with a nest egg and make it easier for them to save for retirement. We can choose that future.
We can allow ourselves to stay mired in the same education debate that has consumed Washington for decades, or we can come to a consensus that true progress on education will require both more resources and more reform. It will require investing in early-childhood education, recruiting an army of qualified teachers who we’ll pay more and expect more from in return, and ensuring that a college education is affordable by offering free tuition in exchange for community or national service.
And most of all, it will require parents to get involved in their children’s education early and often. I believe that if we truly want to help our children compete for the jobs of the future with children in Beijing and Bangalore, all of us have a role in ensuring that every child gets a world-class education from the day they’re born to the day they graduate college.
We can continue to spend billions of dollars a month in Iraq and ask our overstretched military to stay there indefinitely, or we can rebuild that military, responsibly redeploy our brave men and women to finish the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and renew our alliances to meet the threats of the twenty-first century.
These are the choices we face in November and over the next few years—decisions that will set the course for the next decade, if not the century. We can choose to remain on the failed path we’ve been traveling for so many years, or we can come together like so many generations before us and forge a future where we renew the promise at the very heart of the American idea—that this is a place where everyone has a chance to make it if you really try.
This is the promise that gave my grandfather the chance to go to college on the GI Bill after he returned from World War II, and allowed him and my grandmother to buy their first home with a loan from the Federal Housing Authority. It’s the promise that led my father, who grew up herding goats in Kenya, to cross the ocean just for the chance to study in America. It allowed my mother, who raised my sister and me as a single parent without much money, to send us to some of the best schools in the country with the help of scholarships.
And it’s the promise that first led me to Chicago all those years ago. After college, a lot of my friends went directly to law school or took jobs on Wall Street, and I initially did similar work. But when I stopped and thought about the chances I had been given—chances that so many others still didn’t have—I decided that I would do my small part to change that. And so I took a job with a group of churches on the South Side that were trying to help neighborhoods that had been devastated by the closing of a steel plant.
We faced hard days and our share of failure, but I learned then that no matter how great the challenge or how difficult the circumstance, change is always possible if you’re willing to work for it, and fight for it, and, above all, believe in it. In the end, that is America’s greatest gift to all those who choose to make a home on her endless frontier.
I have talked a great deal about change in this campaign, and the purpose of this book is to describe in detail what that change would look like. But as I have said many times in many places across this great nation, and as I learned all those years ago on the streets of Chicago, the only way to truly bring about the future we seek is if we’re willing to work together as one nation, and one people. That is our task in the months and years ahead, and I look forward to joining all of you in that effort.
We stand at a moment of great challenge and great opportunity. All across America, a chorus of voices is swelling in a demand for change. The American people want the simple things that—for eight years—Washington hasn’t delivered: an economy that honors the efforts of those who work hard, a national security policy that rallies the world to meet our shared threats and makes America safer, a politics that focuses on bringing people together across party lines to work for the common good. It’s not too much to ask for. It is the change that the American people deserve.
Yet today our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and our planet is in peril. American families are living with a health care system that costs more, delivers less, and bankrupts families and businesses; schools that fail to provide opportunity to too many of our children; and a retirement system that may not be able to pay out what it promised. Across the country, families are paying record prices to fill up their gas tanks and shopping carts. Too many Americans worry about whether they’ll be able to raise their kids in safety and security and give them a shot at a better life.
But these challenges were not inevitable. They are the result of flawed policies and failed leadership. As our world and economy have changed, the thinking in Washington has not kept pace with the tests of the twenty-first century. Instead of investing in America’s ability to compete or confronting the new national security challenges, we’ve seen tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and an open-ended commitment to a war in Iraq that isn’t making us safer and is distracting us from the real threats to our security. As a result, fewer Americans have reaped the benefits of the global economy, a growing number of Americans work harder for less, and our country is losing control over its destiny.
The first years of this new century should have been the moment when America’s leaders had the strength to turn adversity into opportunity, the wisdom to see a little further down the road, and the courage to challenge conventional thinking and worn ideas. We could have reinvented our economy and responded to new threats in ways that seized the promise of the future.
Instead, these past eight years will be remembered for their rigid and ideological adherence to discredited ideas. Just think of what we could have done if we were united and worked together. Instead of making a real commitment to a world-class education for our kids and preparing them to seize the jobs of tomorrow, we passed “No Child Left Behind,” a law that has the right goals but left the money behind and failed to empower teachers, principals, and school boards. Instead of ending our addiction to oil, we continued down a path that sends our dollars to dictators and tyrants, endangers our planet, and has left Americans struggling with $4-a-gallon gasoline. Instead of investing in innovation and rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, we spent billions in tax giveaways to the wealthiest of the wealthy. Instead of reducing soaring health care costs for all Americans, we did nothing and have seen premiums, co-pays, and out-of-pocket expenses spiral out of control. And instead of rallying the world to our side as we routed Al Qaeda, we spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting a war in Iraq that should never have been authorized and never been waged.
The past eight years have been a failure of American leadership, not a failure of the American people.
Barack Obama believes that we can change course, and that we must. He looks to the future with optimism and hope. This is not the first time our nation has faced adversity, and each time we have, our people have summoned the will and found the way to conquer our challenges. This moment is no different. Working together, we can revive our economy and give every family the opportunity to succeed; we can lead the world to overcome the transnational security threats that imperil us; we can perfect our union by reinvigorating basic American values; and we can make investments now that will put America at the forefront of the new economy.
The choices in this election aren’t between left and right, or Republican and Democrat. The choices we face are about
