Draft discussion notes - A Call to Service by John Kerry
4/22/04  Dawn F.

Chapter One - Why I am Running for President

“Like my parents, I have always hoped and often assumed that my own children will have more opportunities in life than I had and will live in a country and in a world where such opportunities are more widely shared and more deeply rooted than at any time in the past.  I am running for president in no small part to redeem that promise for the America to come.”

“In the name of ideology and on behalf of selfish interests, the Bush administration has been systematically dismantling just about everything government accomplished in the 1990s:  environmental protection, international diplomacy, substantial investments in basic scientific and technological research, fiscal discipline, and the commitment to a fairer society of opportunity for all.”

“I believe what America needs is a president determined to restore our sense of common national purpose.”

“On every major political issue, we should ask Americans to frame key political questions not in terms of what’s in it for them, but what’s in it for all of us. 

We should ask Americans to think of the federal budget not as a dispenser of benefits and confiscator of wealth but as a balance sheet of investments that we as a people have decided are important enough to tax ourselves to make.

We should ask Americans to think of our foreign policy not just as a projection of our influence and our military power but our principles and our freedoms.

We should ask Americans to think of the impending crisis in the Social Security and Medicare system not as a problem affecting the pocketbooks of seniors but as an intergenerational challenge to our willingness to lay aside a portion of our wealth for future needs we know that we will soon have.

We should ask Americans to think of energy policy not just in immediate terms of pump prices but in terms of our standing in the world and our capacity to sustain economic growth while preserving our environment at home.

And we should ask Americans to think of our civil liberties not as rights to be defended only when it is convenient and ignored when it is not as essential to who we are.”

“There is one other element of our Democratic heritage that I want to reclaim - our heritage as the party of reform.  ...Our reform agenda must include not only government programs but also our democratic system itself.  The time has come for us to be ashamed of living in the country with the lowest voting participation and the highest campaign spending of any advanced democratic society.”

Chapter Two - The Challenge of Protecting America and Promoting Its Values and Interests

“Our challenge is to expand the twentieth-century consensus that political freedom is the best guarantor of human rights and that economic freedom is the best engine for prosperity.”

“The president has used our armed forces since 9/11, but he has routinely and inexcusably failed to draw on our other international assets, including our values, our alliances, and the multilateral organizations we largely created.  By limiting its foreign policy to military responses, the Bush administration sells America short and leaves us more vulnerable than we should be.”

“Working through global institutions doesn’t tie our hands; it invests our aims with greater legitimacy, brings us vital support, and dampens the resentment that great power inevitably inspires.”

“One of the reasons I’m running for president is to oppose a Democratic trend - conceding international and security issues to the opposition party and consistently trying to focus campaigns on domestic issues.  The domestic-only strategy shows contempt for the heightened security concerns of our citizens, abandons a rich history of Democratic internationalism and worst of all, leaves the dangerous foreign policy and national; security views of the Republican Party unchallenged.”

Chapter Three - The Challenge of Expanding Our Common Wealth

“There are certain bedrock, mainstream principles that can and must power our engines of economic growth:

-  Economic growth is built on the talent and hard work of all our people, not just wealthy elites.

-  Both private and public investments play a role in building the infrastructure for growth.

-  Government must ensure a fair and honest marketplace for business competition, labor-management cooperation, and investors with enforceable standards of integrity for financial and accounting systems and corporate executives.

-  The progressive system of taxes, which distributes the burden of self-government in proportion tot he ability to pay, can and should be maintained without discouraging enterprise or wealth.”

“The Bush Administration has violated, indeed sometimes even waged war on, all these foundations of American economic policy.”

“All these investments - in energy independence, home-land security, chronic-disease research, job skills, and new economic infrastructure - are designed to boost long-term economic growth while meeting other critical national challenges.”

“We need an economic policy based on increasing our common wealth instead of squandering public resources to reward private privilege.  As I’ve made plain, this will mean reversing ill-advised tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.”

“It’s time to make a fundamental choice between two very different visions of the American economy.  The Bush administration’s vision is one in which Americans depend on the investment decisions of their wealthiest fellow-citizens for jobs, income, health care, skills, and technology.  I envision an America in which working families have a government that helps them find real opportunities, high paying jobs, and better lifestyles; in which middle-class families are first in line for tax cuts; and in which our country’s leaders know where to cut and where to invest to create economic growth while handling taxpayer’s dollars fairly and efficiently.”

Chapter Four - The Challenge of Creating World-Class Schools

“Many individual factors contribute to the mixed performance of our public schools... There are physical infrastructure problems - schools are falling apart.  There are teacher shortages, especially in critical fields like science, math, and special education and in high-need schools in poorer areas.  Reliance on property taxes to fund public education has resulted in large inequities in the resources available for schools.  Above all there’s a crisis of confidence among parents and taxpayers about the performance of traditional public schools.”

