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Gov. Branstad and Chris and Gov. Ray and Billie and Congressman King, thank you for having me here and I'd like to offer a special happy birthday to Ray Hoffmann, who is the chairman of the party. Happy birthday, Ray. What birthday is it, Ray? [laughter] Twenty-seven. Okay. [laughter]. It's good to see Mike Whalen and Jeff Lamberti, who I had the honor of campaigning with just back in the Fall and all of the other distinguished guests of the party.
If I looked a little shocked at this audience and gathering, I've never seen so many Republicans. [laughter] In New York City it would stop about in that part of the room over there. We're out-numbered 5 to 1, so I love to travel and come to Iowa. I think I'm going to run in the Iowa caucuses just so I can meet Republicans; it's going to be great. [applause].
Right before the 1993 election for mayor, when I was in a very, very heated and difficult election, I was walking along the streets--I think it was Brooklyn, and it may have been Manhattan or somewhere, but I shook this man's hand. I wanted to get every last vote. The man grabbed my hand, he looked at me, he looked at me like really kind of friendly, but he had a very, very strong handshake, and he held it; he wouldn't let it go, and he said to me, it'll be until hell freezes over before there's a Republican mayor of my city. [laughter]. I said, thank you. [laughter]. Couldn't think of what else to say. But a couple of days later I got elected.
I didn't think about this man for a while. He passed out of my thoughts. And one month into being Mayor of New York City, I woke up on February 1st, 1994. I had the radio on and the announcer on the radio said, "Mayor Giuliani's been in office for one month, and the Mayor has already set a record." I said, oh, that's nice; I wonder what it is? [The announcer] Said he set a record for the most snowfall in the last 40 years. [laughter]. So I said, hmm, and then the reporter went on to say there's going to be more snowfall in February.
So now I started to think about this man. And I started to have dreams about him. Hell freezing over. Republican mayor. Maybe he knew something I didn't know about New York City. And the first couple of years I got a lot of snow, but I want to report something to you. By the time I finished as Mayor there was almost no snow in the winters. Republican policies and programs work to even reduce the snow. So I want you to know that.
Republican policies and programs work in a much more serious way too. And the election that we're going to be dealing with in 2008 is a very, very important one. It's important because there are a lot of things at stake. Let me mention two of them very, very quickly.
One of them is whether we're going to remain a growth economy any more. If we elect a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president in 2008, we're not going to be a growth economy any more. We're going to go copy the economies of Western Europe, as if they're doing so well.
And if we elect a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, we're not going to be on offense against terrorism any longer because by everything they've said, done and the way they've acted, they want to go back on defense against terrorism.
And these things are really important. They're important to our future. The choice we make is going to be enormously important not just for our party, it's going to be enormously important for our country. And we need your help and we need your support and we've got to make sure that we elect a Republican president and a Republican Congress in 2008. [applause].
The best way to do that is to be a party that is best known for what we're for, not what we're against. That motivates people, that draws people; it's positive vision. That's what Ronald Reagan gave us. That's what our great leaders always give us: What we're for. We're always against something, but what is it that we're for?
So what are we for? We're for growth. We're for growth through lower taxes. We're for growth--that's why we lower taxes. We don't lower taxes just because we want to lower them, although it's not bad to lower them; we lower taxes because that brings about economic growth, it brings about more jobs, it brings about a better future. We're for reducing the size of government because we realize that that creates growth because the private sector is the thing that really fuels our economy and government can be too much of a burden on it. We're for reducing regulations not because regulations are in of themselves bad, but when you have regulations too many of them, like Sarbanes-Oxley now and some of the others, they're like a weight. They're a weight on your private economy; they stop the growth of it. So we're a party of growth.
