about abstention, we ought to be talking about adoption, we ought to be talking about alternatives. We need to be talking to young people, but we also need to understand where the role of the government ends and why Roe v. Wade was passed in the first place, and there is no inconsistency in doing either of those. (applause)
MR. OLIPHANT: Speaking of young people, we have a question from a 16 year old in the audience who’s a sophomore in high school. And because my name is Oliphant, I’m not even going to try to butcher his name from here. But he asks, “How can teenagers help get legislation passed for stem cell research.”
SENATOR KERRY: Love it. Can I ask where this young person is? Good for you, thank you very much for asking that.
MR. OLIPHANT: Valentino, right?
SENATOR KERRY: Valentino! Well, first of all, let me just say to all of you, you have no idea the joy and the energy, excitement that folks like Mr. Valentino brought to the campaign over the last two years. I was stunned by it. Teresa was stunned by it. I met a kid … there was a kid … I’ve got to diverge and tell you this. There was a kid, six years old -- six years old! -- who came up to me in Philadelphia with a big Tupperware container, and he got all dressed up to come, a coat and tie on, a tussle of hair. He spent the entire summer, and he had a photograph of it, sitting out in a street where he went in the summer with a big sign saying “Kerry for President” out there and a table in front of it. And this six year old kid got his nine year old brother to make bracelets for him, which he had laid out on the table and he sold the bracelets all summer to raise money to change America. In that Tupperware container, he presented me with $680 to change this country. (applause)
Now, let me tell you something. If a six year old can do that, my 16 year old friend, you can go out there and change your high school. You can get kids involved in the summer, you can be interns, you can get involved door to door and house to house, you can volunteer for so many different things, whether it’s mentoring another child or involving yourself in Big Brother, Big Sister, Boy’s Club, Girl’s Club, any number of things. But the way to ultimately change the stem cell research and the other things that are so critical to us is to get that accountability I talked about in Congress. We sell democracy all over the world, but we don’t practice it enough here at home and we still don’t have enough people doing it right. (applause) And I believe that if we can get the people who are out there to vote … I mean, folks, when everybody gets this despair about the outcome of the election, yeah it’s disappointing. But you know what? Ten million more people. We began to organize. We did something we haven’t done. You know, I only became the nominee in March. Karl Rove and company had four years to prepare for election day, two years before that, so six years, actually. And we had about four and a half months. And we weren’t allowed to talk to our “get out the vote” operation because they're 527s, and we’re separated and under the law you can’t coordinate. So the head start that they’d had in terms of framing and messaging and getting out the vote and identifying and building a grass roots organization is stunning. What I want to see us do is get you and your friends and a whole bunch of other people to not stop from what we did on November 2nd and keep building towards 2006. We elected a Democratic governor up in New Hampshire, we added 30 new legislative seats to the House, two new senators. We added a Democratic House and Senate in the State of Colorado, and a senator and a congressman. We elected a Democratic governor of Montana. We made states more blue than they were before. We’re moving, and if we’ll just feel that energy and take it, and you’ll be part of it, we’re going to win in 2006 and onwards, and that's what we have to do. (applause)
MR. OLIPHANT: This is not an irrelevant follow-up, actually, from the audience, recognizing that you did for a second up there discuss my troubled racket. And the question is how to stop the media from creating and perpetuating the divisive red state/blue state situation?
SENATOR KERRY: Tom, I swear I don’t have the answer to that, and I'm looking for it just like everybody else is. I don't have the answer right now. I think it is linked to what I was just talking about. I was talking earlier about accountability and citizen structure. And I think part of what we have to do is have an impact on the economics. The corporatization of the media in America has taken away some of the willingness of the media to do the great muckraking they used to do and be the accountability folks they used to be. And so you have so many different media outlets that are just bottom line, and they go where the ratings tell them to go, and there's a top down hierarchical administration of what they’ll go after and what they’ll do and it’s driven by the economics more than anything. I think if we were to change those economics a little bit through grassroots effort, then you might begin to see a shift.
Now, beyond that an epiphany of some kind, people who … It’s very difficult and it is particularly challenging because, as I say, a lot of the mainstream media were very responsible during the course of the campaign. They tried to put out a balanced view and they did show what they thought to be the truth in certain situations of attack, both sides. But it never penetrated. And when you look at the statistics and understand that about 80 percent of America gets 100 percent of its news from television, and a great deal of that news comes from either MTV, John Stewart, Bill Maher, Jay Leno, David Letterman, you begin to see the size of this challenge. And so I don't have a total answer. I just know it’s something that we’ve really got to grapple with and …
MR. OLIPHANT: Going back to the economics of it, though, isn’t this why God created the Sherman and Clayton Acts?
