Subject: In Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton Pledges to Bring the Country Together
From: Hillary for America Press <[email-masked]>
To: Hillary for America Press <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2016 17:45:54 -0400
List-Id: <nationalpress2016.hillaryclinton.com>

<[email-masked]>
​

*​*
*In Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton Pledges to Bring the Country Together*

At a Get Out The Vote event on Monday night in Philadelphia, Hillary
Clinton pledged to bring the country together to solve problems, make the
economy work for everyone, and provide every person the chance to live up
to his or her God-given potential.
*The transcript of Clinton’s remarks, as delivered, is below:*

​"​
Wow, I am thrilled to be here in Philadelphia with all of you.  And I am
delighted to be in this beautiful setting on this spring evening, because
it makes us all feel like there will be a new beginning, doesn’t it?  And
we are going to build on the progress we have been making, but we’re going
to go further, and I want to be the best president that you could possibly
have here in Pennsylvania and in Philadelphia.  I want to thank the people
who represent you, who have been supporting me, in addition to the mayor.
Your governor, Governor Wolf is here.  Thank you so much, Governor.  The
Governor has been fighting the good fight against the Republican
legislature, and is standing up for more aid for Philadelphia’s schools, is
standing up to provide greater economic opportunities, and I’m looking
forward to working with you, Governor.

I also want to thank your Senator, Bob Casey, who is with my daughter
tonight, who is also campaigning in Philadelphia. I want to thank
Congressman Bob Brady, who has been a stalwart, tenacious fighter for the
people he represents here.  Thank you, Bob.  Thank you for everything.  I
want to thank Congressman Brendan Boyle, a new young voice in the
Congress.  I’m so proud to have his endorsement.  Councilwoman Dani
Blackwell I know is here somewhere.  I saw her earlier.  Thank you.  And
former Mayor and Governor, Ed Rendell, thank you Ed.

I’m pretty excited about tomorrow, and I’m glad to see you all are excited
about tomorrow.  I need every one of you to go out and work as hard as you
can, and convince everybody you can talk to to come out and vote.  I want
to thank the entire campaign, all of the organizers and volunteers, and I
want to thank my friends from organized labor who have been working so hard
on behalf of this campaign.  Now, why are all these people working?  Well,
because they know that this election is so consequential, because there
could not be a bigger difference between where I stand and what I believe,
and where the Republicans are.  And remember, the goal here is to make sure
we have a Democrat in the White House next January.

And I want you to imagine with me the kind of country that we can strive
for and achieve.  Because I think it’s absolutely necessary for us to set
some big goals again, to pull our country together again, to make decisions
that will make us stronger and more prosperous.  So let’s start by
imagining an economy that produces enough jobs for everybody to get ahead,
because they have a chance for a good middle-class life.  I am convinced we
can do that.  More jobs in infrastructure, manufacturing, clean renewable
energy, more support for small businesses, especially minority and women
owned small businesses.  Raising the minimum wage so that it’s not a
poverty wage for our working people.  Defending the right to organize and
bargain collectively, because the American labor movement helped to create
the American middle class. And standing up for equal pay for women. And
this is not just a women’s issue.  This is a family issue.  If you have a
mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter who works, you want her paid fairly
and equally as well.

Everything I’ve just said, the Republicans disagree with.  Every bit of
it.  They don’t think that we should be creating more jobs.  They don’t
want to raise the minimum wage.  They don’t believe in equal pay.  That’s
why it’s so important that we send a really strong message here in
Pennsylvania that we are not going to be intimidated or deterred by their
demagoguery, by their old ideas.  We’re going forward with a new vision of
what we can do together.  And it includes education.  Let’s have early
childhood education – and thank you, Mayor.  And let’s work with our
teachers.  Let’s be a good partner with our teachers.  And let’s make
college affordable for everyone.  And let’s have more apprenticeships and
technical education, to be able to fill the 1.2 million jobs for skilled
tradesmen.

Let’s make community college free.  And let’s pay down and forgive as much
of the student debt as we possibly can.  And let’s make sure the federal
government isn’t making money off of lending money to kids to go to college
in the first place.  I have plans to do all of that.  I’ve told you what I
will do, because I want you to know.  I’m not going to make promises I
can’t keep.  I am not going to engage in demagoguery, because we have too
much work to do.  And it’s good work.  It’s important work.  I believe our
best years can still be ahead of us in this country, and I intend to do
everything to make that so.  And we’re going to finish the work on the
Affordable Care Act.  We’re going to lower the costs, the co-pays,
deductibles.  We’re going to provide more choices.  And we are going to
lower the cost of prescription drugs that are skyrocketing.

The Republicans want to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  I take that really
as a challenge, because before there was something called Obamacare, there
was something called Hillarycare.  And we worked really hard to provide
universal healthcare coverage.  And when we weren’t successful, I turned
around and helped to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which
insures 8 million kids in America.  But that’s why I was so thrilled when
President Obama passed and signed the Affordable Care Act, and I’m not
going to let anybody repeal it, and we’re not going to start over.  We’re
going to make it work.

And there’s two other things we’re going to focus on.  We’re going to make
sure that mental health and addiction get the support that they both
require.  It is wrong that so many people with mental health problems are
still stigmatized, isn’t it?  It’s wrong that they can’t afford to get the
treatment they need.  And it’s wrong that we don’t have enough treatment
and recovery programs for people suffering from addiction, particularly
opioid addiction and heroin addiction.  So we’re going to tackle those two
problems as well.  We’re going to save lives and give people a better
chance.  Now, when I talk about the kind of country that I want, and what
we can do together, some people say, well, we can’t do that.  We can’t do
manufacturing anymore.  Well, I just disagree.  We can make it in America.
And I’ll tell you, it wasn’t so long ago, when my husband was President, we
had 23 million new jobs and incomes went up for everybody, not just people
at the top – middle class, working, poor families.  And we can do that
again.  Now, what interrupted it was a Republican President came along and
went back to trickle-down economics.  Didn’t work then.  Won’t work now.
That’s exactly the right response.

