SOUTH DAKOTA STRAIGHT TALK

Straight Talk Commentary – To paraphrase Frankie Valli “Oh What A Night”

Minnesota U S Senator Norm Coleman recently spoke at the Minnehaha County Lincoln Day Dinner in Sioux Falls .

Without question his speech ranks as one of the finest political speeches I have ever heard. It is clearly in my top ten. I have attended four National Nominating Conventions and traveled the Country from New York City to San Diego, Miami to San Francisco, Grand Rapids to Austin and many points in between and rarely have I heard a speech like Norm Coleman gave on that Saturday night - A great message and a spell binding delivery. He was at the top of his game and full of excitement from his opening greeting.

From his presence and his address it was clear Norm Coleman is not a political newcomer. He served two terms as the Mayor of Saint Paul where he was first elected as a Democrat in 1993. In 1997 he was reelected by an even larger majority than his first term after becoming a Republican. In 1998 he ran for Governor of Minnesota as Republican losing on points to former professional grappler Jesse Ventura in a three way free for all that included Hubert (Skip) Humphrey III.

He did not go down for the count but he came back to win election to the US Senate in 2002 in the tragic election where his opponent incumbent Senator Paul Wellstone died in an airplane accident just days before the election. Wellstone was replaced on the ballot by former Vice President Walter Mondale. Early in the 2002 election cycle Coleman traveled widely to GOP fundraisers with two other Senate candidates, Jim Talent of Missouri and John Thune. It made for very efficient fundraising for all three and they became close friends. At the time they were dubbed as The Three Amigos as this was the first time this type of joint fundraising was employed on a national level. Coleman and Talent were elected, Thune lost to Tim Johnson by 524 votes.(Talent defeated incumbent Jean Carnahan.) Today all three are in the Senate.

Senator Thune when introducing Senator Coleman at the dinner in Sioux Falls and talking of Coleman’s switching political parties divulged that he too had previously been a Democrat. Both follow a long line of “Switchers” whom like Ronald Regan said, “I didn’t leave my party, my party left me.”

Sidebar – Senator Coleman’s campaign office provided the following copy of his prepared remarks for his address in Sioux Falls . When speaking Senator Coleman frequently ad libs. In particular during the Sioux Falls speech, when talking about education and American challenges he referenced a recent article in the NY Times on International competitiveness and PRC having a worker shortage. Straight Talk also has noted this as An Important Story .

Norm Coleman Speech

Minnehaha County Lincoln Day Dinner

Saturday, April 22, 2006

It’s great to be here in the city of Sioux Falls , or as we like to refer to it in Minnesota , the western suburbs of the Greater Luverne Metropolitan area.

It’s great to be in the home of my good friend John Thune. If you can see him working in the Senate day in and day out like I do, you would be prouder of him than you already are. You can take the boy out of South Dakota , but you can’t take the South Dakota out of the boy. He’s a tremendous example of your quality of life here in South Dakota : your hard work, your integrity and your lives of service. In the Bible, David didn’t just defeat Goliath: he went on to be king. John Thune didn’t just defeat Tom Daschle, he is replacing him as a powerful player, but one who always puts you first.

Minnesota and South Dakota share at least two things: 225 miles of border and jokes that feature people from North Dakota and Iowa .

Of course you all know that North Dakota is famous all over the world as the only place where milk is considered a spice.

And in Iowa not far from here this winter they averted a tragedy just in time. They found two guys about to freeze to death in the car at a drive in movie, where they had gone to see “Closed for the Season.”

But we need to stick together here in the upper Midwest and share the punishment. There was a guy from Minnesota who was in Chicago in a bad part of town. A gang of guys jumped him and demanded his money. The Minnesota guy fought them tooth and nail for almost half an hour before they finally got him down. When they emptied his pockets, they found 65 cents. The gang members said, “You fought like that for 65 lousy cents?” The Minnesota guy said, “Aw, shucks no. I thought you were after the $200 hidden in my shoe.”