SENATOR KERRY: But you see, that's something that a President with a veto pen and with the right of proposal you can achieve. But in this particular political dynamic, don’t hold your breath. There ain’t going to be no effort to change that or to restore the fairness doctrine either. This all began, incidentally, when the fairness doctrine ended. You would have had a dramatic change in the discussion in this country had we still had a fairness doctrine in the course of the last campaign. But the absence of a fairness doctrine and the corporatization structure of the media has changed dramatically the ability of -- and the filter through which -- certain kinds of information gets to the American people. The internet has provided a different outlet; bloggers and so forth is one way around it. But we still have a large part of America that doesn’t have access to the internet. We have a digital divide. We have a serious question about how we’re going to reach that. So America’s democracy, trust me, is great and important and vibrant, but it’s also deeply challenged by this question of flow of information and how we’re going to have accountability.
MR. OLIPHANT: Senator, there's a marvelously phrased question about a specific foreign policy question from Courtney Houston Carter about North Korea. And the question is, “I want to know what course do you believe U.S. foreign policy needs to pursue to insure a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula? And do you feel that the Bush Administration is using the proper diplomatic resources in dealing with this situation?”
SENATOR KERRY: No to the last part, they’re not, and the reason is that you cannot just go forward through the six party talks. I believe you must engage in a bilateral effort. What I recommended during the campaign was that you first of all make it clear that you're willing to freeze your intentions in place with respect to the preemption doctrine, providing they're prepared to freeze at the current level. Had this been done last year or more, we would not be where we are today where they have eight to twelve nuclear weapons. It’s a much harder problem today, and in fact America is less secure today, four years after the President took office, than we were at the end of the Clinton Administration when we at least had television cameras and inspectors in the reactor.
Now, how do you get back to there? You, I think, have to put all of the issues on the table and only the United States has the ability to do that because there are still unresolved issues from the armistice of 1952 where you have questions about deployment of forces, numbers of forces, about the economic relationship and other things that are very difficult to deal with in the six party talks. Let me just say to all of you, I’ve heard Condi Rice say it to me, I heard the President say it to me in debates, “We want to do the six party talks.” The six parties, the other five, would urge, have urged privately and otherwise, the United States to engage bilaterally. And I believe a bilateral engagement is the best way for us to try to proceed forward. Do you kick the six party talks completely out? No. It’s useful to have Japan and South Korea and China and the others involved. But the United States has the most issues and the sole capacity to be able to provide the security issues that are at stake, and I believe you’ve got to engage bilaterally. (applause)
MR. OLIPHANT: I’d be remiss, given the course of the news in the last couple of days, if I didn't expand that question to another continent and ask if you could explain to us, help us understand, what is going on as the administration appears to be changing its policy toward the negotiations with Iran.
SENATOR KERRY: They should change that policy, and I think that's exactly what they're trying to do. It may be part of the new and friendly face for Europe; it may be a genuine commitment to the notion that that's the way it could work. I don't know which. My own judgment is that we are long overdue at the table with France, Germany and Great Britain. They are puzzled, this was expressed to me from their foreign ministers and their leaders, as to why the United States hasn’t been more involved in that effort. I believe from the discussions I had in the Middle East that the Middle Eastern leadership itself believes we would be far more successful as a consortium rather than leaving the United States out because of the mixed signals and messages that that sends. So I hope we will engage fully with the European bloc. And I think if we became more engaged in the Middle Eastern effort, we can be more successful likewise.
One other comment, if I can quickly, the President does deserve credit for being on the right track with respect to the issue of democracy and freedom. The how is the critical question. How do you best implement it? What are the choices you make? But I think that that is important for us, always has been as Americans. And we all need to understand that it is important to stand up and push, whether it’s President Mubarak in Egypt or Syria or other countries, in the right direction. But we’ve got to do it with a smart, overall strategy and understanding of the other dynamics of the region and how fast you can move and what you need to do to achieve peace in the Middle East, and I think it is all intertwined.
MR. OLIPHANT: Before I give you a question about Amtrak that is very direct and well phrased, I have to ask you to go a little further in your last answer when you mentioned the President’s inaugural address by implication. Could you analyze for us what happened in Moscow last week and didn't happen? Did we elevate nuclear proliferation above a concern for human rights in Russia? What's happening in that confusing country?
SENATOR KERRY: The truth is, Tom, I don’t think I can because I’m not privy to that private conversation, nobody is. So I don't know what the President really said to President Putin. And without that, it’s really hard to play pundit; it’s hard enough to play pundit, but I think it’s dangerous to try to do it under those circumstances, so I’d rather say I think that we’ll sort that out as the days go ahead.
MR. OLIPHANT: Then let’s put you on the spot about Amtrak then.
SENATOR KERRY: I’m not on the spot.
MR. OLIPHANT: This is from a railroad conductor, very concerned about the future of Amtrak since Bush has allocated no funds, even though the government constantly bails out the airlines. Please give your opinion. Karen Garrity, I believe, in the back. The hand went up.
