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Remarks by former New York Governor Mario Cuomo (D)

Gingrich-Cuomo Cooper Union Debate Transcripts

- Introductions by Cooper Union President George Campbell and Harold Holzer

- Remarks by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia)

- Remarks by former New York Governor Mario Cuomo (D)

- Q&A with Gingrich and Cuomo moderated by NBC’s Tim Russert

Tim Russert: Thank you, Speaker Gingrich. Our next speaker served the Empire State as the Secretary of State, Lieutenant Governor and Governor for twelve years, the Honorable Mario Cuomo. [Applause].

Mario Cuomo: Thank you very much. Let me immediately – first of all, where is the woman with the sign for time? I can't see you. [Laughing]. Let me get some other things straight immediately. I'm delighted to be here, but before I even thank people for putting this event together, which I intend to do, let me get this clear. I think the Speaker referred to me as an orator. God forbid. Just look up the word oration and orator. If you have an up-to-date dictionary, I think there is a certain tinge of pomposity associated with the word orator, and so I shouldn’t be thought of as pompous. You heard Harold Holzer tell you about how I behaved in 1977. [Laughing]. Think of me not as pompous but rather as pious. [Laughing]. [Applause].

As to the Speaker, it's a great, great pleasure to be here with him, and we owe a great deal to President Campbell for his hospitality, Tim Russert, America's political inquisitor, who has gotten more truth out of the mouths of politicians than they knew they had in them [Laughing], for participating this evening, and Harold Holzer, who you all know, is a great Lincoln scholar and a communications guru extraordinaire, for providing the historic authenticity here, and thank you, too, to one of the brightest political minds I know and a heck of a good guy, Kevin McCabe. [Applause] A lot of you don't know him, but I do, because he made this thing happen in a very real way.

Let me just say some things before I make the points that I have been assigned to make which deal with values, values that affirm, values that unit and values that divide, and then something about our domestic policy and what the problems are and how we pay for solutions, if that's what we need to do, and then the third will be Iraq. I apologize to you for my voice. This is the first time I've been out of the house in a real way for over a week or so, and I've got some strange kind of disability, which for me makes things particularly difficult, not being able to use my voice.

But let me say this about what the Speaker has already indicated. I think there's a great deal more agreement here than I expected to find. The Speaker has pointed out that he is not opposed to government; that's a very good beginning, [Laughing], not accustomed to that in dealing with conservatives frankly. The normal thing is know of course the best solutions, perhaps the only solutions are in the private sector. You certainly can't say that about government. The Speaker was referring to technology. The government's not bad at technology. Regrettably, it has put its incredible capacities technologically to some questionable uses, like, for example. inventing the Atom Bomb, and now being the expert on proliferation of weapons, which we can't get back into the bottle.

But there's no arguing with their ability technologically; there's no arguing with their ability technologically concerning the Space program. There could be, deriving from their experience with nuclear, a government – and I hope this does happen in the near future – that make nuclear energy a much more real alternative to oil than it is now. There are only three major problems there and they're all technological. I know a good deal about this because we ended the life of a nuclear plant here in New York in a place called Shoreham after it had been loaded with fuel. Because it was so badly sited in a place on Long Island that you couldn’t get home from the beach on a Saturday because of traffic, what would you do if the bell went off and the alarm went off and you had a Chernobyl in a nuclear plant there? So the sitting was wrong.

They had a technology that had come off line 28 times in building the Shoreham facility. This was private, incidentally, private work, not by government. Twenty-eight times it came off line; you wouldn’t buy a car that came off line two or three times, and there's not place to put the waste, the very dangerous noxious waste from nuclear energy.

Now, all of those three are technological problems. Governments could handle that. France has handled it for a long, long time, and it started with government. And so the Speaker makes clear that he wouldn’t be averse to that, and I think that's good. Most of all, I agree totally with the Speaker that while government can be positive, the current government has been a disaster. [Applause]. I don't think the Speaker could have said it any better or any clearer. They're a disaster as Katrina, they're a disaster at foreign policy, they don't know what to do in handling weapons. They have done everything wrong, Homeland Security an absolutely disaster. He's right, the beginning of the problem with Homeland Security was the absurdity, frankly, and Democrats participated, of saying: You can take all these government agencies, ten, eleven, twelve of them, and because this is a big problem and we want a big solution, jam them all together without a great deal of planning and expect that uniting twelve chaotic conditions will produce one smoothly operating one.

