Speech in New Hampshire (excerpt)January 27, 2004HOWARD DEAN (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thank you. CROWD: We want Dean. We want Dean. We want Dean. DEAN: Thank you. CROWD: We want Dean. We want Dean. We want Dean. DEAN: Thank you, my goodness. CROWD: We want Dean. We want Dean. We want Dean. DEAN: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, my goodness. Thank you, holy cow. Let me thank you. Thank you. Thank you, my goodness. Thank you. Thank you. Wow. Thank you. Thank you. I didn't mean to get...thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Let me... Thank you. Well, that was-Michael. We really are going to win this nomination aren't we? You are amazing. You are amazing. First, let me just say a couple of things. You are unbelievable and I really appreciate it. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So are you. DEAN: First let me thank-let me thank the people of the state of New Hampshire. I really-you took us into your homes and your living rooms, meet-ups, the Merrimac (ph) Restaurant. I really appreciate all that you've done. People in New Hampshire have allowed our campaign to regain its momentum and I am very grateful. And the people of-the people of New Hampshire have allowed all of you to hope again that we're going to have real change in America. For those of you who believe America needs real change and someone in the White House who has really delivered change we're all together in this. Stand with us to the very end which is January 20, 2005. For those of you who think-for those of you think that America needs a president who is willing to stand up for what's right not just what's popular we are all together again, stand together all of us. To those of you who believe the best way to beat George Bush, in fact the only way to beat George Bush is to stand up to him all the time not just when it's convenient, not just some of the time. Tonight, the people of New Hampshire have asked for change, a real change. We can change America and we will. We can have-we can have jobs again in America and we will. We can join every other industrialized nation on the face of the earth and have health insurance for all Americans and we will. We can invest in families with small children and have those kids grow up to go to college instead of prison and we will. We can demand-we can demand for our young people a better future, a solution to global warming, getting us off foreign oil by investing in renewable energy and we will. We can regain the moral leadership that this country has held from the end of World War I until the time of the Iraq invasion by having a foreign policy based on cooperation, not confrontation, and we will. We can return our school systems to the control of local school boards, fully fund special education and get rid of the federal mandates of No Child Left Behind and we will. We can get rid of the president's pharmaceutical bill and instead have a pharmaceutical bill that helps seniors instead of insurance companies and drug companies and we will. We can give the 50 percent of Americans who have quit voting in this country because we don't give them a reason to vote a reason to vote again and we will. We can take back America and stand up for working families and middle class families again and take our government back for the people who built it instead of corporations and special interests and we will and this time we can have a president who really is a uniter not a divider and we will. A lot of you have heard me... UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Unintelligible.) DEAN: A lot of you have heard me say this. I'm going to say this to America. The biggest loss that we have suffered under George Bush is not the 2.9 million jobs that have disappeared since he's been president and it's not the loss of our moral leadership in the world where a majority of people in most countries don't respect us anymore. The biggest loss that we've suffered in this country since George Bush has been president is our loss of our sense of community, the sense that we're all in it together. When I was 21 years old, it was the end of the civil rights movement and America had suffered greatly. Martin Luther King had been killed. Bobby Kennedy was dead. A lot of other Americans maybe not so famous, including four little girls in a Birmingham church died so that every single American would have equal rights under the law but it was also a time of great hope. Medicare passed so the seniors would never again have to fear being bankrupted because they became ill. Head Start passed the first investment in children under the age of five, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the first African American justice to the United States Supreme Court. We felt like we were all in this together that if one person was left behind then America wasn't as strong as it should be or as good as it could be. We were all in it together. Now the president ran as a uniter, not a divider, and there wasn't any evidence for that anymore than there was for those weapons of mass destruction or all those bombs. The president used the word quota five or six times on the evening news to talk about the University of Michigan Affirmative Action Program. Not only did the most conservative Supreme Court since the Dred Scott decision disagreed with him on that one. But the word quota every politician and every pollster in America knows is a race coded word deliberately designed to appeal to people's fears that they may lose their job or their place at the university to a member of a community of color. In other words, the president played the race card and that alone entitles him to a one-way bus ticket back to Crawford, Texas. I am-I am tired of being divided in this country. I am tired of being divided by race. I'm tried of being divided by gender when the president thinks he knows better than an American woman what kind of reproductive health care that she ought to have. I'm tired of being divided by income. I'm tired of being divided by sexual orientation. I'm tired of being divided by religion. When we say-when we say we want our country back what we mean is we want the country that all of us were promised when we were 21 years old, a country where we are all in this together, where we could believe or we could hope again that America would be a better place as we grew older. We want the country back that John F. Kennedy talked about when he talked about passing the torch to the new generation and leaving a country to the new generation better off than we found it. Wow. I just noticed a whole lot of people came out here from San Francisco. I can't believe all these people. (Unintelligible.) Anybody here from Alaska? You know something we are going to take our country back. The other day-the other day I was in Manchester and I was giving a speech in Manchester to a lot of the hardworking volunteers that we-that have worked so hard and I want to thank some of those people. I want to thank-I want to thank, first of all, Karen Hicks our state director who has been absolutely unbelievable. Where is Karen Hicks? Come on up here. Come on. Come on. Not only Karen Hicks but how about all those incredibly hardworking people, staff members, and volunteers, hundreds of them from all over this state thank you so much for all you have done. And there's a long, long, long list of incredibly deserving people including an enormous number of people and I hardly dare single any of them out. I don't know is Fran Egbers (ph) here the super volunteer? Carol Moore (ph) another one, unbelievable. Meg, you and Gary have been so great. Thank you so much for all your help right from the beginning. Is Michael King here? Michael King our very first person that signed up right from the beginning, thank you. Now I know if I keep doing this I'm going to get in a lot of trouble. I do want to thank my brother Bill and my brother Jim for coming up here and my wonderful mother who came up and campaigned the day before her birthday and I would be remiss if I did not thank my fantastic wife Judy Dean. WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: We're going to break away from Howard Dean's speech before his supporters here in New Hampshire, continue to monitor what he's saying, clearly a much more subdued, sober speech than we heard eight nights ago in Des Moines, Iowa. Content and programming Copyright 2004 Cable News Network Transcribed under license by FDCH e-Media, Inc. http://www.lexis.com
|
.
.
 |
