My Stump Speech

Bill

My fellow Americans

It's with the greatest pleasure that I come before you today to present my ideas for moving us  out of the path of sure fiscal destruction that we're headed down, and back to the ideals that have made us a great nation since our founding. Ideals of initiative, hard work, equality of opportunity independence of spirit, and faith in family and each other. Ideals of fairness, and justice.

But to do that, we need to come to some basic agreement about the role of government in our our lives as both a vehicle for change and a guarantor of stability.

Here's what government can and should do to promote those ideals we so dearly share. It should promote  initiative by rewarding hard work and forbidding the exploitation of the vulnerable among us  It should provide a basic template for national progress. It should promote reasonable safety and quality of life, in the air we breath, the water we drink, and the bridges we cross.  It should insure our safety inside and outside of our own borders, and demand and enforce equal justice under law.

But, my fellow Americans, here is what government cannot and should not do. It cannot guarantee equality of outcomes. or a good life for all. It cannot invigorate the lazy, redeem the irresponsible or purify the corrupt. It can set a standard for national character but it cannot determine the individual characters of its citizens. That's up to each one of us, when we get up in the morning kiss our loved ones goodbye and head out to whatever small place in the larger mechanism that we occupy.

We can, and we will argue in this election season about what to spend our hard earned national treasure on. We can debate priorities, argue outcomes, and promote values. But no matter what we decide,  we simply must no longer accept the insanity of relentlessly spending more than we take in. We can find a solution that requires painful compromise on all sides. Or can we let events overtake us, or react belatedly and ineffectively to avoidable the the inevitable crisis if we go on doing what we're doing now, which is to blame blame everyone but ourselves.

Eli