And it didn't do that at all. Instead, it took some elements like FEMA which was a very good thing and worked very, very well with our State and CEMO and with my son Andrew when he was head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development – FEMA worked beautifully until you jammed it into Homeland Security and then it couldn’t work at all.

So he's absolutely correct about all these things, and the Speaker goes on to say: "And they won't change. They won't have hearings. They won't study it." Mr. Speaker, I think we'll take care of that on Election Day 2008. [Applause]. That's when the change will occur. Health care, that would make a very good subject for a debate and a really good debate, and your idea about private applications and Health Savings Accounts, et cetera, there's something to be said for that. I don't happen to favor them, but it certainly is worth a discussion and a very big one. My quick analysis of health care is, the current problems, the biggest one perhaps is 48 million people without insurance, 48 million people without insurance, and Health Savings accounts and those things do nothing to deal with that.

But having said all of that, having expressed to you my gratitude for all your pleasant news about the Bush Administration and the other things, I want to also thank you very sincerely for myself, for my wife, Matilda and for our whole family – we're doing this belatedly – but we know that in 1994, that great Republican tide was very much your doing. And I want to say to you that that great Republican tide in 1994 washed me out of Alderman and deposited – [Applause]. No, that's not the part I'm happy about – and deposited me on the front steps of a law firm called Willkie, Farr and Gallagher, and I'm pleased to announce to you that we paid our mortgage yesterday, and so thank you, Mr. Speaker, for that. [Applause].

Now I can talk about what I was assigned to talk about, and I will do it as swiftly as I can. Values, values that divide, values that unite, and you're going to find that there is probably a good deal more agreement here between the Speaker and me than you suspected. I believe what American needs most of all today is a better idea of what we want to be as a nation. I really do think our problems are as fundamental as that: who are we, what are we, what are we trying to achieve as a people? Are we a 300 million disassociated individuals struggling in a dog-eat-dog society or a community of Americans with a profound commitment to sharing our benefits and our burdens for the common good. At the moment, I think we're a people divided yearning for an inspiring rationale, a vision worthy of the world's greatest nation. We don't have one, it seems to me.

We should remind ourselves that those things are what Abe Lincoln brought to America. The truth is, we've always been a nation challenged by a diversity of cultures and values, including religious values. Our Founding Fathers tried to accommodated that diversity and the Constitution, but only to the extent that they protected individual rights and independence. They did not in the Constitution require us to make ourselves strong as a nation by becoming a sharing community. That was left to the American people. And for more than 200 years we've been finding ways to do it, taking down walls that divide us and developing a new appreciation of how much we need one another. Gradually, as pioneers and immigrants cover the land from Atlantic to Pacific, building villages then cities then states, we added to our rugged individualism the ability to come together, to share benefits and burdens intelligently.

Abraham Lincoln described the idea of the American community with stunning complicity and clarity as he did with so many other subjects. Like Adam Smith before him, he noted that the market system is indispensable to our success as a nation, and so we should work constituently to maintain a strong economy. You cant be a Governor, you can't be a President without doing that. You can't be a legislator without understanding how important the economy is. The great empires were brought down not militarily but by failures of their economy.

But Adam Smith and other people who study these things have always pointed out, too, that even a strong economy is not sufficient to provide all we need to thrive as a society. That requires government, which Lincoln defined as "the coming together or people to do for one another collectively what they could not do as well or at all privately." And he followed the formula himself, providing infrastructure, education, homesteads, help to agriculture. He did a whole lot of things as President that people in his own party and other parties and most politicians said: "This is nonsense. You have two things to do with government, one, protect us from foreign powers, and two, be concerned about insurrection. Everything else is for commerce."

