To all of you, the loyal Democrats, who fought the lonely fight here in Wyoming for so long. Thank you.
To all of you new to this, who bring us energy and commitment and, yes, HOPE, welcome! We've been waiting for you.
This is our time.

In a little over five months, the era of George W. Bush, of Dick Cheney, of Karl Rove, of lobbyists writing laws, of the environment being pillaged, of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, of the Bill of Rights being trampled, that long national nightmare, is going to be over.
The tide is in our favor. In the last three by- elections Democrats won a seat in Illinois the Republicans had held for 70 years; a seat in Louisiana they'd held for 33 years; and a seat in Mississippi that George Bush carried by 20 points. We could win 5-10 Senate seats. We have a great candidate for Congress in Gary Trauner. We have good candidates for Senate and up and down the ticket. No Republican is safe. We can and will win in Wyoming.

We have to, for us and for our children. And for my children, four of whom are here today. We're a typical Democratic family: we've got supporters of Hillary AND Obama. But we'll all work to win in November.
Allow me a brief story from the movies, since Marcia mentioned "Apollo 13."

Acting is kind of like politics. They say the hardest thing to convey is sincerity - when you can fake that, you've got it made. When you're making movies actors, always ask you, Why does my character act the way he or she does? What's the motivation? So to help out, I went to Jim Lovell, the astronaut Tom Hanks was going to play in Apollo 13. I said, "Jim, you and your two companions were 100,000 miles from earth when your ship was disabled. There you were, our home planet the size of a marble out your window, not knowing if you could ever get back. No human beings, in the history of our species, have ever been in such terrible danger, lost in space so far from home. How did it feel? What were you thinking?"
"Oh, not much," Jim said.
I went to Tom Hanks and I said, "You're on your own, pal."
We don'’t have that problem. We're not on our own. And we know why we're here. We know what our motivations are.
Let me give some.
We're loyal Democrats.
We're fed up - and yes, maybe bitter - with what the Bush-McCain era has done to America and the world.
We know we're at a crucial point in our history and we need to get on the right track.

We know we can do better, and we're inspired by our two excellent candidates.

We want our country back and we want to get it back now.

And we will.

But like movies, elections have their own story line. What's important in May can be forgotten in November, what's crucial in November may be unimagined in May.

One thing we know: The Republicans will revert to the same old playbook.

They will question our patriotism: they'll talk about flag pins and preachers and being proud of America, they'll say we don't get chills when they play the star spangled banner, that we don't have American values, that we don't love America enough. Do they love America more than we do?

NO.

Is that what the election should be about?

NO.

Did anyone ask Abe Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy if he wore a flag pin?

NO.

Here's what I tell my Republican friends. If you think the biggest challenge facing America is gay marriage;

If you think America shouldn't give children health care and veterans the means to attend college;

If you think we can't protect the environment, take steps to stop global warning, or become energy independent;

If you think we should trample on rights that have taken centuries to win;

If you think people making over $500,000 a year need more tax cuts, but ordinary working Americans need less health care, lower pensions, and higher college costs;

If you think we should talk tough to the world but act stupid;

If you think we should be in Iraq for a hundred years;

Then the Republican party is for you.

But if you think we've got to restore our bill of rights and fundamental freedoms;

Forge a new energy policy and become independent from dictators and terrorists;

Protect the environment;

Invest in American schools, highways, and airports;

Give every American access to health care;

And get out of this senseless, tragic, disastrous war in Iraq;

If you think America can do better,

If you think we can still inspire and lead the world;

If you believe in, yes, HOPE, then come join us.

Roll up your sleeves.

Because we’ve got a lot of work to do.

 

Others can better discuss the mess the Bush-McCain era has made of America and the world.

I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about why we Democrats are the best hope for a strong military and a safer world.

And our security begins with energy.

I'm third-generation oil patch. My grandfather worked the Texas boomtowns in the 1920s. My father grew up in tents pitched by derricks, then went to work in Baytown, Texas for the Exxon refinery, the largest in the world. I worked summers in the refineries and chemical plants along the Houston Ship Channel.

So when the Department of Environmental Quality says ozone levels in Sublette County are worse than Houston. When they tell people to stay indoors. Indoors! In WY-O-MING. I know there's a bum deal going on.

I know what oil and gas fields look like. I know when you take the trouble to make working on them safe and when you don't. And we're not. You put thousands of wells on land where you can still see the Oregon Trail, if you clear roads into the Wyoming Range, you'll never get it back. We can protect our national treasures and have a sane energy policy. It's a matter of life and death.  