We're a party of better education. We're a party that understands that the way we're going to bring about better education--I learned this as Mayor of New York City; I changed my mind about this while I was Mayor of New York City. We're going to bring about better education by putting the evaluations and the scoring and the decisions about schools not in the hands of the federal Department of Education, not in the hands of the school boards--they're all great and they're all terrific--but who knows the most about the good of a child? Who? The parents. That's where the choice should be; that's where the decision should be made. They're the ones who will decide on the best schools for children and that's why I am a very, very strong proponent of school choice. [applause].
We're the party that's going to improve health care. We're the party that's going to improve health care because if we don't get elected, we're going to have socialized medicine in this country. That's where the Democrats are headed. The Democrats are headed to government mandates, government controlled health care, government directed health care. They want to make our health care system like the health care systems of France and Germany and Italy and England and Canada.
I had prostate cancer six years ago. I wrote in my book about prostate cancer. People call me up all the time; they ask me for advice about it. I try not to give 'em too much advice because I don't want to practice medicine without a license, but usually the thing it gets around to is, you know, what hospital, what doctor, and sometimes they need help, sometimes they need help to get into a hospital. Always it's a hospital in America. It can be in New York, it can be in Washington, it can be in Boston, it can be in Minnesota, it can be in Los Angeles--I mean just many great hospitals.
I've never yet gotten a request from anybody that's called me for treatment on prostate cancer or even some other forms of cancer to get into a hospital in England or France or Germany or Canada. I've gotten some requests from people there to get into our hospitals. Why is that?
Because we have a flawed health care system, we have a health care system that needs a lot of help, we have a health care system we have to make available to many, many more people, we have a health care system that is burdened by enormous lawsuits that are totally out of control, but we still have the best health care system in the world. And we're going to fix it by not ruining it.
The Democrats want to ruin it. They want to take away the thing that makes it the best health care system in the world, and that is because it's private, because it's competitive, because it's free market, because there's a profit motive in it. These are the things that make it a great health care system. And we're going to fix it by giving tax incentives, by having health savings accounts, by having health vouchers, and we're going to maintain the competitive nature of it, and we're going to expand it. And if we don't get elected, I think it's in real jeopardy.
And finally we're the party of energy independence. We're the party that realizes that energy independence is a matter now of national security. We should have realized it a long time ago, but we've got to realize it now and we have to realize it the way, the way Eisenhower realized it in the 1950s when the Russians got ahead of us in the quest for space. Eisenhower saw that, Eisenhower looked at that, and Eisenhower said, we're going to take all of our energy, we're going to take everything that we can muster and we're going to get ahead of them. And Eisenhower started it, and Kennedy continued it and Johnson continued it some more and Nixon completed it and we beat the Russians to the moon.
We can do the same thing with energy independence if we have the will to do it. Republican, Democrat--two Republican presidents, two Democratic presidents working together for the national good. And that's what we have to do with energy independence. You've got a lot to contribute here in Iowa. Ethanol is part of that. Expanding ethanol is part of that.
But why is it that Brazil is ahead of us in ethanol? Does that make any sense? I mean Brazil is a great country; Brazil is a terrific country, but Brazil doesn't have the resources that we have, Brazil doesn't have the science that we have, Brazil doesn't have the economy that we have. We should be ahead of Brazil and we should be ahead of other countries in nuclear power, and we should be ahead in carbon sequestration, and we should be ahead in wind and solar power and we're only going to do that if we make that a singular goal.
The theme for us is that we're a party of growth, we're a party that's characterized by what we're for, and the most important thing that we face is terrorism. We're at war with terrorists not because we want to be, we're at war with terrorists because they're at war with us. And what's happened in Washington has intensified for me exactly the difference between us and the Democrats. The Democrats over the last couple of weeks have done something that I have a difficult time even describing. I'm trying to figure out in the long history of war when has ever an army or a nation not only announced its retreat but then printed up a schedule of that retreat and handed it to their enemy. Does that make any sense? That only has to make sense in Washington, right? I mean how can it make sense to give a schedule of just when you're going to deplete your forces to your enemy. Whether you're for this war or you're against this war. Why would you do that?