That was the popular position, but not Lincoln's position. Regrettably, the nation's sense of community has withered during the last six years, in part because our economy has fragmented us dramatically, becoming wonderfully rewarding for high level corporate executives and investors, but punishing the workers of moderate or low skills. Everybody knows this now; it's conceded. The course of everything, the struggling middle class needs most, housing, education, transportation, retirement security and health care are growing much faster than their wages, if they still have a job. More and more of them have lost work, mostly because of a lack of education. Only one out of four of our workers is high skilled. Forty-eight million Americans have no health care insurance. And further down the ladder – and we don't mention this much any more because apparently poor people don't vote as far as our candidates are concerned but down the ladder we have more poor citizens than we had five years ago, and almost 13 million of our 37 million poor Americans are children deemed to be at risk of poverty, illiteracy and abuse. I have said of some of these children from neighborhoods like my old neighborhood, South Jamaica here in Queens, New York, that if you go back to that community now you'll see these children surrounded by pimps, prostitutes, disorientation, of all kind, here, in the city of New York, in the richest country in world history. And some of those children conceivably will grow up familiar with the sound of gunfire before they've ever heard an orchestra play. Here, in this city, in this great country. Not an issue, but certainly it should be.

For six years our government has failed us in every phase of its performance. We need better Homeland Security, new energy sources, better and more education and healthcare, fairer trade agreements, budget discipline, a re-invigorated armed forces, more respect for our Constitution and restored respect from the rest of the world. [Applause]. Obviously many of these problems, the economic ones at least, exist and have persisted at times when the president and his Administration have said we had a strong market economy. And if you're an econometrician and you measure the society that way, measure the economy, what is the economy? The economy is the production of goods and services, the distribution of goods and services, and the consumption of goods and services if you are a market economy like ours, at a profit. And if that's the way you measure the economy, of course, it's doing fairly well despite the trepidation and the fear expressed by some markets in this morning's paper, that I think is temporary.

But if you measure economically by the productivity and all of the other criteria that econometricians use, yeah, it's a strong economy. But that has nothing to do with the condition of the people in the country. You can have a strong economy in China, and 75 percent of the people could be starving. And so when you look at the condition of people in this country, you find that the middle class is sinking, the poor are desperate, and everything good is happening up at the top where I live, frankly. And as Adam Smith and Abe Lincoln told us, a strong economy simply will not be enough. In addition to having been fragmented economically – and incidentally, if you want to read on fragmentation, read books by Republicans. Kevin Phillips, read his two books on wealth. He did two, in which he said: "It's a disaster what's happening to us. The fragmentation appears to be almost irreversible. We are becoming a classified, stratified society." Buffet says, "There is no question that this is class warfare, and the rich people are winning." That's not bad, except the poor people and the middle class people are losing big time. That's the reality of this moment. [Applause].

Let me try to speed this up. On the question of values, religion, you have to consider religion. This should take a lot of time because it's a subtle subject, and I'm going to give you just a piece of it, just to arouse your interest and perhaps preserve the opportunity to get into greater depth on another occasion. In addition to having been fragmented economically, we've been driven to some extent by controversy over attempts to make our government more actively religious than it is or than it should be. The First Amendment protects everyone's right to decide what to believe with respect to religion. That's the main purpose of the First Amendment, to give you the right to believe what you will. There is a God, there isn't a God, there is a God of this type, of that type, and in this country we define religion differently than some of you would suspect. Theistic religion we're all familiar with, the Hebrews, the Christians, the Muslims. But then there's the non-theist, the atheistic religions, Buddhism, Shinduism, Hinduism, even ethical humanism are defined as religions, bodies of belief, concentrated bodies of belief.

Now, the First Amendment protects our right to participate in any one of those or none of them if we wish. And in order to assure that right, the First Amendment also makes specific the fact that the government should stay out of the religion business. It should not ever impose religion on anyone, and it shouldn’t even make specific grants of resources to religions qua religions, if they happen to be tied up with other things. [Applause]. That is being considered even this evening by the judges of the Supreme Court because there was an argument on the faith-based initiatives, a complicated subject, but we ought to keep our eye on it.

Now, let me give you another example of religion by way of imposition and point out how divisive it can be. Take the subject of stem cells, embryonic stem cells. The understanding by many scientists – not all of them – is that embryonic stem cells have great potential to produce after continuing research and development, to product amazing restorative capacities. So a lot of people are excited about developing. You know in California they're very aggressive about it, New Jersey, but here, the President of the United States says, we will not use this government to promote stem cells, embryonic stem cells. Scientists tell me it could be very useful; however, we're not going to do it. Why not, Mr. President? Because if it's an embryonic stem cell, to get it you have to destroy the embryo and that's killing a human being, because life begins at conception. Now, that's interesting. Life begins at conception. There's a point of view. [Applause].