SENATOR KERRY: The President’s policy on Amtrak is incomprehensible. It’s even worse than incomprehensible in the sense that it is counterproductive in every respect. Are there some Amtrak routes that don’t make sense economically? The answer is yes, but the northeast is certainly not one of them. And what we ought to be doing in America, and I have been talking about this now for 20 years and fighting for this, because I’ve been on the committee that has helped save Amtrak several times, and that is we need a commitment in America. And you want to talk about jobs in the future, we should be building at least an east coast-west coast, north-south high speed rail system in this country. (applause) And you could do it, it’s not as complicated as some people think because if you wanted to get creative and smart at the same time about it, you could use medium strips and rights of ways on turnpikes and existing … That's the only place you're going to find it today. It’s impossible to turn that windy, curvy old path into what it needs to be.
But if you were beginning to think about a long-term strategy for America where within the next 20 years, I think it’s about 70 percent or so of our population will live within 50 miles of coastline, and that is including the Great Lakes, which changes a little bit, but you realize what we have today, which is bumper to bumper traffic; moving parking lots; enormous lost productivity; remarkable contribution to global warming and fuel inefficiency; incredible inefficiencies in terms of the productivity of hours of useful time in America; danger; insurance costs; all the rest of it. Whereas we could be building, as other countries have that have had land issues more forced upon them, a smarter movement of people and goods from place to place. I think the day will come when that'll become more obvious to Americans, but part of our vision ought to be to try to lead America there as rapidly as possible. And folks, there are a lot of jobs to be created, not just in the construction but in the management, maintenance and continued upkeep of that effort, and I think we ought to go there.
MR. OLIPHANT: Before I get to what I am so sad, I’m told, will have to be the last question, I’ll just follow that a little bit because I think it’s a window on other domestic issues you're going to be grappling with over the next few years. Regardless of the President’s budget request, which made no allocation to Amtrak at all, is it possible, likely to keep the funding pipelined to an operation like Amtrak going, even though he made the proposal he did?
SENATOR KERRY: Yes, this will survive the President’s lack of commitment to it, and we will save it in the Congress, but we will not … Here’s the problem, folks, and this is what is so frustrating, and I want you to take this frustration out of here with you tonight and put it to use in whatever you do. It’s time for us to stop being on the defensive, stopping bad things from happening rather than being on the offensive, making good things happen. (applause) And this is where they want to keep us. This is where they want to keep you.
The fact is there's nothing in the President’s budget that is either truthful or makes sense. (laughter) Nothing. Just go look at it. The war is not included in the President’s budget. The social security fix is not included in the President’s budget. Making the tax cut permanent is not included in the President’s budget. Fixing the alternative minimum class for the millions of middle class Americans who are going to be pushed into a higher bracket is not included in the President’s budget. All together, there’s almost five trillion dollars that is not included in the President’s budget. And notwithstanding that, I said to the person the other day, we had a hearing, I said, “You know, why didn't you just submit a budget and call it balanced?” Because it’s so artificial when they say they're going to cut the deficit in half in four years.
This is what we have to take out to the country over the course of these next months. We’ve got to communicate these real choices because here’s what's happening. It’s stripping away the ability of our schools to meet the higher standards. It’s stripping away the ability of parents to be able to care for their kids adequately and have childcare. It’s stripping away health care and the health care system is imploding on itself. Nick Littlefield’s here, he’ll tell you; other people have worked on this. The system is growing more and more complicated, more and more people opting out, more and more companies going to be defined contribution rather than defined benefit. Fewer and fewer people able to afford the increases. More and more people uncovered every year; therefore, less sharing of the cost and risks. Therefore, a more inefficient distribution of the costs and the system gets worse.
We’re not grappling with the real issues that make a difference to our nation and that includes the great topic that was at the center of our efforts last year, the security of the nation. Ninety-five percent of the containers of the nation come into the country and they’re not inspected. Cops, firehouses across the nation inadequately funded. Mayors, governors struggling with cuts in Medicaid. And the number one issue, the Holy Grail of the Republican Party, is making the tax cuts permanent. Ladies and gentlemen, the choice could not be more clear, and President Kennedy would ask every single one of you to believe that you can make a difference in the outcome of that choice. (applause)
MR. OLIPHANT: This last one isn’t my fault. Senator Kennedy brought it up when he was filling the air around us, and this is asked so crisply and cleanly from the audience that it takes but a second to read it. “Will you run in 2008?”
SENATOR KERRY: For what? (laughter) Honestly, it is so far too early to really be contemplating that, and I’m amazed by all of the hurly-burly that's going on this early about it. I am going to be focused -- we just had a meeting on it today -- we’re going to be focused exclusively on 2006, on electing Democrats to the House and the Senate, on getting these choices out to the country. And that's the first job. And we’ll see where we are.
MR. OLIPHANT: I can explain the hurly-burly. It’s the Mick Jagger explanation. It’s only rock and roll, but I like it. (laughter) Thank you for your cooperation.
SENATOR KERRY: Thank you so much. Great to be with you, thank you. (applause)