“I will make lifting the performance of public schools and giving them the tools and flexibility to succeed the top educational priority of my administration.”

“We need to place more emphasis on teaching and less on bureaucracy.  Many public schools are governed by a system that neither provides effective leadership at the top nor accepts leadership in individual schools or classrooms.  The result is that no one is really held accountable for the education of our kids.”

“We need to give public institutions more freedom from micromanagement in exchange for strict accountability for achieving tangible improvements in the knowledge and skills of our children.”

“We need to adopt the American Federation of Teacher’s proposal for greater mentoring and induction training for new teachers as part of a broader effort to encourage continuing professional development for teachers.”

“We need to create a Twenty-first Century Teaching Corps of midcareer professionals loaned and paid for by the corporate sector, which would recognize the huge stake that business has in the education of the next generation of executives, technicians, managers, and workers.”

“We need to pay more attention to what happens before kids enter school and what they do after the bell rings each day to send them to homes that are too often empty.”

“We should expand the child tax credit as quickly as possible.  At the same time we should begin to catch up with the rest of the world by providing paid parental leave for parents with infants.”

“In every area of education policy a Kerry administration will understand the value of world-class schools not as an end in itself but as the means by which our country prepares its citizenry for a dramatically evolving national and world economy.”

Chapter Five - The Challenge of  Creating a Modern Health-Care System

“I offer a proposal that breaks new ground in the health-insurance debate by simultaneously addressing three challenges that are central to modernizing our health care system:  first and foremost, bringing costs under control; offering access to affordable coverage, with plenty of choices, to every American; and guaranteeing that every child in America will have health insurance coverage.”

“Here in summary form is my bottom line:

-  All Americans will have access to the same health-care coverage that their member of Congress has today.

-  A commitments to work until every American has affordable health insurance - starting with a plan that covers 99 percent of children and 96 percent of all Americans.

-  Contain soaring health-care costs by making prescription drugs more affordable, getting rid of frivolous lawsuits, reducing uncompensated care, and giving patients affordable health-care choices.

-  Relief to employers who offer affordable coverage to their employees by covering a portion of their highest cost cases.

-  Save costs by cutting bureaucracy; that cuts $350 billion a year out of the health-care system.”

Chapter Six - The Challenge of Defending the Environment and Achieving Energy Independence

“A Kerry Administration will put America back into the mainstream of respect for scientific evidence, technological progress and bipartisan action on energy and the environment.  Those who deny our responsibility for stewardship of the earth and its resources will be dismissed from positions of influence.”

“It’s time to issue and American declaration of independence from oil.  We spend 20 billion dollars a year on oil imports from the Persian Gulf.  Too often these funds pour into the pockets of some of the planet’s most uncooperative and regressive regimes.  And they can too easily be diverted to finance the very terrorists who seek to destroy us.  We need a new strategy that’s consistent with our energy needs, our environmental needs, our economic needs and our national security.”

“The goal is simple but revolutionary:  for the first time in human history, to harness the natural world around us to light and power the world we live in.  The sun, the wind, water and a rich array of crops can provide us with secure forms of energy at reasonable costs for a modern twenty-first-century economy.”

“The federal government itself can lead the way and use its enormous purchasing power to bring about change - a general principal of a Kerry Administration and one that’s of particular importance in this area.  With 500,000 buildings under his jurisdiction and a huge fleet of cares, Uncle Sam is the largest single consumer of energy in the entire world.  With the right leadership, we can demonstrate better than any other single party all the environmental and financial savings attainable by energy efficiencies.  As president I will demand that the federal government take steps to cut its energy bill 20 percent by 2020 - and will challenge state and local governments, corporations, universities, small businesses and hospitals to do the same.”

“My proposals for both energy and environmental protection will place these subjects back on the front burner of the national debate where they belong and where they will be in integral importance to our budget policy, trade policy, and foreign policy.”

Chapter Seven - The Challenge of Reviving Democracy and Citizenship

“If we are to stand as the world’s role model for freedom, we need to remain vigilant about our own civil liberties.  If we are to stand as the world’s role model for democracy, we need to become vigilant about participation in our own democratic system.  If we are to stand as the world’s role model for citizenship, we need to become far more focused on what we expect American citizens to give back in exchange for the blessings of freedom and justice.”

“My proposal is to engage more than a million Americans a year in voluntary full or part-time national service positions, with millions more volunteering some portion of their time and talents in less formal ways.”

“Our great country, the world’s oldest and strongest democracy, can become even greater if we commit ourselves to helping one another here at home and helping others beyond our borders achieve the values of freedom and democracy that we have championed tot he envy of the whole world.  This is my call to service and yours.”