Of course, over the generations, over the centuries, people have disagreed on that. Even my own church had Thomas Aquinas, who says 30 days, and then St. Augustine, who says 15 days, and then now it's at conception. And so there have been different positions on that, but that's not the point. The point is this. I talked to the New York Times and I said, you ought to ask the bioscience adviser to the President what the basis of the President's decision is that life begins at conception. How does he know life begins at conception? And the scientists said the following: It is not a scientific issue. Dr. Marburger, John Marburger, who was out at Shoreham, he was from Brookhaven. He's now his adviser. It is not a scientific issue; it is a sacred issue. Well, if it is a religious issue, then what you are saying to me, Mr. President, is because your religion prohibits it, I am denied it, and that at least in spirit is a violation of the First Amendment. [Applause].

But that's religions being divisive. There's another side of religion that we don't talk enough about, and I know the Speaker's very strong on this. Incidentally, if I can pause and be erratically independent of my text. I think you would make a great candidate for President no the Republican side, I really do. [Applause]. There's a terrible evil possibility here, which I want you not even to dwell on, that number one, that's really a kiss of death and that I already did it to Rudy Giuliani by making an endorsement for him, so I can get both of you by being nice to you. [Laughing].

But let's just look quickly at religion as a positive, as a positive, and here I think we have neglected religion. There are values, religious values that are extraordinarily benign useful, and that track perfectly the whole idea of community and the basic principles of Judaism. Si daca and Ti kwan Alan, two ideas, the Hebrews, the first theism. They say Si daca. Si daca's nothing more than love. Understand, we're all human beings, and that relationship creates a need for us to understand one another, to help one another, to be good to one another, simple enough. And Ti Kwan Alan, Ti Kwan Alan means only repair the world. The world is imperfect, and you should make it closer to perfect. Now, that's Judaism, that's Catholicism. "Love one another as you love yourself for the love of me, for I am Christ." And that's Si daca. And what do you do? "God made the world but did not complete it, you are to be collaborators in Creation." That's Christianity. That's Ti Kwan Alan.

The Koran says exactly the same thing. So does Buddhism, Hinduism Shinduism, so does the natural law. If nobody ever came down a mountain with a stone tablet, if nobody ever delivered a homily, if you were all alone on an island, you and a thousand other like you and you had no other access to history or humanity and you sat down and tried to figure it out, you'd have to come to two conclusions: that first of all we're all alike, we have the same needs, the same instincts, and so we should work together because together we're stronger and better. And two, we don't know what our mission is. How could you possibly know? Even if you believed in a God that's infinite, that infinite quality puts him or her beyond your reach as a human being. [Applause].

So those two principles are the best beginning for a government as well, and that's what Lincoln, who himself was not formally religious, not formally religious – he used God plenty, and his beautiful second inaugural was magnificent. But he said over and over he wasn't formally religious but he did love God. He believed in those principles, and they're good enough to build a political philosophy on.

Let me skip all the way now to this simple proposition. I believe we should use government to work on health care, to work on education, to do all these other things, and you should be asking me and every other politician, how do you pay for it, because everybody's going to say the same thing, especially on the Democratic side, we should do this, we should do that, we should do this, here's how you pay for it. And now tomorrow, there'll be story saying, oh, gee, he wants to kill the Democrats because he's going to tax us. Listen very closely to me, please. Here's how you pay for it.

Now, if we had the Treasury that Bill Clinton left us with – [Applause] $5.4 trillion surplus, $5.4 trillion surplus. Newt Gringrich had a lot to do with that, because he worked with the President, they came up with pay as you go, they wound up with a whole lot of money, and so he had a lot. We don't have that money, so what do you have?

Well, first you have to cut spending. Where is the spending? There is a lot of spending in entitlement, Social Security and Medicare. Now, the main purpose of those programs are to take care of people who without those programs would suffer. So take the people who can't possibly suffer. Take Warren Buffet, take the 700 millionaires and billionaires who came to Washington to argue against getting rid of the tax cuts saying, we're rich because the country made us rich, and cut some of their Social Security and Medicare. They'll never feel it, and there's a lot of money there. [Applause].

