The most presidential lorem ipsum in history.
But it also comes from my own American story. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. The truth is, on issue after issue that would make a difference in your lives - on health care and education and the economy - Senator McCain has been anything but independent. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class. The first issue that we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms.
More work to do for the workers I met in Galesburg, Ill., who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that's moving to Mexico, and now are having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay seven bucks an hour. For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past.
Today there are 12 million undocumented immigrants in America, most of them working in our communities, attending our churches, and contributing to our country. "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. But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That's the promise we need to keep. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism. I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims.
It's been several months now since I announced I was running for president. And then another one. And that is why we are providing more than $2.8 billion to help Afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend upon.
But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. But it is where we start.
Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.