NH Town Hall 9/26, WKC's opening remarks (via CSPAN)
Transcribed from CSPAN, double checked for accuracy.
Streaming video at CSPAN.
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My name is Wes Clark. I'm the newest Democrat in the race. I'm probably the newest Democrat in this party. I'm running for president and I want your support.
What I really want to do tonight is hear from you. I want to know what's on your mind. I want to know what the issues are, that you're thinking about. I want to have a dialogue with you, but I'd just like to cover three things very quickly:
Number One: Why I'm a Democrat.
Number Two: Why I'm in this race.
And Number Three: What I think I can do for the United States as president.
Number One: Why I'm a Democrat. Well, I joined the United States military at the age of 17. I went to West Point, I raised my right hand, . . . looked out on the Hudson River. There were 807 of us. We believed in the pledge that John Kennedy brought to our hearts. We believed in trying to do something for our country. It was a difficult time in American history: we'd been through the Bay of Pigs, there'd been some nasty shenanigans between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev over in Vienna, we were entering the Berlin crisis, we were heading toward the Cuban missile crisis. We were patriotic and we believed.
I served for 34 years. I got out in the summer of 2000. I'd never been involved in partisan politics. I served Democratic presidents, Republican presidents. I was around the Ford White House. I knew people like Rumsfeld and Cheney, and Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary. And I'd been around the Democratic White House. I was there during the Clinton administration. So I knew the whole Clinton team and worked very closely with them as well. And for me politics was something that the military served its political leaders but you didn't engage in it other than to vote.
But when I looked at where the country was headed, I looked at the administration that took us without due reason into war in Iraq without an imminent threat and claimed it to be a pre-emptive attack without really assembling the evidence, but rather seeking evidence to justify, I guess, some predetermined course of action. I saw it was wrong.
I said at the time, there was no imminent threat. I said there were other ways to handle the problem. I warned that there weren't enough ground troops. And I suspected there wasn't a good plan for what happened afterwards. Tragically, it's all true.
I was in Walter Reed Army Hospital not too long ago and visited a young man who was there as one of the army patients. I've known him since he was five or six years old, his daddy worked for me. He enlisted in the army right after high school, he became a combat engineer, he went to Iraq, and they were clearing a minefield.
And of course, the Iraqis had mis-marked the minefield and as he approached a hundred meters away from where the mine was supposed to be, he stepped on a mine and he lost his leg below the knee. He's one of more than a thousand seriously injured U.S. soldiers, 200 dead, no telling what the count is among the Iraqi's.
We have an administration that doesn't have an adequate foreign policy. It hasn't made us safer and it's made us less respected in the world and it's brought us into Iraq where we're spending billions of dollars in a mission that wasn't strictly speaking necessary.
Then I looked at home and I realized that at home we weren't living up to the motto that I grew up with in the United States Army. We're a volunteer army. The only people who stay in the United States Army are people who want to. You have to persuade the soldier and the family that this is good for them.
And so we adopted a motto that we thought could capture the essence of what the United States Army stood for and we called it, "be all you could be." Many of you remember it. It was a great recruiting slogan for fifteen or twenty years for the army. But it was a lot more than a slogan. It was a principle that guided the way we tried to take care of men and women and the families in the army.
My wife and I worked for better education for kids, we worked for better housing for married and single soldiers, we worked for better health care, we worked for a proper environment, we worked for quality time for families. We did all these things because we believed in trying to help the men and women in uniform.
And when I got out, I found how much opportunity there was in this country to do more. And as I put together the foreign policy, the internationalism that I believed in, the belief in the development of human potential that I believed in, and I checked off my, sort of, core principles . . .
Well, I'm pro-affirmative action, I'm really proud of what we did in the United States Army, we did it well. I'm pro-choice because I think that it is a woman's choice and a woman's responsibility. I'm pro-environment, I'm pro-education, I'm pro-health, I'm pro-civil rights, I fought a war for human rights, and perhaps most of all, I'm pro-jobs, because if people want to contribute, they deserve the right to work. So if I was going to join a political party, I was either going to be the loneliest Republican in the United States of America, or I was going to be a very happy Democrat, and I'm so proud I'm a Democrat. I thank you for that.
People started coming to me about a year ago, maybe a little over a year ago. And they said, "you know, we've seen you on CNN, we've read your book, we know something about you, you've got to stand for office. You're saying these things, we believe `em, they've got resonance, you've got to stand for office.
Well, . . . I wasn't sure. It's a huge step to transition from the military into business, and I didn't want to go sell weapons and I tried not to rely on all my Pentagon buddies for consulting contracts. I didn't do very much of that at all. And the thought of transitioning to elective politics, well, it's like my wife said, she said, "You don't know anything about it," and so she was right, as she always is.
And so I continued to speak out, I thought maybe I can help, I'll be a commentator, I'll keep my commenting job on CNN, during the war I'll be able to brag about the men and women in uniform `cause I love `em, I'll be able to help the American public understand what's goin' on. A lot of people came to me and said, "You know, you're doing something very important by commenting and being on the "Aaron Brown Show," and so forth, so I felt good about that.
And then I came up here to New Hampshire in May and one of the people in the "Draft Clark" movement was there and she handed me a thousand letters. I was on "Tim Russert" in June and he said, "Will you consider at least running for office?" and I had to say, "If there's this draft movement out there, I guess I gotta consider it," and the pressure finally built up and it finally ended up, I was speaking to the Long Island Foreign Affairs Association about three or four weeks ago, and they said, "Do you thing we'll need to re- institute the draft?"
I said, "No, I don't think so because at least for the United States Army, we don't want people in there who don't want to be there. We want volunteers because you know, that's the way you'd run any organization, you don't want to force people to be there." And I said, "but here's what I'd like," I said, "This is a group of very well-to-do people who are all very civic minded," and I said, "So I'd like you to dedicate your first-born child or grand-child to the service of the armed forces of the United States. Would you do that?"
Well, some people nodded, some people laughed, and one guy said, "We'll do that when you answer the draft we've got on you and volunteer to stand for office." And I realized that I'd crossed the line. At that point, I was speaking out, I was committed and emotionally I wanted to do something to help the country.
I'm running because I think I can help this country. I think I've got the background, I've got the leadership experience. At home, I've got the leadership experience. Abroad, I've dealt at the head of state level, the minister of foreign affairs level, the heads of government, I've negotiated with some of the worst war criminals in human history, and I know what they're like, I've helped lead our forces in combat, so that's why I'm running.
And if you elect me, I've got a vision for America and I'm gonna stop right here because I want to hear what you all want to ask me, and I'll explain my vision as we go through, yes ma'am.