But I’ll tell you, President Obama inherited that mess from the
Republicans, and I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves for digging
us out of the ditch that the Republicans put us into.  So you got to listen
closely because the Republicans want to dig that ditch all over again.  We
are finally standing, and we’re going to be running, if we work together,
if we have an explain about the real choices that are before the American
people.

And you need to pay attention to what these Republicans say because they
also want to undermine all of our rights.  Make no mistake about it.  And I
want you to know where I stand.  I will defend a woman’s right to make her
own health care decisions. I will defend Planned Parenthood against these
partisan attacks.  I will defend marriage equality and work to end
discrimination against the LGBT community.  I will fight to protect voting
rights.  And I will work to end Citizens United.  I will defend Social
Security, Medicare, and the Veterans Administration against efforts to
privatize them by the Republicans.  I will fight for criminal justice
reform and end mass incarceration by giving people second chances and more
opportunities.

This is a really big deal.  The mayor and I visited a program right here in
Philadelphia where we saw what a second chance program looks like, where
men coming out of prison and young men being diverted from the criminal
justice system were given the tools, the skills, the opportunities, to make
a different set of choices.  I want that to be a high priority for the
federal government, and it will be under my administration.  I will also
continue to work for comprehensive immigration reform with a path to
citizenship.  And I will do everything I can to stand up against and fight
the gun lobby to get common-sense gun safety reform.

This is a really terrible epidemic that we are suffering through.  I know
just this last weekend and the weekend before, you had killings here in
Philadelphia, didn’t you?  That happens in so many places – big cities,
small towns, out in the country.  On average, 90 people a day die from gun
violence.  That is 33,000 people a year.  Now, if 33,000 people in our
country were dying from anything else, we would be organizing to prevent
it, to save lives.  That is what we must do – comprehensive background
checks, close the gun show loophole, close the online loophole, close the
Charleston loophole, and the special protection that the Congress voted to
give gun makers and sellers.

And we also, in addition to fighting to pass laws, we have to end the
intimidation practiced by the gun lobby.  This has to be a voting issue,
where people are just as concerned about measuring where an elected
official stands vis-a-vis guns as any other issue.  And we have to do more
to go right at the gun culture, help people, particularly young people,
guns do not solve your problems.  Guns do not end the anguish or the
suffering.  It only perpetuates that.

And I have now met with so many mothers, so many family members, who have
lost loved ones.  We did an event here in Philadelphia last week where you
had mothers who had lost children.  It doesn’t matter where they live.  It
doesn’t matter who they are.  They are members of a club none of us want
ever to join.  So stand with me in this effort to once again take on the
gun lobby to save lives in America.  There is nothing more important that
we can do to get the violence off our streets and out of our homes.

We also have to make sure we protect America.  Tomorrow, when you go to
vote, you’re voting for a president and a commander-in-chief.  I will do
everything to keep this country safe, to protect Americans, to work with
our friends and allies around the world.  I have to tell you, though, when
I hear the kind of reckless rhetoric coming from Donald Trump and Ted Cruz,
it’s deeply troubling, because it’s not only offensive, it is dangerous.
And we have to rebuke it and repudiate it.

When Donald Trump talks about not caring whether more countries develop
nuclear weapons, that is so contrary to what we have tried to do for the
last 70 years, prevent more countries from getting nuclear weapons.  That
should be our goal.  We can’t have someone running for president who
basically says, “I don’t care if countries develop nuclear weapons,” making
our world all that much more dangerous.  No.  And when he says no Muslims
can come into America, he is sending a message to the entire world that
will make it more difficult for us to defeat ISIS because we’re going to
have to have a coalition with Muslim-majority nations.  And that is exactly
what I will do because I have put coalitions like that together.

We all have to be on the front lines of defense in America, and we will
be.  And we have to lead the world with values in furtherance of our
interests and our security.  I care deeply about this because I was a
Senator from New York on 9/11.  I spent eight years worrying and working to
make sure that did not happen again.  And I will do everything, as your
president, to keep our nation safe.

I will also work to unify our nation.  We have to come back together.  We
can’t allow the divisiveness and the dissension that we hear too much of in
our political system.  And I will go anywhere and meet with anyone at any
time to find common ground.  I did it as First Lady.  I did it as Senator.
I did it as Secretary of State.   Because that is how we will solve our
problems.  It is not enough to diagnose our problems.  We need to know how
to solve them.

And then we’ve got to bring everybody together to do just that.  I am
absolutely convinced our best years are ahead of us if we do what we must
do to get the economy working for everyone, to provide every person,
particularly our children, the chance to live up to their God-given
potential, defend our rights, stand up for our freedom, and human rights
and dignity here at home and around the world.  There is nothing that will
hold us back.  We will have the future that we deserve if we work together,
and that starts for you tomorrow, Philadelphia, right here.

Please, come out and vote!  I would be honored to have your vote.  And if
you vote for me tomorrow, I will stand up and fight for you and for our
future through this campaign into the White House.  Let’s go seize the
future together!  Thank you and God bless you!
​"​

###

For Immediate Release, April 26, 2016
Contact: [email-masked]

PAID FOR BY HILLARY FOR AMERICA
Contributions or gifts to Hillary for America are not tax deductible.
Hillary for America, PO Box 5256, New York

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