I think the most important thing for us to make judgments about is what can we really do? What can we achieve?
I should say the leadership’s proposal in the Senate and the House are very unpopular. And when people realize it will raise taxes, raise their insurance premiums cost and explode the deficit, they think twice about it.
I would like to run for the mayor of the city of Chicago. That has always been an aspiration of mine even when I was in the House of Representatives.
As individuals, we will be judged in our lives by the totality of our actions. Not one thing will stand out. And I think that’s how we get judged by our colleagues and that’s how we get judged by the good lord.
The person who takes the oath of office in the next four months will shape not just the next four years, but the next forty years of our nation. In these next four years, we need proven leadership, proven judgment and proven values. America needs four more years of President Barack Obama.
The problem is, you have to look at Afghanistan also in a global context where we’ve canceled basically our missile defense system undercutting the Czech Republic in Poland. We’ve I think not dealt with Iran with the kind of resolve that would show that we understand the nature of that threat.
There was no blueprint or how-to manual for fixing a global financial meltdown, an auto crisis, two wars and a great recession, all at the same time.
Whose leadership, whose judgment, whose values do you want in the White House when that crisis lands like a thud on the Oval Office desk?
Because of the president’s leadership, every American will have access to affordable, quality health care.
We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually.
Everybody knows they’re on the Obama team: There isn’t vice presidential vs. presidential division, there’s not a generational pull. People have internalized that this is a real moment in history.
I don’t want to go negative on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he didn’t pass an economic deal in the first 100 days. We have passed the largest Recovery Act in the history of the country.
I saw the president make the tough calls in the Situation Room – and today, our troops in Iraq have finally come home so America can do some nation building here at home. That was the change that we believed in. That was the change we fought for. That was the change President Obama delivered.
I still believe the Lewinsky investigation was way off from the focus of what Whitewater was, which turned out to be nothing at the end of the process. And I think that there were people who were determined as political opponents to not allow his presidency to succeed.
In the White House, you can be on the pitcher’s mound or you can be in the catcher’s position. Put points on the board. Show people you can govern. Deliver on what you said you were going to deliver on.
President Obama made the right choice, over one million Americans are still working today. The American auto industry is not just surviving. It is thriving. Where Mitt Romney was willing to turn his back on Akron, Dayton and Toledo, Ohio, the president said, ‘I’ve got your back.’
Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.
I do not believe that a counterterrorism strategy all by itself, without a sufficient level of counterinsurgency, will work.
I think indeed our response on counterinsurgency needs to be finely tuned to the needs of Afghanistan. This is not Iraq. We don’t have a Sons of Iraq here. We don’t have the same divisions here that we had between Sunni and Shia.
I think that every country presents its own particular challenges, different cultures, different histories, different religions, different people. And different ethnic make-ups in those countries present different challenges.
Deliberation is a good thing when it comes to fighting wars.