Hello, folks. How are you? It’s great to be with you all. (Applause.) What a great introduction. I just said I hope she remembers me when she’s President of the United States of America.
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s great to be before such a distinguished audience at a great university. I want to start off by doing what the Ambassador will tell you you should never do, apologizing. It’s all Jack Lew’s fault I’m late. (Laughter.) No, some of you students don't know that the President’s Chief of Staff was the CFO here at NYU, and also taught a public policy course, and so that's the only reason he got the job as Chief of Staff. He figured if he could deal with this great university, he can deal with the country.
And it’s great to see one of the great, great patriots, one of the finest generals I’ve ever in my 39 years of working in foreign policy and national security ever met, General Wesley Clark. Great to see you, General.
I want to just state parenthetically that you know I ran -- not you know, but I ran for the United States Senate when I was 28 years old, and no one in my family on my dad’s side had ever been involved in public life. And as one of my colleagues said, I’m the first United States Senator I ever knew.
And I ran at the time because I thought the policy we had in Vietnam, I didn't argue it as immoral, but I thought it just didn't make sense, the notion of dominoes and so on and so forth.
And I came to Washington as a 29-year-old kid. I got elected. Before I was eligible to serve, I had to literally wait to be sworn in because I wasn’t eligible under the Constitution. You must be 30 years old. And my image of the military commanders at the time was, if you ever saw that old movie, if you ever rented it, where Slim Pickens is on the back of an atom bomb, dropping out of an aircraft, yelling, Yippe, Kiyay. (Laughter.) And “Dr. Strangelove” was the movie.
But I have to tell you after all the time I’ve served in public office, if you asked me who the most impressive women and men that I have met in government in the last 40 years, six of them would be men or women wearing a uniform. It’s a different military. This guy was not only a great warrior -- I mean literally a warrior, but this guy is a diplomat. This guy is an incredibly bright man, extremely well educated. He understands the role of the military within our system, and he understands the Constitution.
And there are -- Thank God, there’s others like him that are still around today. Wes, thanks for being one of those many folks who changed my impression from my younger years. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Folks, over the last -- the past months, I’ve given on behalf of the campaign a series of speeches on major issues in this campaign laying down the markers, at least from our perspective, of the President and mine, the distinguishing differences between the President [sic] and us on a series of issues -- issues that we believe affect the middle class and our country’s future.
I’ve spoken about the rescue of the American automobile industry in Toledo, Ohio. I’ve spoken about retirement security down in Florida, about leading the world again in manufacturing in the Quad Cities area, and about the tax system and the unfairness of it and how to make fair up in New Hampshire.
Today, I will -- this is the fifth in the series of those speeches, and I want to talk about an American President’s single most important responsibility -- single most important responsibility -- and that's keeping our fellow citizens safe and our nation secure, particularly at a time of such extraordinary challenge and change. The poet William Butler Yeats writing about his Ireland in the year 1916 in a poem called Easter Sunday 1916, said, “all’s changed, changed utterly; a terrible beauty has been born.”
The world has utterly changed during your young life and your early adulthood. It’s not the world it was in 1990 and -- even as recently as 1990. And the question is: How are we going to deal with this beautiful -- this beautiful -- change that also has with its -- fraught with so many potential difficulties.
On this fundamental issue, foreign policy, keeping America safe, the contrast between President Obama, his record, and Governor Romney, and his rhetoric, in my view cannot be greater.
Three and a half years ago, when President Obama and I took office, and stepped into that Oval Office, our nation had been engaged in two wars for the better part of a decade. Al Qaeda was resurgent and Osama bin Laden was at large. Our alliances were dangerously frayed. And our economy -– the foundation of our national security -– was on the precipice of a new depression.
President Obama began to act immediately. He set in motion a policy to end the war in Iraq responsibly. He set a clear strategy and an end date for the war in Afghanistan, which has been going on for close to a decade. He cut in half the number of Americans who are literally serving in harm’s way. He decimated al Qaeda’s senior leadership. He repaired our alliances and restored America’s standing in the world and he saved our economy. He saved our economy from collapse with some very unpopular but bold decisions that have turned out to be right, including the rescue of the automobile industry, all of which has made us much stronger not only at home but abroad.
If you’re looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited, it’s pretty simple: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.
Governor Romney’s national security policies, in our view, would return us to a past we’ve worked so hard to move beyond. And, in this regard, there is no difference in what Governor Romney says and what he has proposed for our economy than he has done in foreign policy. In every instance, in our view, he takes us back to the failed policies that got us into the mess that President Obama has dug us out of, and the mess that got us into this in the first place.
Governor Romney, I think, is counting on collective amnesia of the American people. Americans know -- American know that we can’t go back to the future, back to a foreign policy that would have America go it alone -- shout to the world you’re either with us or against us, lash out first and ask the hard questions later, if they get asked at all, isolate America instead of isolating our enemies, waste hundreds of billions of dollars and risk thousands of Americans’ lives on a war that’s unnecessary -- and see the world through a Cold War prism that is totally out of touch with the realities of the 21st century.
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