Go back to pay as you go, which was the Newt Gingrich idea, along with the President and John Kasich and people like that. Then there are perennial billions of dollars in savings that everybody talks about that Congress doesn't want to do anything. Now, they're going to have to do something by earmarks. That's political pork, basically, and there was a lot of money there. The corporate welfare that John McCain is talking about all the time, billions of dollars there. Chuck Schumer points to $150 billions dollars, if you just put more auditors in the IRS, $15 billion, $15 billion uncollected on capital gains because capital gains were not reported to the IRS, $15 billion worth. Finally, there are hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts given to the top one percent of the wealthiest Americans over the next decade.

Now, there must be a better way to invest that money than to give cuts to the top one percent. What is that, a million people out of 100 million taxpayers. What did you get for it? Well, this s money that goes to investors, and if it goes to investors, it goes into the economy and it's good for everybody. We have so much money in investment we don't have the deals to put it into. We're not short of investment money. Go to any banker who has any sense at all and hasn't been drinking all night and ask him about it. [Laughing].

Now, let me talk finally about something that I think is going to shock you all, especially the many Republicans in this office. President Reagan, I got to know him well. On the question of taxation, the Reagan- Bush I-Clinton III presidents is very important. I was a governor at the time, and so I'm extremely familiar with this. Reagan came in – and see, the problem when you're talking about taxes and taking the cuts that the President imprudently gave Bush to the people at the top, over the decade over 40 percent of about $1 trillion goes to people who don't need the money. And remember, the President said, "I'm giving it to them because we don't need the money," remember? It's their money; I'm giving it back." Well, there's now hundreds of billions of dollars out there, but you can't touch it. Why? Because if you say no, we're going to take that buck, oh, you're a tax raiser. We're not talking about raising taxes on the middle class or the poor, only them.

And what would happen if you took it back? Now, here is the history. You can look it up. Read Richard Darmon's book, read David Stockman's book, read John Farrell on Tip O'Neill. It's all in the book. Reagan comes with the magic of supply-side, Bush says it's economic voodoo, voodoo economics, but then he marries the witch doctor and becomes Vice President. [Applause].

So now they're there and they say, here's what we're going to do, we're going to cut your taxes, the rates all the way down. Everybody cheers/ And then we're going to pile the missiles so high that the Ruskies are going to see it and they're going to surrender, but that's going to cost you a lot of money. That's all right, because the magic of supply-side, we're going to balance the budget in three years. Three years? How? Because the wheels of the economy are going to spin so fast from the tax cuts that it's going to throw off so much revenue it pays you all the tax money back. Phhh. You're even, or better. Good, then why don't you cut the taxes for zero? We'll be incredibly rich. [Laughing].

Now, was he off? Only by $2 trillion. He miscalculated this badly. Now, listen closely, please. This badly that he had to go back and raise taxes, and so did Bush, had to give up his pledge and raise taxes. And so did Clinton, who first was going to put the money into infrastructure, $200 billion his first year and Bob Rubin said, no, no, no, the deficit is so huge created by the Reagan tax cuts that the recession that we had in 1982 is going to be repeated. They raised taxes hundreds of billions of dollars, and mostly on the rich people, and what happened after they did that? Look it up. Look it up. Six tax increases by Reagan, and the first one was the biggest tax increase in history as of that time. And then George Bush, who I spoke to personally about it, and said you should take the NEC, which was an idea I gave Reagan and he adopted a national economic commission, give you a housing to both cut entitlements and raise taxes because you're going to have to do it if you become President. He was Vice President. He said, no, that's a tax-cutting idea. He didn't do it. Reagan created the Commission. He killed the Commission after six months. He had no cover. He got stuck. He had to unzip his mouth, and he had to say okay, I'll do tax increases.

And here's what happened after that. After that, you had – supply-siders incidentally said, you raise taxes on them and you're going to kill the economy. Here's what happened. Eight years of economic growth, the four best stock market years in our history, 22 million new jobs, a balanced budget, $5 trillion projected surplus, an upwardly mobile middle class, fewer poor, and the discrediting of the magic of supply-side theory, and incidentally more millionaires and billionaires than ever. In the long run, the increased taxes on our wealthiest taxpayers proved to be a good investment for America and especially for the wealthiest Americans, because it helped produced even more billionaires and millionaires than ever. Let's call it the magic of tax increases. So the next time they tell you you can't touch that money, tell them to read a book.

