Analyzing rhetorical strategies: comparing versions of the same speech

Analyzing rhetorical strategies: comparing versions of the same speech

Read the speeches below. On Wednesday, September 5 former President of the United States Bill Clinton gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. The first version presented below is the speech as it was originally written. The second version is the speech as delivered with the audience's response included. The third version (like the second) presents what Clinton actually said at the convention, but also shows Clinton’s additions to the written text in italics and his deletions from the written text struck out with a single line. Then at the very end of this post I've added a digital recording (posted by C-SPAN) of Clinton delivering the speech.

First, take notes on the versions of the speech with rhetorical strategies and features in mind.

Pay particular attention to the rhetorical significance of the changes Clinton made while delivering the speech. (The third version will help a lot because it makes the changes explicit.)

Then, on the blog answer the following question by class time on Monday: Which version is more rhetorically effective: the speech as written or the speech as delivered? Convince your peers and me by analyzing specific differences in the two speeches. (If your response is too long to fit in the comment box split it into two or more posts. Use your first name and last initial at the beginning of your response.)

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VERSION #1
 Written text of former President Bill Clinton's remarks Wednesday night [9/5/12] at the Democratic National Convention, as provided by the Democratic Party:

We're here to nominate a president, and I've got one in mind.

I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. A man who ran for president to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before the election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression. A man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs were created and saved, there were still millions more waiting, trying to feed their children and keep their hopes alive.

I want to nominate a man cool on the outside but burning for America on the inside. A man who believes we can build a new American Dream economy driven by innovation and creativity, education and cooperation. A man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.

I want Barack Obama to be the next president of the United States and I proudly nominate him as the standard bearer of the Democratic Party.

In Tampa, we heard a lot of talk about how the president and the Democrats don't believe in free enterprise and individual initiative, how we want everyone to be dependent on the government, how bad we are for the economy.

The Republican narrative is that all of us who amount to anything are completely self-made. One of our greatest Democratic chairmen, Bob Strauss, used to say that every politician wants you to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself, but it ain't so.

We Democrats think the country works better with a strong middle class, real opportunities for poor people to work their way into it and a relentless focus on the future, with business and government working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. We think "we're all in this together" is a better philosophy than "you're on your own."

Who's right? Well, since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs. What's the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million.

It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it, creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.

Though I often disagree with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats. After all, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to my home state to integrate Little Rock Central High and built the interstate highway system. And as governor, I worked with President Reagan on welfare reform and with President George H.W. Bush on national education goals. I am grateful to President George W. Bush for PEPFAR, which is saving the lives of millions of people in poor countries and to both Presidents Bush for the work we've done together after the South Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake.

Through my foundation, in America and around the world, I work with Democrats, Republicans and Independents who are focused on solving problems and seizing opportunities, not fighting each other.

When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. After all, nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day. All of us are destined to live our lives between those two extremes. Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn't see it that way. They think government is the enemy, and compromise is weakness.

One of the main reasons America should re-elect President Obama is that he is still committed to cooperation. He appointed Republican secretaries of defense, the army and transportation. He appointed a vice president who ran against him in 2008, and trusted him to oversee the successful end of the war in Iraq and the implementation of the recovery act. And Joe Biden did a great job with both. He appointed Cabinet members who supported Hillary in the primaries. Heck, he even appointed Hillary. I'm so proud of her and grateful to our entire national security team for all they've done to make us safer and stronger and to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies. I'm also grateful to the young men and women who serve our country in the military and to Michelle Obama and Jill Biden for supporting military families when their loved ones are overseas and for helping our veterans, when they come home bearing the wounds of war, or needing help with education, housing, and jobs.

President Obama's record on national security is a tribute to his strength, and judgment, and to his preference for inclusion and partnership over partisanship.

He also tried to work with congressional Republicans on health care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn't work out so well. Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their No. 1 priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work.

Senator, I hate to break it to you, but we're going to keep President Obama on the job.

In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was pretty simple: we left him a total mess, he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.

