They Didn't Sign Up for All of This

I decided a while back that it would be a good idea if people could actually see what Hillary Clinton's been saying, rather than repeating misconceptions about her. Here's a speech that she gave on June 5th to a group of supporters.


There are issues, and there are lots of challenges we have faced as a nation. I know there are strong opinions on issues we've been dealing with and I respect that greatly. I think what is important now is that we stand together and try to change the direction of our country. I don't think anyone can look at our country and not be proud.

Five and a half years ago, we had a lot of challenges that we needed to confront as a nation. And I just getting my feeling in the Senate when September 11th happened - it really changed everything - it changed everything, the extraordinary damage that was done to our city and individual lives. But I think all of us, whether we we're directly impacted or not, knew that NY had an unprecedented set of challenges that we had to respond to. And I'm very proud of the resilience and the patriotism and the courage and the conviction that so many New Yorkers brought to the day, weeks, months and years following 9/11.

Some of you in the crowd, I know have been great champions of the work that we tried to do to take care of the victims of 9/11 and their families to make sure that they we're given the support that they needed. Many people worked with me to try to contend with the health effects that so many of our first responders are confronting because of the toxic mix of the air after the collapse of the buildings.

But every New Yorker I know has really stood up and spoken up on behalf of not only the survivors, victims of 9/11, not only our heroes, our firefighters, police officers, emergency workers, and all who rushed to down to Ground Zero to conduct the most successful rescue mission in the history of our nation or maybe even the world. But there was the sense that we're all in this together, that we had to support each other. And that's how I tried to make decisions over the last now nearly five years. It has been a very difficult set of issues about how do we protect ourselves, how we remain vigilant, how we deal with those who wish us harm - because make no mistake about it, they are out there, they are here they are no respecter of geographic boundary or sex or race or gender or anything else.

And so, trying to balance off what we have to do to continue to make America a country we can be proud of, to focus on challenges confronting us and to really keep in mind the next generation, to me is a hallmark of what you are supposed to do in public life, while recognizing that as New Yorkers we have to take on the additional responsibility of doing everything we could to protect our city and our state and our country.

There was a great opportunity after 9/11 for the entire country to come together. I had some basic disagreements with the current administration, but more heartbreaking to me was the decision made by the highest levels of the administration to segment our country, to go after specific hot button issues - really divide us - when after 9/11, I think the President could have asked us to do anything and we would have done it.

If he had said, "I wish you would use less gas so that we would be less dependent upon foreign oil," we would have done it.

If he had asked to us to be more cognizant about how we treat each other and to really look for ways that we could work to meet the needs of all children - particularly poor children so that they had the chance to fulfill their God-given potential - we would have done it.

If he had said, "You know, we need to really tackle the health care problem now because we're losing jobs, we can't keep doing what we're doing - it's just not working," we would have done it.

There were so many opportunities, and unfortunately a different kind of decision was made. We're seeing again this week, when I leave here to fly back to Washington, we're going to be debating this week an amendment to the United States Constitution that bars gay marriage.

Now, when I travel around and speak with people who I represent, and hear about everything from terrorism to gas prices to childhood health care to energy independence to global climate change to affordable housing - there's a long list - but this is not on the list.

It is unfortunately on the list for the political machine of the White House and the Republican majority, and so I hope that as we weigh the campaign for reelection and I try to help elect Democrats around the country to take back one or two houses of Congress, we will all stand up and be counted.

We will all stand up for a return to fiscal responsibility that will give us a chance to make the right decisions and investments that will make our country richer and stronger in the future. We will stand against the wrongheaded decisions that are being made by the administration and Congress that are slashing so many of the programs to the most vulnerable among us and not giving people the confidence to make smart investments in energy independence and protecting ourselves against global climate change - and so many of those problems that none of us can deal with individually - we have to work together, and we have to work through our government.

We need to stand up to stand up on behalf of energy independence; it is the most important challenge when you look at where we are economically, from a serious perspective, from the environment. Just in the last few days, we had threats form Iran that they we're going to somehow choke off our oil supply. Well, I hope that doesn't happen. Wouldn't it be a great to be in a position where we could basically say, "Go Jump in the Lake"? -- Where we wouldn't have to be dependent on the theocrats and the autocrats and the dictators that control so much of the oil supply of our nation.

And I hope everybody sees Vice President Gore's movie, because it shows us how to make smart decisions about how we can finally deal with this issue.

And health care, which I mentioned, does not go away as an issue; in fact it is even more because the costs keep going on the number of uninsured people keep going on, the jobs we move keep going up, and yet we are not tackling this problem in a way that we should.

And there are things that we should do right now. I've worked in a bipartisan way every chance I could - obviously there are issues like social security or a women's right to choose where you can't work in a bipartisan way; you have to stand your ground - but when it comes to changing certain things in health care, you can work together. I've worked with Senator Bill Frist to pass legislation that will give us a health information technology program for computerized medical records that will save us billions of dollars, and improve Medicare, and improve quality health care, and that's the kind of approach we need so we can get a good base of information to be able to make the hard decisions about how we're going to deal with our health care situation.

When it comes to education - there are a lot of educators in this room - we still have not figured out how we're going to provide resources so that school districts can help children learn without having to raise property taxes to an unaffordable level. And what we have to do is fully fund No Child Left Behind Program and fully fund special education, so that those funds are available and school districts can use them to equally fund children's education as they need.

