Link to Audio: http://my.democrats.org/page/-/audio/WS320008Edit.mp3

Politico Story on Conference: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30190.html

WASHINGTON, Dec 5 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --This is an excellent opportunity to just have some dialogue and I want to share with all of you some thoughts about politics being a good thing. And then talk about 2009, 2010, some of the things we're doing at the Democratic Party. We've got a lot of students here. So I thought what I might do, just very of quickly, is tell you how I got into this line of work because there are those of you out in the audience who are kind of wrestling with you know, "is politics really a good thing?" and is it something you might want to be engaged in. I was a civil rights lawyer for 17 years and when I came to Virginia, my wife arm twisted me here - I really thought that's what I would be doing for my whole career. I was a fair housing lawyer. And one day after I practiced law for a decade in Richmond, I got mad at my city council and I ran for city council. And then two terms later, was mayor. And then two terms later was lieutenant governor and now I am in my last two months as governor. I consider politics kind of a 16 year accidental side light to my civil rights career, but it's gonna be extended a little bit beyond the 16 years because of my work at the Democratic National Committee.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080519/DNCLOGO )

I've been a close confident of the President's since when I was running for Governor in 2005. If you're in Virginia, one of the great benefits you have is if you're running for office you can ask somebody from Washington to just drive across the Potomac to do a fundraiser for you. And so, I asked the new Senator Obama to do that. And the night that he was going to do a fundraiser, I stayed up the night before and read his first book Dreams OF My Father and then I was able to say to him when he walked in we've got a couple of things in common. We were both Harvard Law School graduates. Now it is true that President Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review and I went to a lot of Red Sox games when I was in law school but our diplomas look exactly the same. Second, we were both civil rights lawyers he did civil rights work in Chicago and I was fair housing lawyer in Richmond. Third we both spent formative time abroad: he in Indonesia and I was a missionary in Honduras for a year.

But the thing that cemented the relationship was when I was able to tell him, and you know when you say your dad's from Kenya and your mom's from a small farm town in Kansas, my mom's from the same town your mom is from - El Doredo, Kansas. And that kind of struck up this bond between us that has been a very strong one and I have been absolutely thrilled to be part of the campaign and now work with him in my capacity at the Democratic National Committee.

I haven't been a particularly political guy or a Washington guy. I kind of consider my political work as civil rights work by other means so I really focused in my public career on things like expanding pre-K, trying to keep the states business climate strong so that all will have opportunities, health care safety net and foster care reform. I'm really in to the serving people side of this not particularly being a Washington guy and I'm a little bit of an unusual choice to be chair of the party. I wrote the President a letter after his historic election and said Chairman Dean is stepping down and he was fantastic, here is someone who would be great to be party chair and I laid out in an incredibly persuasive way why this individual would be a wonderful party chair. The President and his team called me back and said we got your memo and we like that person but you have to do the job. As I talked to them and kind of figured it out and I think there is only one answer when the President asks and the answer is yes. But I also got kind of excited about it, I would normally have thought I would be going back into the civil rights work or work in the education sector, but I got very excited about it.

And let me before I talk about '09 and '10 talk about why I love my job. There is an amazing event that happens every year in Virginia in a little county called Wise County where my wife's family comes from and it's an event that happens in the last weekend in July. There's a woman there named Sister Bernie who is a Catholic nun who has a little thing called the St. Mary's health clinic. Sister Bernie, probably 15 years ago started driving a BW Beetle around the Appalachian handing out prescription medications to people who didn't have health insurance and couldn't get health care. And 10 years ago Sister Bernie said you know what, I'm going to try to recruit some doctors and dentists to the county fairgrounds and we'll just open up for the weekend and try to provide services. And so she did 10 years ago.

Since I've been Lieutenant Governor I've been going down to work the registrations. Let me tell you what this event has become. On Monday night, people start arriving in their cars often with kids in tow to camp out in this dusty county fairground parking lot. And they come by the tens, and then they come by the hundreds and then they come by the thousands. And on Friday morning they open the doors to the fairgrounds and then people come in and they get a number and then they wait with their number Friday, Saturday, Sunday eventually to see a doctor and maybe get a mammogram for the first time in their life, or to get their eyes tested at the age of 45 and find out they should have had eye glasses 15 years ago, or to see a dentist for the first time ever. If you're seeing a dentist for the first time ever as an adult there's only one thing the dentist is going to be able to do for you and that's pull out teeth to ease your pain. The first time that I went to this, it just struck me so vividly it reminded me so vividly of when I was a missionary in Honduras. When I worked in Honduras 25 years ago it was the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere and the missionaries I worked with would do health clinics in rural Honduras for people who didn't have health care. But I don't live in the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere, I live in the greatest nation in the history of the world and one of the wealthiest nations. And so when I saw this in Wise county, and these clinics happen all over the United States what I saw in Honduras it just strikes me every year and I go back to remind myself.