When the EPA and the Clean Air Act were passed, everyone at our refinery said the same thing Bush-McCain say now: that we couldn't afford it, that it would ruin the business, that it would cost jobs, that the economy would collapse. You know what happened? We invented incredible new technologies to clean up refineries not even imagined then. We lead the world in those technologies now, and they're worth billions of dollars and employ thousands of people.

If we'd done the same with Detroit and made them hit ambitious mileage standards, maybe Ford and GM wouldn't be in so much trouble right now.

I had the privilege to hear John Kennedy give his speech in Houston vowing that America would put a man on the moon by the end of the Sixties. What an absurd thing to say! We were way behind the Soviet Union in space; we'd barely got our rockets in the air. It would take metals and technologies not even imagined when Kennedy gave his speech. But you know what? If you challenge America, America stands up. We got together and did it.

When I wrote "Apollo 13" I talked to the controllers who'd run the Apollo program. Those capsules had less computer power than your cell phone. Some of them didn't even have transistors. But they got to the moon and back. And to a man, those engineers said that for all our new technology, we couldn't put a man on the moon today. We couldn't do anything like it. We're too selfish, too satisfied, too safe.

I think they're wrong. And I think we've got an even greater challenge. If we had a president who challenged us to become energy independent, who asked something of us, who inspired and mobilized America-- I don't just think we could do it. I know we could.

We'd build a whole new industry. We'd create millions of new jobs. We'd fight global warming and preserve our environment. And we'd free ourselves from the sheikhs, dictators and terrorists who control oil today. We pay them, they pay the terrorists, our troops get blown up.

All we need is a president willing to call on the creative genius of the American people, to challenge us and not scare us. That's the biggest security challenge of the next generation. That's how we'll be strong again.

My grandfather served in World War I, my father in World War 2. I was a Marine in Viet Nam. The longest love affair of my life is with the United States Marine Corps. I believe in its values, its commitment, its ethic of sacrifice and excellence. In a soft world of self-indulgence, there's no fat in the Marine Corps soul.

After 9/11, my son David, who had just graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in English, enlisted with great idealism. He endured the grueling training to become a Para Rescue Jumper in the AF, which is like a Navy Seal, and served three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan with elite special operations troops. When he was there I couldn't answer the phone at night. I couldn't understand how the rest of the country was acting as if there wasn't a war on. I couldn't watch the news. And I was one of the lucky ones. My son came home.

Every time I hear about 5 GIs blown up, or ten GIs wounded, I don't see them as those faceless kids in goggles. I see my son. I see his friends, who I'd come to know as the best and brightest young Americans I'd ever met. I see their faces. I know their wives and families. It is personal.

When you send men and women to war, you don't just ask them to risk their lives. You ask them to do what every fiber of their being and every value taught them tells them not to do: you ask them to kill. There better be a good reason. Your country's survival better be at stake. Because if it's not, if you abuse their patriotism and their sacrifice, then you create a hole in their souls, and a hole in the soul of America.

With each tour my son's idealism - and those of the men in his unit - eroded. He grew to hate the war. He served with pride but it was no longer for all the empty words Bush-McCain kept throwing around. It was for the men in his unit. It was for himself.

When he left the military he decided to dedicate himself to helping wounded American vets, men and women whose government had failed them once when it sent them to an ill-conceived, mismanaged, and wrong-headed war, then failed them again when they came home.

To raise money he started a non-profit and swam the Strait of Gibraltar with another military buddy. They were on Good Morning America. The documentary about them will be shown at the JH film festival.

The film co-stars real men and women who were terribly injured and disfigured. The ones who are invisible, whose faces look like melted candles, who can't see or hear or walk. Whose disability benefits were delayed or denied. Whose spouses lost their jobs trying to take care of them. Who've lost their homes and their hope and been forgotten. More than a thousand a month attempt suicide. Twenty per cent, more than 300,000, are affected with PTSD or TBI, including my son's best friend.

So this war is personal to me. When I see George Bush, who dodged the war, and Dick Cheney, who dodged the draft - he had other priorities - talking about "sacrifice"

When I listen to Rich Limbaugh, who dodged the draft and said, of the suffering of today's veterans: well, they're volunteers;

When I watch Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity, who've never volunteered to do anything for America but talk;

When I see the Bush daughters flirting around the world when women their age are serving and dying in Iraq;

When I see friends from the national guard or the reserve called up, then called up again, then called up again;

When I see all those clean-cut, young Republicans cheerleading for a war that they wouldn't think of serving in;

When I see George Romney compare his son's working on his campaign with military service;

When the president and John McCain tell me it's more important to give tax cuts to the rich than to ask us to pay for this war, billions of dollars my kids and grand-kids will have to pay back;

When coffins of dead young Americans are brought home in secret and some cremated in pet cemeteries;

When we've created five million refugees in Iraq and taken in less than 10,000;

When we cage people without trials for years at Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and treat them like animals;

When we throw away the Bill of Rights here at home;

When I hear the President has given up golf to show his commitment to the troops;

When I see John McCain and George Bush oppose more money for veterans to go to college - that's my son, by the way --

Well, I take it personally.