In order to look like an acceptable alternative to President Obama, they couldn't say much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years. You see they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place: to cut taxes for high income Americans even more than President Bush did; to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts; to increase defense spending $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they'll spend the money on; to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor kids. As another president once said- there they go again.

I like the argument for President Obama's re-election a lot better. He inherited a deeply damaged economy, put a floor under the crash, began the long hard road to recovery, and laid the foundation for a modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for the innovators.

Are we where we want to be? No. Is the president satisfied? No. Are we better off than we were when he took office, with an economy in free fall, losing 750,000 jobs a month. The answer is yes.

I understand the challenge we face. I know many Americans are still angry and frustrated with the economy. Though employment is growing, banks are beginning to lend and even housing prices are picking up a bit, too many people don't feel it.

I experienced the same thing in 1994 and early 1995. Our policies were working and the economy was growing but most people didn't feel it yet. By 1996, the economy was roaring, halfway through the longest peacetime expansion in American history.

President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. No president- not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you'll renew the President's contract you will feel it.

I believe that with all my heart.

President Obama's approach embodies the values, the ideas, and the direction America must take to build a 21st century version of the American Dream in a nation of shared opportunities, shared prosperity and shared responsibilities.

So back to the story. In 2010, as the president's recovery program kicked in, the job losses stopped and things began to turn around.

The Recovery Act saved and created millions of jobs and cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people. In the last 29 months the economy has produced about 4.5 million private sector jobs. But last year, the Republicans blocked the president's jobs plan costing the economy more than a million new jobs. So here's another jobs score: President Obama plus 4.5 million, congressional Republicans zero.

Over that same period, more than more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama- the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s.

The auto industry restructuring worked. It saved more than a million jobs, not just at GM, Chrysler and their dealerships, but in auto parts manufacturing all over the country. That's why even auto-makers that weren't part of the deal supported it. They needed to save the suppliers too. Like I said, we're all in this together.

Now there are 250,000 more people working in the auto industry than the day the companies were restructured. Gov. Romney opposed the plan to save GM and Chrysler. So here's another jobs score: Obama 250,000, Romney, zero.

The agreement the administration made with management, labor and environmental groups to double car mileage over the next few years is another good deal: it will cut your gas bill in half, make us more energy independent, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and add another 500,000 good jobs.

President Obama's "all of the above" energy plan is helping too- the boom in oil and gas production combined with greater energy efficiency has driven oil imports to a near 20 year low and natural gas production to an all-time high. Renewable energy production has also doubled.

We do need more new jobs, lots of them, but there are already more than three million jobs open and unfilled in America today, mostly because the applicants don't have the required skills. We have to prepare more Americans for the new jobs that are being created in a world fueled by new technology. That's why investments in our people are more important than ever. The president has supported community colleges and employers in working together to train people for open jobs in their communities. And, after a decade in which exploding college costs have increased the drop-out rate so much that we've fallen to 16th in the world in the percentage of our young adults with college degrees, his student loan reform lowers the cost of federal student loans and even more important, gives students the right to repay the loans as a fixed percentage of their incomes for up to 20 years. That means no one will have to drop-out of college for fear they can't repay their debt, and no one will have to turn down a job, as a teacher, a police officer or a small town doctor because it doesn't pay enough to make the debt payments. This will change the future for young Americans.

I know we're better off because President Obama made these decisions.

That brings me to health care.

The Republicans call it Obamacare and say it's a government takeover of health care that they'll repeal. Are they right? Let's look at what's happened so far. Individuals and businesses have secured more than a billion dollars in refunds from their insurance premiums because the new law requires 80 percent to 85 pecent of your premiums to be spent on health care, not profits or promotion. Other insurance companies have lowered their rates to meet the requirement. More than 3 million young people between 19 and 25 are insured for the first time because their parents can now carry them on family policies. Millions of seniors are receiving preventive care including breast cancer screenings and tests for heart problems. Soon the insurance companies, not the government, will have millions of new customers many of them middle class people with pre-existing conditions. And for the last two years, health care spending has grown under 4 pecent, for the first time in 50 years.

So are we all better off because President Obama fought for it and passed it? You bet we are.