You walk through the parking lot at this health care clinic and you look at license plates, it's right on the border between Virginia and Kentucky so you would expect to see Virginia and Kentucky vehicles and maybe Tennessee, and North Carolina's not too far. But I saw a car from Oklahoma the first year, and I saw another vehicle from Florida. This year when my wife and I went down to work the registration booth we saw cars, there were people thousands of them from sixteen different states. And I tell you, that's why I love my job at the DNC. Because when we have the White House with a President like President Obama the opportunity to tackle the big tough issues is so exciting. And it really speaks to that civil rights lawyer in me.

We're engaged in this battle about health reform right now and I'll say a little more about it in a minute, but every other industrialized nation in the world has figured this out. They're not smarter than we are, they're not richer than we are, they're not more compassionate than we are. They're not more innovative or creative than we are but they've had a will that we haven't had. And so what we are doing and our primary motive at the DNC which is a little bit different, I have a different job than Howard Dean or Terry McCauliff, our primary motive is to promote the success of the presidency to make the change that people need so that we can lift the burden that's on citizens and that we can produce results that are spectacular including tackling tough issues like health care. So, the job, although it was a little bit of an unusual fit, has been something that I've found very very exciting and I'm really excited to tackle it in a major way as we're going through these elections.

Let me talk to you about 2009 and 2010. Obviously in 2009 from the national party standpoint we took some lumps that were painful and we won some races that made us feel very good. So I'm going to talk about the lumps -- state races, and the wins -- federal races. Virginia New Jersey Governorships this has more than a passing personal interest, trying to be successful in both of those. Governor Corzine in New Jersey, a great friend and obviously I wanted to put the keys to the executive mansion in the hands of a Democratic successor, but we recognized we were running against a headwind. For at least 24 years the party that wins the White House loses both of those governorships and in Virginia it had actually been 32 years, the party that wins the White House loses the governorship. We knew we were running against a headwind but still, even though those races largely revolved around local concerns we were disappointed.

On the federal side, we've actually had some pretty good news in 2009. Since President Obama was inaugurated, there have been five special elections in Congress and the Democrats have won all five. We've also added two Senators: the recount that produced the victory in Minnesota for Al Franken in June gave us another Senator, and early in the year the other side chased the Republican Senator Arlen Specter into our camp. So on the federal side, we have felt that all of the movement and all of the change this year has been in our direction.

In terms of the federal races, there's one factor that I think is really important going into 2010: GOP fighting and the tea party devouring the GOP. The year started with the Chairman of the RNC threatening to primary Republicans who voted for the Recovery Act. And Senator Arlen Specter said: Guess what? I'm not going to wait. I'll just become a Democrat right now.

The year ended in New York's Congressional District 23 with the race featuring Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava, a pretty well known member of the New York General Assembly, who was running in a district that hadn't gone Democratic since 1872.

The Republicans put a million dollars into her campaign, but then they ended up abandoning her in favor of a candidate whose candidacy had basically been inflated by talk show radio hosts. After the Republicans abandoned Dede Scozzafava, she endorsed the Democratic candidate Bill Owens, who is the first Democrat to win that seat in over a hundred and thirty years.

This showed the divide that we're seeing on the GOP side. We've got various factions on the Democratic side, but they're not corrosive, and they're not deep chasms. They're just the standard feature of having a diverse party.

The divide we're seeing on the Republican side -- exemplified by Specter joining our team and by the Republican right wing chasing Dede Scozzafava out of that race -- this is something that we expect to see going forward into 2010. We are already seeing corrosive primaries in the Texas governor's race, the Florida Senate race, and other races on the Republican side. And I think we will see more of that.

In fact, what I think we are seeing coming out of these elections in both parties is that from the Democratic side, our party is broadening. We're broadening geographically, broadening ideologically, and broadening demographically. While on the Republican side we see a party that is narrowing geographically, narrowing ideologically, and narrowing demographically.

How are we going to do in 2010? Since 1900, the average first-term president in their first midterm loses 28 House seats, 4 U.S. Senate seats, and faces headwind with governor's races. So we're very mindful of that going into 2010. I remember talking to President Obama about it when he arm-twisted me into doing this job last December. We knew 2010 could be pretty tough: the President was being left with a tough national environment, two wars, and an economy in a free-fall. He was coming into office at a time more difficult than any since FDR's presidency beginning in March of 1933.

We could still be facing some major challenges in the midterm, and so we acknowledge the headwind is blowing against us. It's just the historic norm is, and it's blowing against us.

But we feel like we've got a couple of strong cards up our sleeve as we go into 2010. The first is what I described earlier, that corrosive and persistent battle on the GOP side between the tea bag party and talk show radio hosts and that dwindling bunch of Republican moderates. We think that this continuing battle will give us some real opportunity in a number of places.

The second thing we feel we've got going for us in 2010 is that we're going to sell results to the American people. We feel that if we sell the President's record of achievement and the results we've achieved in a very difficult time, these successes will be our strongest suit going into 2010.

SOURCE Democratic National Committee

Back to top

RELATED LINKS
http://www.democrats.org