Well here's why you do it. You don't do it because you know, they care about the country less than we do or they care about the troops less than we do. That's not true. Neither party has a monopoly on virtue or vice. When you start thinking that you get all confused. They do it because they see the war in Iraq in a vacuum. They see it sort of isolated. They don't see it as part of the wider war on terror. I'm not sure they see the wider war on terror.
It isn't just about Iraq. Iraq is real important. We've got to get it right, and we've got to be for victory in Iraq. But we've got to concentrate on the rest of the war on terror. There are people in other parts of this world, not just in Iraq, who are part of this terrorist movement that are planning to come here and kill us and harm us and hurt us. They succeeded in doing it twice here in the United States. They're going to succeed in doing it again if we go back being on defense.
What I learned from dealing with terrorism, going way back to the 1970s as a prosecutor, as a Justice Department official, as a mayor who had to deal with the aftermath of the first attack in 1993, and then as a mayor who had to deal with the ultimate attack in 2001; here's what I learned and here's what I would carry forward with me anywhere I go, president or any place else that I go: Never again are we going to be on defense against terrorists. [applause].
Retreat, surrender, schedules of retreat, cutting back on the Patriot Act, cutting back on electronic surveillance, cutting back on interrogation--that's all defense; that's all where we were before September 11th. Well maybe before September 11 you couldn't get it. Maybe before September 11 when they attacked at the World Trade Center in 1993 we didn't see that it was an act of war, and we thought it was just a crime. Maybe when they attacked us on the U.S.S. Cole we didn't get it, that it was an act of war. I don't blame people for that. Things are confusing in government and hindsight is powerful. But I do blame people that don't get it after September 11.
After September 11 it's clear, it's clear what they're about, it's clear what they want to do; it's clear what we have to do to protect ourselves. We need to have a military that is stronger, more flexible, more prepared, and appropriately aggressive. And that's what we have been in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we should not back off. [applause].
We need a Patriot Act that allows the FBI to share information appropriately. We're for it; they wanted to cut back on it. That's going back on defense. We need electronic surveillance. It needs to be legal, it needs to be appropriate, but it needs to be aggressive. And we need interrogation techniques; not torture, not inhumane treatment, but aggressive terrorist techniques. I investigated many organized criminal groups and some terrorist groups. I never once had one of them come into my office, knock on my door, and volunteer information. [laughter]. The way you find out about their plans to come here and kill us is by intruding into what they're doing--tape recording them, putting spies in, and getting them to talk. If we back off that, then we're going back on defense and we're no longer on offense. [applause].
So that's what I think this next election is about. It's about whether we remain a growth economy, whether we really move forward and energize the private sector toward energy independence, and whether we remain on offense in the war on terror. This election is more important than me and it's more important that all of the candidates who are going to appear here in a little while, and it's more important than all of us.
I would like to be your president. I hope you select me. Please. [laughter, applause]. But if you don't, every single person that comes up here after me, some of whom I know very well, some of whom I consider personal friends and all of whom I know their views; every single one of them is better than Hillary, Senator Obama, Senator Edwards and the other long list of Democrats. [applause]. And I hope you pick me, but if you don't pick me, pick one of them. This country's going to be in a lot better shape.
And every one of us has to remember the words of the president it seems to me we all quote the most now, Ronald Reagan. Do you remember his 11th Commandment? Never speak ill of another Republican. We should all pledge ourselves to that [applause] because when it's over, when this primary is over, whoever wins we are all going to be on the same side. Because the things I just mentioned we all believe in and we can all bring about, and I mean every single one of us. We can bring about a growth economy, we can bring about more offense and no defense against terrorism, we can bring about energy independence, and there are a lot more things we can do together. It's going to be a spirited primary. There are going to be a lot of differences and a lot of things that, but on those things we're together. This party has to remain together. It's for our good as a party; it's even more important for the United States of America. Thank you and God bless America. [applause].
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Time: 17:46