And it makes me mad.

I've had enough of George Bush and John McCain's war.

I've had enough of the pictures of nice American families, the mom with her arms around her children and the caption saying they'd just celebrated their anniversary when she was killed.

I've had enough of the pictures of wounded Americans trying to learn to walk or talk or eat again, of the African American West Point graduate killed in Iraq. These are men and women who would enrich our nation, and we need them. Their wives and husbands, their children and their parents, they need them, too.

I've had enough of the pictures I don't see but can too vividly imagine. Of the coffins coming home. Of the Iraqi children dead in hospitals, their homes destroyed, the cars with children in them blown away. The millions of refugees. The women murdered for not being married or not wearing a head scarf.

I've had enough of throwing billions down a rathole. Ten billion unaccounted for by the Pentagon. Another ten billion unaccounted for by the Provisional Authority. Another 3.5 billion in cash that simply disappeared. Tens of billions of our hard-earned money given to contractors who were Republican cronies or simply shell corporations with nothing more than a post office box.

When I'd finished my year in Viet Nam, when I couldn't wait to get on that freedom bird and come home, I couldn't. You know why? Because I'd signed out for a shovel and hadn't returned it. The supply sergeant told me the taxpayers had paid for that shovel and I better bring it back or he wouldn't sign my departure papers. I had to go down to the black market and buy one. That's how we used to do things, before we got the Bush-McCain gang who think that taxpayers' hard-earned money, even in wartime, should be shoveled into the pockets of corporations as quickly as possible.

How much will this war cost? Two trillion? Three? Think of what we could have done with that money. Health care, social security, rebuilding America, investing in our future in a world that doesn't assume America is going to lead anymore, because we've forgotten what's important. We've squandered away our strength.

We've got 160,000 troops in two countries bigger than Texas and California, with 60 million people who speak seven or eight languages, none of which we understand. In those circumstances, 160,000 Americans can win battles, they might even win a short war. But they can not control the destiny of those countries over the long run. 

Yes, we face threats. But to compare Iran to Nazi Germany is grandiose melodrama, like comparing Saddam Hussein, a tin-pot dictator, to Adolph Hitler. It gives politicians the World War II disease. They wake up every morning and think they're Winston Churchill.

If we get out of Iraq tomorrow, there could be even more violence than there is now, there could be partition, Iran and Syria might have more influence. But if we get out five years from now, the same things could happen. We don't know. But we do know we can't solve this. American soldiers are only putting off the inevitable. The Iraqis have to solve it. And the Iranians, the Saudis, the Syrians will have to be involved. But once we're out, we won't be fueling the hatred of the Muslim world. We won't be making more new terrorists for each bomb we drop and each door we kick in.

John McCain and George Bush tell us that getting out will embolden terrorists, lead to genocide, destroy our standing in the world, and maybe even cause climate change. They want to stay in til we win. They also told us Saddam had helped Al Queda, that he had weapons of mass destruction, that we'd be greeted as liberators and that the war would pay for itself. So their track record on predicting what's going to happen isn't that great.

The truth is, history has a way of surprising you. For example, in 1968, seven years into the Viet Nam War, Richard Nixon was elected because he had a plan to end the war. He changed his mind. He said we couldn't settle for defeat. Like John McCain, he said we had to win. If we'd got out right away, he told us, there'd be a bloodbath. The Soviet Union would win a propaganda victory and the Chinese Communists would establish a beachhead in Southeast Asia. Just like John McCain tells us terrorists will be emboldened if we leave Iraq. So the war went on another five years. 25,000 more Americans and a million more Vietnamese died.

And four years after the last helicopter left Saigon, the Vietnamese went to war against, guess who? The Chinese Communists. And fifteen years later the Soviet Union collapsed, not us. We were stronger after we got out of Viet Nam. Not weaker. 

