The most presidential lorem ipsum in history.
Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach our kids to learn - they know that parents have to teach, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. He told me he'd joined the Marines, and was heading to Iraq the following week. Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. America, our work will not be easy.
"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other. Among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of another's.
"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. No health care? The market will fix it. That's the promise we need to keep.
I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents' dreams live on in my two precious daughters. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper that makes this country work. Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America. I do not believe that women must make the same choices as men in order to be equal, and I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles.
Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.