名人演讲：A Tale of Two Cities

We should not, we should not be embarrassed or dismayed or chagrined if the process of unifying is difficult, even wrenching at times. Remember that, unlike any other party, we embrace men and women of every color, every creed, every orientation, every economic class. In our family are gathered everyone from the abject poor of Essex County in New York, to the enlightened affluent of the gold coasts at both ends of the nation. And in between is the heart of our constituency. The middle class -- the people not rich enough to be worry-free, but not poor enough to be on welfare. The middle class, those people who work for a living because they have to, not because some psychiatrist told them it was a convenient way to fill the interval between birth and eternity. White collar and blue collar. Young professionals. Men and women in small business desperate for the capital and contracts that they need to prove their worth.

We speak for the minorities who have not yet entered the mainstream. We speak for ethnics who want to add their culture to the magnificent mosaic that is America. We speak, we speak for women who are indignant that this nation refuses to etch into its governmental commandments the simple rule "thou shalt not sin against equality," a rule so simple -- I was going to say, and I perhaps dare not but I will, it's a commandment so simple it can be spelled in three letters -- E.R.A.!

We speak for young people demanding an education and a future. We speak for senior citizens who are terrorized by the idea that their only security - their Social Security - is being threatened. We speak for millions of reasoning people fighting to preserve our environment from greed and from stupidity. And we speak for reasonable people who are fighting to preserve our very existence from a macho intransigence that refuses to make intelligent attempts to discuss the possibility of nuclear holocaust with our enemy. They refuse. They refuse, because they believe we can pile missiles so high that they will pierce the clouds and the sight of them will frighten our enemies into submission.

Now we're proud of this diversity as Democrats. We're grateful for it. We don't have to manufacture it the way the Republicans will next month in Dallas, by propping up mannequin delegates on the convention floor. But while we're proud of this diversity as Democrats, we pay a price for it. The different people that we represent have different points of view. And sometimes they compete and even debate, and even argue. That's what our primaries were all about. But now the primaries are over and it is time when we pick our candidates and our platform here to lock arms and move into this campaign together. If you need any more inspiration to put some small part of your own differences aside to create this consensus, all you need to do is to reflect on what the Republican policy of divide and cajole has done to this land since 1980.

Now the president has asked us to judge him on whether or not he's fulfilled the promise he made four years ago. I believe that as Democrats, we ought to accept that challenge. And, just for a moment let us consider what he has said and what he's done. Inflation is down since 1980. But not because of the supply- side miracle promised to us by the president. Inflation was reduced the old-fashioned way, with a recession, the worst since 1932. We could have brought inflation down that way. How did he do it? Fifty-five thousand bankruptcies. Two years of massive unemployment. Two hundred thousand farmers and ranchers forced off the land. More homeless than at any time since the Great Depression in 1932. More hungry, in this nation of enormous affluence, the United States of America, more hungry. More poor - most of them women - and he paid one more thing, a nearly $200 billion deficit threatening our future.

Now we must make the American people understand this deficit because they don't. The president's deficit is a direct and dramatic repudiation of his promise to balance our budget by 1983. How large is it? The deficit is the largest in the history of this universe; President Carter's last budget had a deficit of less than one-third of this deficit. It is a deficit that, according to the president's own fiscal adviser, may grow as high as $300 billion a year for "as far as the eye can see."

And, ladies and gentlemen, it is a debt so large that as much as one-half of our revenue from the income tax goes just to pay the interest. It is a mortgage on our children's future that can be paid only in pain and that could bring this nation to its knees.

Now don't take my word for it - I'm a Democrat.

Ask the Republican investment bankers on Wall Street what they think the chances of this recovery being permanent are. You see, if they're not too embarrassed to tell you the truth, they'll say that they are appalled and frightened by the president's deficit. Ask them what they think of our economy, now that it has been driven by the distorted value of the dollar back to its colonial condition - now we're exporting agricultural products and importing manufactured ones. Ask those Republican investment bankers what they expect the rate of interest to be a year from now. And ask them, if they dare tell you the truth you will hear from them, what they predict for the inflation rate a year from now, because of the deficit.

Now, how important is this question of the deficit.

Think about it practically: What chance would the Republican candidate have had in 1980 if he had told the American people that he intended to pay for his so-called economic recovery with bankruptcies, unemployment, more homeless, more hungry and the largest government debt known to humankind? Would American voters have signed the loan certificate for him on Election Day? Of course not! That was an election won under false pretenses. It was won with smoke and mirrors and illusions. And that's the kind of recovery we have now as well.

And what about foreign policy? They said that they would make us and the whole world safer. They say they have. By creating the largest defense budget in history, one that even they now admit is excessive. By escalating to a frenzy the nuclear arms race. By incendiary rhetoric. By refusing to discuss peace with our enemies. By the loss of 279 young Americans in Lebanon in pursuit of a plan and a policy that no one can find or describe.

We give money to Latin American governments that murder nuns, and then we lie about it. We have been less than zealous in support of our only real friend, it seems to me, we have in the Middle East, the one democracy there, our flesh and blood ally, the state of Israel. Our foreign policy drifts with no real direction, other than an hysterical commitment to an arms race that leads nowhere - if we're lucky. And if we're not, it could lead us into bankruptcy or war.

Of course we must have a strong defense!

Of course Democrats are for a strong defense. Of course Democrats believe that there are times when we must stand and fight. And we have. Thousands of us have paid for freedom with our lives. But always - when this country has been at its best - our purposes were clear. Now they're not. Now our allies are as confused as our enemies. Now we have no real commitment to our friends or to our ideals - not to human rights, not to the refuseniks, not to Sakharov, not to Bishop Tutu and the others struggling for freedom in South Africa.

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