The great thing about the upper Midwest is: our humor is fiction. On the East and West coasts, it’s the daily news.

Let me take you to one of my favorite moments in U.S. history. It so happens it occurred about a hundred and sixty miles from here, one hundred and forty six years ago.

Candidate Abraham Lincoln, the founder of our Republican Party had come to Omaha to give a speech. That night, he stayed across the river at the famous Pacific Hotel in Council Bluffs , Iowa . The hotel boasted a big front porch with a commanding view West. Omaha at that time was the terminus of the Eastern railroads. What Lincoln did as soon as he got to Omaha was collect the best railroad men in the area and invite them to meet on porch. As a state legislator years before, Lincoln had proposed an Illinois State railroad before he had ever seen a train.

Abraham Lincoln gathered that little group of experts on the porch and asked the Big Question: What’s the best route for a railroad to the Pacific Ocean ? Nine years later, Lincoln was dead, but they drove the golden spike that completed the world first transcontinental railroad that united America literally, “from sea to shining sea.” The route was chosen that night and a dream was born.

My purpose tonight is to invite you onto a virtual porch of our own and ask you to think with me: What’s the best route to American future we all cherish? What path should the next journey of American freedom take?

The mark of Lincoln and Washington and Reagan and all great leaders of history was that their leadership was time-specific. They understood what were the greatest issues of their time and called the nation to do its utmost to achieve greatness in fulfilling those challenges.

Washington inspired a whole nation with his dignity, his discipline and his humble use of power as we not only overthrew the British, but established a brand new kind of government.

Reagan knew the American economy needed to be unleashed from suffocating taxes and regulation. And he knew that Soviet power must be opposed both morally and militarily. And he accomplished both.

And Lincoln knew he had to preserve America as the last great hope of earth by reuniting the nation North and South, and uniting it for the first time between black and white, and East and West.

What does America ’s destiny demand of us today, in our time? You can each answer that question for yourselves. But here is the answer I would offer, in three parts.

1. American leadership must be grounded in the idea of appreciating American exceptionalism and promoting it around the world.

Lincoln was right when he said America was the last, best hope on earth. And it still true, perhaps more than ever. We need to rekindle that understanding.

It drives me crazy when Supreme Court justices cite foreign precedent to justify their decisions. Don’t they have passports? Who could travel to any nation on earth and believe they had a firmer foundation to build a society on than we?

It also drives me crazy that some think we need a UN stamp of approval for our foreign policy. I was proud to be the guy to say "The Emperor has no clothes." - "Kofi Annan has no legitimacy - And he should resign. If ever there was a "blood for oil" it was the Iraqi Oil for Food Program. The blood of Iraqi's bought the oil that made Saddam rich. Don't tell me we need to take moral advice from the folks who had that right under their noses and couldn't smell it. That is - don’t tell American that they need the United Nations’ approval to right terrorism and defend freedom.

America is a miracle. Like David Ben-Gurion said, "If you don't believe in miracles, you're not being realistic.

American leadership must begin with optimizing that great and unique American strength.

2. Leadership must be devoted to winning the global competition for capital, ideas and jobs.

Thomas Friedman, a Minnesotan by the way, said his mother used to tell him "Finish your dinner; kids in India and China are starving." Today we tell our kids "Finish your homework. Kids in India and China are starving for your jobs.”

The American economy is a successful slugger showing up for Spring Training overweight and with some left over injuries from last season.

For us to be competitive, we need to be stronger, leaner and quicker. We need leaders committed to continuous economic improvement so we can not only compete, but win.

I am on the Foreign Relations Committee and Chair the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee. I was at a conference with the Mexican Foreign Minister and Mexican Academics who complained about the impact of low wage jobs in china on the Mexican manufacturing economy. At first I thought, “what about us?” But then it was clear that Americans shouldn’t and won’t win the race for low wage jobs. America will be the world’s strongest economic power if we have smarter kids, better trained workers, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

I encourage you all to get a copy of the so called Augustine Report, entitled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm.”
It lays out an aggressive series of steps we need to take in K-12 education, higher-ed, basic research and economic policy. And it is receiving very positive, bipartisan support.