I'm going to now skip all of Iraq. [Laughing]. No, I have a minute. Let me give it to you in a hurry. [Laughing]. The majority of the American people disagree with the President on escalation. He's been wrong about almost everything, and particularly about the escalation in my opinion. His stated rationale is that we have to accept the sacrifice to steal more of our American forces in order to avoid making Iraq a place of civil war, violence and chaos. The simple answer to that is, it's already a place of violence, chaos, et cetera, and has been for a long time. What's more, it is now clear beyond disputation that the real war against terrorism is in Afghanistan, and we're losing there as well. We shouldn’t have left Afghanistan to go to Iraq in the first place. We'd better get back as soon as we can. Nevertheless, the President says we must stay the course until he declare we've had a victory in Iraq.

Now, how would we know the President's version of victory when we saw it? Presumably it would require that we have in place a stable, effective all-Iraqi government agreed to by the Shiites, their mortal enemies the Sunnis, and their alienated northern neighbors, the Kurds. They would have to be at peace, not dominated by Iran which favors Shiites, nor Saudi Arabia, which favors Sunnis, with a competent police force and military force that together would put down serious internal disturbances. But after four years, 140,000 or so troops in the field not able to create those conditions, what makes you think that with 21,000 more you could do it now?

There's a story in the Times I have to tell you about this morning. There's more to this, but one thing that I think maybe the Speaker said, or perhaps it was someone else, but surely it was said. They said that leaving Iraq now would be a betrayal for the Iraqis, a betrayal of the Iraqis. I think that is a harsh and groundless accusation. A betrayal by us, the USA, after more than 3,000 Americans have given their life, and ten times that number were wounded? After spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get rid of Saddam Hussein? Hundreds of billions of dollars trying to prevent Iraqis from killing Iraqis? No, this wasn't a betrayal by Americans, this was all the product of a blunder by our President, a tragic, calamitous blunder that he refuses to acknowledge or to end. And let me say ironically about the New York Times story this morning. It involves a group of returning veterans from Iraq who stated their displeasure about the President's escalation and how demanded a prompt withdrawal. It's only a group, a small group. I'm not saying this is the position of the military, but there is this small group of human beings who went there, who fought and who came back and are saying we're wrong to stay. And one of them expresses indignation by saying that keeping out troops in Iraq is yes, a betrayal, a betrayal of the soldiers because they've given us five different reasons for why we're there and none of them are any good. Now, that's another view of betrayal.

Let me finish with this. I really want to spend a lot of time on this, and I apologize for going over and I hope you guys will forgive me. I think there's only one way to conclude this thing. The Democrats now in the legislature with the help of some Republicans trying to condition, in trying to make a conditional legislation which would cleverly take from the President the ability to manage the war the way he wants to. Let's assume that they could get a vote for it. They probably wouldn’t get 60 votes, and that means it's dead because it's going to be vetoed, but let's say they get passed the veto. Then there's going to be litigation. And what would happen in the litigation? What almost always happens when the Congress and the President lock horns on an issue in war. When it's the question of the Commander in Chief against the Congr3ess, they will probably conclude this is a political issue. What does that mean? We're not going to handle it; you guys handle it, and that means it goes nowhere because it come back to where it was.

So I don't think – it's very good politics for the Democrats and it gives them an opportunity to rub the President's nose in it, and it may even be pretty good policy, but it is not good legally and it will not work. There's only one thing that will work. Read the book, Out of Iraq. Now, the name on it is McGovern and Polk, but in that book they have a scheme, a plan for withdrawing and stabilizing Iraq at the same time, using a force of neighboring people put together with maybe some from the European Union, maybe some from NATO, maybe some from ____ -- excuse me. That it's all in the book. I would encourage you to read the book, I would encourage the President to read the book. He'd have to do more than read it. I think he'll like it. I think it's a plausible plan for getting out. It goes way beyond what Hillary Clinton has done or any of the other Democrats have done. It's all in there how to get it done. And I feel this way about it. The only chance we have now is for the President to lead the way. He has nearly two years to create a legacy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful for our nation if he could make that legacy more than a tale of terrible failure which it has been to this point by promoting a thoughtful, intelligent and effective plan to removal our troops from the heart of battle while at the same time helping to build a viable government for the Iraqi people? If he could do that, if he could get us out of Iraq with dignity, leaving behind the best possible climate for rebuilding, regrrowth and peace, now, that would be a big idea, a really big idea. Thank you for your patience.