And oh yes, the Vietnamese? They're one of the most prosperous nations in Southeast Asia, and little by little the Communist Party is losing its grip. Not as fast as we would like, but freedom is coming. And it will be the Vietnamese themselves, not us, who win it for themselves. Just as it will be the Iraqis, not us, who will have to figure out their future.

Yes, everyone wants freedom. But they also want to be safe in their homes. They want their children to be safe in their schools. And they love their countries the same way we do. They don't want foreigners telling them what to do, kicking down their doors and dropping bombs on their villages and their cars. Because even if we say we're doing it for their own good, that we're America and we're the good guys, their children are still dead, their mother is still buried in the rubble, and they will always hate us.

If an enemy had wanted to weaken our country at home and abroad, to turn us against each other, to ruin our standing in the Middle East and around the world, to play into the hands of Al Queda and Iran, to weaken and exhaust our military, to distract us from the challenges of the 21^st Century, that enemy could not have had a better agent than--who?

George W. Bush!

And who wants to carry on his disastrous policies?

John McCain!

Are we going to let that happen?

NO!

One thing I learned when I was in Viet Nam.

You never, ever, leave anyone behind.

Sick, wounded, can't go any farther. You take him with you.

That's a Marine Corps value. That's an American value.

We're not going to leave anyone behind. It doesn't matter what your race, your religion, your gender or who you love. No matter whether you're rich or poor. You're coming with us.

And you know who else we're taking along? The Republicans!

That's right. We're bringing them, too.

 

Let's don't forget. These neo-con, right-wing zealots running the Republican Party today? They've hijacked a great party. They've made it abandon its core principles.

The Republicans have always been better than that. They passed the Endangered Species Act and established the Environmental Protection Agency. They respected the rights of citizens to privacy and freedom. They balanced budgets. They even raised taxes when the country needed them to. Ronald Reagan helped bring down the Berlin Wall without sending a single troop to battle. George H.W. Bush believed in service. He waged a limited war in Kuwait and Iraq, accomplished his objective, then brought the troops home. He worked hard with allies, he respected other nations.

A great political party, the party of Lincoln, has been taken hostage by agents of intolerance and right-wing idealogues who truly think they make their own reality.

John McCain knows that. But he's become part of what he himself used to despise.

Let me re-tell an old parable, the most famous one Jesus tells in the New Testament. The Good Samaritan. Because to me it seems a Wyoming kind of story. In Dubois, my neighbor is John Finley, whose family has run their ranch on the East Fork for more than 100 years. They raised cattle but never ate it themselves. It was too valuable. They ate venison and elk. When John was growing up, twice a year they'd take a wagon in to Riverton to get salt and flour and other staples. If someone along the way had run their wagon into a ditch, John's family would stop and help them out. It didn't matter who they were. The weather was tough and the land tougher. If your neighbor needed help, you helped him. That's why here in Wyoming neighbor is a verb. It's who we are. Love thy neighbor, even if you don't like him. It's our core value.

Everyone for himself. That's today's Republican core value. Sick? Old? Out of a job? Lost your pension? Lost your house? Wounded in Iraq and can't get disability? Can't afford to retire or pay tuition for your kids? Can't afford health insurance? Bankrupt because your wife or kids got sick? Tough luck.

Stuck in a ditch? Can't help you.

Well, these Republicans have run American into a ditch.

We need to get the real Republicans back, and we'll do it not by shouting at them, but by putting a smile on our face and winning them over, not by the passions of our own self-righteousness, but by the merits of our arguments.

We need their help. Weve got to work together, roll up our sleeves and get out of that ditch. 

We can't listen to those who'd divide us, who say that this candidate can't get white votes or that one black votes, who say this one can't get older women and that one can't get younger men.

This is slice and dice politics, micro-politics, the politics of reduction. Karl Rove politics.

They make us angry. They make us threatened. They invent and exaggerate gaffes and slights. They rub salt in the wounds. They say this is un-American or this is racist or this is sacrilegious. 

They divide us one from another. They don't want us to get serious. They want us to lose sight of what's important.

We can't take our eyes off the ball.

We can't let ourselves be divided.

This is our moment.

This is our time.

Government of the people, for the people, by the people is truly at stake. We can't rest a minute. We have to knock on one more door. Make one more phone call. Get out one more vote.

America needs us. The world needs us.

We're all on the same speck orbiting a small sun in a vast universe.

We can't leave anyone behind.

Let no one say that in this time of trial, in this time of decision, this fateful time, we didn't do our best. The way we did in 1860. 1932. 1960. The way we WILL do in 2008.

In the words of the WHO, we won't be fooled again. And to use another line from Apollo 13:

Failure is not an option.