We also know that when you look at the various issues that we're confronting as a nation, that it's not enough for us to just hope that we're going to have better relations around the world. We need to get back in the business of building alliances, not alienation, because we need friends and allies. We need people who we will pick up the phone and call one of our government officials, or their government, to support suspicious activity. We need people to go out rooting for freedom and democracy and decency, not rooting against us. And we can't do that unless we have an attitude in our country that reaches out and includes people, not pushes them away. And we're gong to have to be changing how we relate to the rest of the world if we expect it to be successful in the future.

We also know that as we look around the world that there are so many people who are suffering from diseases like HIV, AIDs, malaria, tuberculosis, who are suffering from environmental degradation and the lack of clean drinking water, who are easy prey for those who take the damage of them. The United States has been a beacon of hope and opportunity. The number one country in the Islamic world that has the highest opinion of the United States today is Indonesia. Why? Because after the tsunami, we were there to help, and that's how we need to be seen to win the hearts and minds of people around the world.

We need to be willing to stand up and fight up for those values. And here at home, we need to continue to protect and nurture that which had made America great and has made it the envy of the world.

Now there is a way to track down terrorists that is within the rule of law and not outside of it. We know that our civil liberties and our right to privacy and our individual freedoms are not a luxury - they are what set us apart from the rest of the world. Our respect for the rule of law is what makes America unique and gives us the confidence to defend against our government, to be politely active and fight for causes that we think are important. We cannot allow our constitutional democracy to be eroded. We can have global security and liberty.

Our founders did that and we can be smart enough to do it as well. I also believe that we protect a woman's right to choose. We have to ensure that abortion is legal, safe, and rare. My good friend Nita Lowey and I, introduced a resolution in Congress - she in the House, I in the Senate - asking Congress to go on record in support of family planning. We want to get people to register their votes, because this is not just about abortion, this is also about contraception. There is a concerted effort to turn the clock back on the women's law. And we all need - Republicans, Democrats, and Independents - we all need to stand together and make it very clear that we will not go back. As I travel around our state, I'm encouraged by the number of the people who come to my events who say they didn't support me last time and tell me that they are Republican, and I always say, "We're glad you're here. Welcome." And I also ask them, "Well, why are you here?" And they always say something like, "I didn't sign up for all of this."

They didn't sign up for a government that interferes with personal, private, intimate relations.

They didn't sign up for a government that's sending us into debt.

They didn't sign up to be the largest debtors in the history of the world where we have to borrow $60 billion a month from China, Japan, and others.

They didn't sign up for Terry Schiavo to be turned into a tragic, political problem.

They didn't sign up for the United States government who totally dismantled the Federal Emergency Management Agency and battled with colleagues and didn't know what to do.

They didn't sign up for the mean-spirited divisiveness against gays and lesbians and tried to make it somehow a political issue as to the life you lead and who you are.

They didn't sign up for the politicization of fining; they didn't sign up for the Environmental Protection Agency - which has turned into a misnomer - to tell people mercury in the air and arsenic in water won't hurt you.

They didn't sign up for an FDA that refuses to make a decision about the emergency contraception known as Plan B.

They didn't sign up for a president who denies global climate changes and refuses to deal with reality of what is happening in our world that has far-reaching consequences for our children and our children's children.

There's a long list why people are suddenly saying, "We didn't sign up for this." You know, this is not a conservative administration; there is nothing conservative about it. It is radical; it is undermining our constitutional democracy. It's turning back years and years of our constitution.

I think we've got the potential for a very positive election in this November if we all work together. We have races right here in New York where Democrats are running for Congress in traditionally Republican districts and finding a lot of support.

We have races all over the country where people run for the Senate, run for the House, are finding that they have a receptive audience, because if we don't take back one or both houses of Congress, we cannot change the direction of the country; we cannot convince the administration of the Republican majority to make decisions based on evidence, not ideology. We can't deal with what we need to do in Iraq if we don't have a Congress that can conduct investigations and make it absolutely clear that the administration, that their failure in Iraq has endangered not only our men and women in uniform, not only the Iraqi people, but the entire region.

I'm very optimistic not only about the election but about our country. You know, I really believe that we do fit into what Winston Churchill once described where he says, "You know the American people, they always do the right thing after trying nearly everything else," and I believe that. I know that. We're dealing in a real tactical manner with the challenges that we face, when we elect new people who will be open and willing to work together to seek common ground, but to have more citizens involved as well, because we are a enjoying them in our country.

You know I can see very clearly, we can go on one path where we ignore our problems, where a very small percentage of people - like my husband and me, we do very well - but where the rest of the country kind of marches in place or is glued to the ground because we're not creating the rapid opportunity; we're making it more expensive for kids to go to college than we did 25 years ago, we're shutting the door on working young people who want a better a life or come down on pre-school programs when we know if we don't give kids a good head start, they'll never catch up. We're turning our backs on how give people decent opportunities for housing and transportation.

We know what the pillars of the middle class look like; we've been taking advantage of them for more than 50 years in our nation, and we are the beneficiaries of that.

So I don't want to go down the path where we undermine the quality of the seniors living in our country, where we have a college needed in the community, where the nation venture forth from our world recreational travel because we're not wanted. That does not have to be the picture. Instead, we can begin working together again - rebuilding the consensus we had in this country until relatively recently about what we needed to do, to build a strong America at home and aboard. And when we do that, we will know how the resilience and energy came from right here in New York. The example that was set by New Yorkers on 9/11 and in the weeks since is the example set by my friend Lauren Manning, who is here today and so many others who have suffered.

That's what makes America great, and we will once again reclaim our greatness. Thank you all very much!