Elizabeth Warren's 2012 Democratic Convention
Speech was show stopping. Warren truly marked her place at the national level
with the audience grasping speech that allowed her to showcase what she stands
in and believes in a while demonstrating what the Democratic party stands
for.
Speech
Transcript:
Thank you! I'm Elizabeth
Warren, and this is my first Democratic Convention. Never thought I'd run for
senate. And I sure never dreamed that I'd get to be the warm-up act for
President Bill Clinton—an amazing man, who had the good sense to marry one of the
coolest women on the planet. I want to give a special shout out to the
Massachusetts delegation. I'm counting on you to help me win and to help
President Obama win.
I'm here tonight to talk
about hard-working people: people who get up early, stay up late, cook dinner
and help out with homework; people who can be counted on to help their kids,
their parents, their neighbors, and the lady down the street whose car broke
down; people who work their hearts out but are up against a hard truth—the game
is rigged against them.
It wasn't always this way.
Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edge of the middle
class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had
a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our
house. My three brothers all served in the military. One was career. The second
worked a good union job in construction. The third started a small business.
Me, I was waiting tables at
13 and married at 19. I graduated from public schools and taught elementary
school. I have a wonderful husband, two great children, and three beautiful
grandchildren. And I'm grateful, down to my toes, for every opportunity that
America gave me. This is a great country. I grew up in an America that invested
in its kids and built a strong middle class; that allowed millions of children
to rise from poverty and establish secure lives. An America that created Social
Security and Medicare so that seniors could live with dignity; an America in
which each generation built something solid so that the next generation could
build something better.
But for many years now, our
middle class has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered. Talk to the construction
worker I met from Malden, Massachusetts, who went nine months without finding
work. Talk to the head of a manufacturing company in Franklin trying to protect
jobs but worried about rising costs. Talk to the student in Worcester who
worked hard to finish his college degree, and now he's drowning in debt. Their
fight is my fight, and it's Barack Obama's fight too.
People feel like the system
is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: they're right. The system
is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies.
Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs—the
same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut
around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank
them.
These folks don't resent that
someone else makes more money. We're Americans. We celebrate success. We just
don't want the game to be rigged. We've fought to level the playing field
before. About a century ago, when corrosive greed threatened our economy and
our way of life, the American people came together under the leadership of
Teddy Roosevelt and other progressives, to bring our nation back from the
brink.
We started to take children
out of factories and put them in schools. We began to give meaning to the words
"consumer protection" by making our food and medicine safe. And we
gave the little guys a better chance to compete by preventing the big guys from
rigging the markets. We turned adversity into progress because that's what we
do.
Americans are fighters. We
are tough, resourceful and creative. If we have the chance to fight on a level
playing field—where everyone pays a fair share and everyone has a real
shot—then no one can stop us. President Obama gets it because he's spent his
life fighting for the middle class. And now he's fighting to level that playing
field—because we know that the economy doesn't grow from the top down, but from
the middle class out and the bottom up. That's how we create jobs and reduce
the debt.
And Mitt Romney? He wants to
give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires. But for middle-class families
who are hanging on by their fingernails? His plans will hammer them with a new
tax hike of up to 2,000 dollars. Mitt Romney wants to give billions in breaks
to big corporations—but he and Paul Ryan would pulverize financial reform,
voucher-ize Medicare, and vaporize Obamacare.
The Republican vision is
clear: "I've got mine, the rest of you are on your own." Republicans
say they don't believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government
to help themselves and their powerful friends. After all, Mitt Romney's the guy
who said corporations are people.
No, Governor Romney,
corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs,
they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And
that matters. That matters because we don't run this country for corporations,
we run it for people. And that's why we need Barack Obama.
After the financial crisis,
President Obama knew that we had to clean up Wall Street. For years, families
had been tricked by credit cards, fooled by student loans and cheated on
mortgages. I had an idea for a consumer financial protection agency to stop the
rip-offs. The big banks sure didn't like it, and they marshaled one of the
biggest lobbying forces on earth to destroy the agency before it ever saw the
light of day. American families didn't have an army of lobbyists on our side,
but what we had was a president—President Obama leading the way. And when the
lobbyists were closing in for the kill, Barack Obama squared his shoulders,
planted his feet, and stood firm. And that's how we won.
By the way, just a few weeks
ago, that little agency caught one of the biggest credit card companies
cheating its customers and made it give people back every penny it took, plus
millions of dollars in fines. That's what happens when you have a president on
the side of the middle class.
President Obama believes in a
level playing field. He believes in a country where nobody gets a free ride or
a golden parachute. A country where anyone who has a great idea and rolls up
their sleeves has a chance to build a business, and anyone who works hard can
build some security and raise a family. President Obama believes in a country
where billionaires pay their taxes just like their secretaries do, and—I can't
believe I have to say this in 2012—a country where women get equal pay for equal
work.
I grew up in the Methodist
Church and taught Sunday school. One of my favorite passages of scripture is:
"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren,
ye have done it unto me." Matthew 25:40. The passage teaches about God in
each of us, that we are bound to each other and called to act. Not to sit, not
to wait, but to act—all of us together.
Senator Kennedy understood
that call. Four years ago, he addressed our convention for the last time. He
said, "We have never lost our belief that we are all called to a better
country and a newer world." Generation after generation, Americans have
answered that call. And now we are called again. We are called to restore
opportunity for every American. We are called to give America's working
families a fighting chance. We are called to build something solid so the next
generation can build something better.
So let me ask you—let me ask
you, America: are you ready to answer this call? Are you ready to fight for
good jobs and a strong middle class? Are you ready to work for a level playing
field? Are you ready to prove to another generation of Americans that we can
build a better country and a newer world?
Joe Biden is ready. Barack
Obama is ready. I'm ready. You're ready. America's ready. Thank you! And God
bless America!
Throughout her speech Elizabeth Warren uses the
word "We" and "Our" to show that she is just like the
average American, which she is. Warren tells the story of her own personal
experiences and how our nation abled her to conquered her dreams, and
made those dreams reality. Warren also uses rhetorical questions to get
her point across and to fire up the audience. Warren also uses a quotes from
the Bible to set a tone of her acceptance of religion. Warren is setting the
tone for President Obama in ways that shows change, passion, and the true
definition of what being an American is all about.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/transcript-elizabeth-warrens-democratic-convention-speech/story?id=17164726
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzspAfNkGz0
