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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Ending his presidential bid, Dean vows continued grass-roots efforts: "I will support the nominee of our party. We must beat George W. Bush in November, whatever it takes."
Feb 18, 2004 | My thanks to all of you who got this crowd together in about three hours' notice. I appreciate that very much. And my thanks to an awful lot of people.
But my particular thanks to Vermont. I started this two years ago -- and I see Governor Kunin is here in the crowd, so I'm going to tell a story that she's going to appreciate in particular, but all of you will, because it's a local story.
The first thing I ever did is I went down to a chamber of commerce meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I was invited down. So I went down with a few brochures in my back pocket. And I got down there and gave the speech, and then they asked questions, as they do at rotaries. It's a lot like going to a rotary or chamber here.
And the last question was somebody who got up and said this. They said, Well, Governor, you have a great business climate in Vermont. It's just terrific. And the one here in New Hampshire stinks. Can you send your people down here to tell us what to do? I thought you'd like that.
That's an inside joke for those of you who are from Vermont. We love to hear people talk about New Hampshire that way.
Well, actually, I did pretty well in New Hampshire.
We did have a -- have had a real record of achievement in this state: creating jobs, providing health insurance, investing in children, balancing budgets. And I said when I left the governor's office that if the rest of this country were like Vermont this country would be much better off.
And what we set out to do was make the rest of the country more like Vermont. And so far we haven't succeeded, but we have a long way to go. What we did show is that by standing up and telling the truth and not worrying about polls and focus groups, you could actually get support in this country from voters.
We started the campaign office in Burlington. There are an awful lot of people -- and some of you should raise your hands -- who drove up here, unrequested, unknowing; showed up, no salary. Finally, we grew into you and we were able to pay you a little something. But we really appreciate people from all over the country, particularly young people. One quarter of all our people who gave us money were under 30 years old in this campaign. I have not seen that happen since I was under 30 years old, and that was a long time ago.
This has been a campaign that has been extraordinarily different. The new approach, planting seeds on the Internet, strengthening grass roots, face-to-face obtaining support from hundreds of thousands of small donors, all these steps can revitalize our democracy and return power to ordinary Americans. All of us have done these things together. We have exposed the dangerous, radical nature of George W. Bush's agenda. We have demonstrated to other Democrats that it is a far better strategy to stand up against the right-wing agenda of George W. Bush than it is to cooperate with it. We have led this party back to considering what its heart and soul is, although there is a lot of work left to do.
I am very proud of all of you and very grateful to all of you for your extraordinary hard work. To the staff who've worked exceptionally hard, very long hours -- worse than mine, sometimes ... for all of you who traveled around the country, showed up at our office, worked around the clock, because they believed in what we were doing, thousands of Americans who have given generously of their time, in their states, because they believed in our cause.
I want to particularly thank all our congressional supporters, many of whom signed on with us when we were an asterisk in the polls, because they believed that it was the right thing to do for their country. There are people in Washington who are going to do the right thing in this party: stand up and be recognized and stand up for what's right with America, instead of being poll-driven. And believe me, we are going to support those people in September. And in November. September, if they have a primary, and then in November.
I want to thank the Service Employees International Union and the Painters. They stuck with me ... They stood with us when the others abandoned us and I am forever grateful to those people in the labor movement who stood up for what was right and not what was popular.
I want to thank all the state and local officials who stood with us, many of them, like Governor Kunin and others, who went to other states for us to represent us all over America.
I want to thank the Dean's List. These are the big donors. We didn't have a lot of big donors, but the ones that we had signed on with us when we were nowhere. We were an asterisk in the polls. They did not do what the establishment of the Democratic Party did. They followed their hearts and stood up for what was right, and they changed this party, too.
I want to thank the 300,000 small donors that decided that they wanted their country back. And we are now in the process of taking our country back thanks to you.
I want to thank all the people in every state who heard our message and supported us. And I, of course, finally and most importantly want to thank my wonderful wife, who finally, after 12 years, made her political debut in Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire.
I also ... [audience chants: "Judy! Judy! Judy!"] I also want to thank Judy for at least promoting the debate that's needed to happen in this country for a long time about whether a woman needs to gaze adoringly at her husband or follow her own career. [Applause]. Now I lost my place. [Laughter.]
I am no longer actively pursuing the presidency. We will, however, continue to build a new organization, using our enormous grass-roots network, to continue the effort to transform the Democratic Party and to change our country. And I ... And speaking to all of you and all of the hundreds of thousands of people around America who are going to get this word, either by the establishment media ... or the Internet, I have some things that I specifically want to ask of our supporters.