In Minnesota , the “State of Hockey ,” we love to quote Wayne Gretsky’s line. He said, “Most hockey player skate fast to where the puck is. I try to skate fast to where it is going to be.”

As you think about the economy of this state and your own businesses, this report lays out where the puck is going to be and you’d be wise to skate in that direction.

3. Leadership must be committed to dragging the federal government, kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.

Just imagine how technology has changed all of our lives. The average 8th grader has more computing power in his backpack than we had on the Apollo missions. Fed Ex has revolutionized the package delivery business. Blackberry has revolutionized the communications business. The iPod has revolutionized the music business.

And sitting in the middle of the raging currents of the change is an island of mediocrity called the federal government. You folks have all radically changed your businesses because you had to. Government has refused to change not because it didn’t need it, but because it has the power to say no.

Our party is the party of reform. The democrats in Washington and elsewhere have reduced themselves to carping and defending the status quo.

We’ve made a good start in reforming the tax code to make it more job-producing. We’ve made a good start in education reform, to tie funding increased to accountability for measurable results. We’ve made a big difference through welfare reform that values working over dependency. And we’ve start on entitlement reform, the sacred cow that is slowly but surely devouring the rest of the federal budget.

I chair the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. My job is to uncover things the bureaucracy doesn’t want you to know. I discovered that our federal government lets contracts to people that owe millions in back taxes. I discovered that one of our agencies, the Office of Personnel Management has 288,000 file cabinets. When I criticized them as bureaucracy gone wild, they said if could just have $168 million for a new computer system they could fix it. In one year I found over $9 billion in savings for taxpayers just by doing very commonsense things.

Look at what GM is going through. Look at what is going on in the streets of Paris . There is not security for legacy companies or countries. We need aggressive reform of how government does business so we can not only get taxpayers better value, but make government more of a tiller and less of an anchor on American growth.

The political challenge

We face a political challenge to retain our platform to pursue that agenda. It’s been said that a leader without followers is just a guy taking a walk. Our ideas are good and our hearts are in the right place. But none of it will matter is we have fewer votes in 2006 and 2008 than the other guys. In order to do that, we need to reach out.

This may come as a shock but, the new Republican Party will not be solely comprised of NASCAR fans.

White birthrates are flat. The growth of our nation is immigrants and people of color. If the growth of our party does not go in that direction, we have about as much chance as a Disney theme park in Minot , North Dakota .

We need to look to new Americans. And we can do that while at the same time securing our borders. We are the party of reform, and transformation. The party of education reform, tax reform, trade reform, Medicare reform, and the transformation of regimes carry into democracies. We need to look to the cities. We need to look to the generation of twenty-somethings.

I'm genuinely happy every time I see Howard Dean on TV. He lathers up their radical constituency, who were going to vote with them anyway, and he turns all the mainstream folks off.

We are entering our fifth consecutive year without a major Democratic policy initiative. The Great Society folks have become the Great Silence folks. They are violating one of the key rules of politics: you can't fight something with nothing. They are forced into the mode of publicly wishing the economy was worse and the war would fail. This gambit of "we support the troops but not their mission" is not working. It's like saying "I root for the MN Vikings. I just don't want them to win."

Remember this: in the last fifty years we’ve had two presidents who were 1) extremely popular 2) cut taxes 3) Believed in peace through strength and aggressive, preemptive action to promote democracy and 4) spoke openly about their religious faith. They were Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. Those JFK democrats are still out there. One of them is the Republican Senator from Minnesota who is speaking to you now.

I am encouraging you to reach out because I was reached out to and politically, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

Georgie Jessel was a Jewish Catskill comedian in the 1950's. He was good friends with the sensation African American singer and actress Lena Horne. Every now and then they'd have dinner together in New York City . Well in the heart of liberal hypocrisy, there were segregated clubs in New York . Jessel chose one of those clubs for their dinner date. When they walked in the matre 'd took one look at Miss Horne's skin color and sniffed, "Who made your reservation. Jessel replied Abraham Lincoln.

Our vision is America ’s vision. Americans don’t want bigger government, they don’t need higher taxes, and they don’t want God out of the pledge of allegiance.

In confusing times I always go back to Abraham Lincoln to get my bearings. Once again, what did Lincoln do? As president he set out to do three things. 1) Preserve the Union . He knew it was the last best hope of earth, and it still is. 2) Lincoln set out to free the slaves. Everything begins and ends with human dignity (the sanctity of human life). The Jews taught that lesson to humanity, and have paid an awful price for it. And 3) Lincoln laid the ground work for the transcontinental railroad. He reunited the nation North and South. He reconciled the nation black and white. And he created a continental economic powerhouse east and west. He fought an increasingly popular war that dragged on longer than anyone thought. Many lost sight of its noble objective, but not Lincoln .

In a way, I see President Bush doing the same thing. He is seeing the war in Iraq through to the end because the objective is still the same: a democratic Iraq is good for the whole world. Failure in the war on terror is not an option. Iran having a nuclear weapon is not an option.

The President’s tax cuts have created 5 million new jobs since 2003. He has appointed solid conservative Justices like Roberts and Alito.

He has looked 10 years down the road and said, “This is what we need to do now to be ready for 2015.”

He has said that we will end dependence on foreign oil, that we will meet the challenge of global competition and that democracy will triumph over totalitarianism. I think the optimistic American people share this vision, but for this to become reality we need you.

A visitor to the White House was looking for President Lincoln. He was directed down to a basement room where he found the president shining his boots. Amazed, the visitor said, “Mr. President, you shine your own boots?” Lincoln replied, “Whose boots do you expect me to shine?”

Leadership in nations, companies and families begins with personal responsibility.

Back in 2002 a group of volunteers in Minnesota decided to set aside a part of their lives to help me win back a Senate seat. They knocked themselves out. Little did we know that in the end my race was not going to be against Paul Wellstone, who died tragically in a plane crash, but against the political icon Walter Mondale.

We won by around 47,000 votes out of 2.2 million cast. I became Republican Senator #51. That meant George Bush could play offense in 2004 instead of defense. That has meant a better economy, more safety from terrorism and better values on our Supreme Court. But it all began with a few people “shining their own boots.”

What a pessimistic time we are in. The Gallop organization just did some polling that suggests that people in Afghanistan and Iraq are more optimistic about their futures than Americans are. How wrong is that? We need to lift our attitudes before we can lift our sights.

I’m encouraging you all to commit a weekly act of optimism: write a check, do a talk radio call in, write a letter to the editor, encourage a kid. Find a positive office holder or candidate and make them a leader with your support. You never know that can come of it.

The Spanish Rabbi Maimonides said, “Each of us should view ourselves as if the world was held in balance and a single act of goodness may tip the scales.”

Let me close with my favorite quote from another Norman – Vincent Peale. Norman Vincent Peale said, "Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem or actually are, raise your sights and see the possibilities, for they're always there."

I love my country too much to see it fall short of freedom's expectations.

I chaired the National Prayer Breakfast last month. Some of you were there. I went out on a bit of limb and asked Bono to be our main speaker. He said he's not a man of the cloth, unless the cloth happens to be leather.

He closed his fascinating testimony about his own faith journey with this thought. He said he used to plan his activities and then ask God to bless them. Now, he says he just looks for what God is already doing, and be involved with those things, because they're already blessed.

Let's look for Freedom's agenda at home and abroad, and be involved in those things, because history's blessing and God's already rest upon them.

May God continue to bless you and the United States of America . T hank you.