There were two other attacks on the president in Tampa that deserve an answer. Both Gov. Romney and congressman Ryan attacked the president for allegedly robbing Medicare of $716 billion. Here's what really happened. There were no cuts to benefits. None. What the president did was save money by cutting unwarranted subsidies to providers and insurance companies that weren't making people any healthier. He used the saving to close the donut hole in the Medicare drug program, and to add eight years to the life of the Medicare Trust Fund. It's now solvent until 2024. So President Obama and the Democrats didn't weaken Medicare, they strengthened it.

When congressman Ryan looked into the TV camera and attacked President Obama's "biggest coldest power play" in raiding Medicare, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. You see, that $716 billion is exactly the same amount of Medicare savings congressman Ryan had in his own budget.

At least on this one, Gov. Romney's been consistent. He wants to repeal the savings and give the money back to the insurance companies, re-open the donut hole and force seniors to pay more for drugs, and reduce the life of the Medicare Trust Fund by eight years. So now if he's elected and does what he promised Medicare will go broke by 2016. If that happens, you won't have to wait until their voucher program to begins in 2023 to see the end Medicare as we know it.

But it gets worse. They also want to block grant Medicaid and cut it by a third over the coming decade. Of course, that will hurt poor kids, but that's not all. Almost two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for seniors and on people with disabilities, including kids from middle class families, with special needs like, Down syndrome or autism. I don't know how those families are going to deal with it. We can't let it happen

Now let's look at the Republican charge that President Obama wants to weaken the work requirements in the welfare reform bill I signed that moved millions of people from welfare to work.

Here's what happened. When some Republican governors asked to try new ways to put people on welfare back to work, the Obama administration said they would only do it if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20 percent. You hear that? More work. So the claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform's work requirement is just not true. But they keep running ads on it. As their campaign pollster said "we're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." Now that is true. I couldn't have said it better myself- I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.

Let's talk about the debt. We have to deal with it or it will deal with us. President Obama has offered a plan with $4 trillion in debt reduction over a decade, with $2 of spending reductions for every $1 of revenue increases, and tight controls on future spending. It's the kind of balanced approach proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.

I think the president's plan is better than the Romney plan, because the Romney plan fails the first test of fiscal responsibility: The numbers don't add up.

It's supposed to be a debt reduction plan but it begins with $5 trillion in tax cuts over a 10-year period. That makes the debt hole bigger before they even start to dig out. They say they'll make it up by eliminating loopholes in the tax code. When you ask "which loopholes and how much?" they say, "See me after the election on that."

People ask me all the time how we delivered four surplus budgets. What new ideas did we bring? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic. If they stay with a $5 trillion tax cut in a debt reduction plan- the- arithmetic tells us that one of three things will happen:

1) they'll have to eliminate so many deductions like the ones for home mortgages and charitable giving that middle class families will see their tax bill go up $2,000 year while people making over $3 million a year get will still get a 250,000 dollar tax cut; or

2) they'll have to cut so much spending that they'll obliterate the budget for our national parks, for ensuring clean air, clean water, safe food, safe air travel; or they'll cut way back on Pell Grants, college loans, early childhood education and other programs that help middle class families and poor children, not to mention cutting investments in roads, bridges, science, technology and medical research; or

3) they'll do what they've been doing for thirty plus years now- cut taxes more than they cut spending, explode the debt, and weaken the economy. Remember, Republican economic policies quadrupled the debt before I took office and doubled it after I left. We simply can't afford to double-down on trickle-down.

President Obama's plan cuts the debt, honors our values, and brightens the future for our children, our families and our nation.

My fellow Americans, you have to decide what kind of country you want to live in. If you want a you're on your own, winner take all society you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities- a "we're all in it together" society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. If you want every American to vote and you think it's wrong to change voting procedures just to reduce the turnout of younger, poorer, minority and disabled voters, you should support Barack Obama. If you think the president was right to open the doors of American opportunity to young immigrants brought here as children who want to go to college or serve in the military, you should vote for Barack Obama. If you want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American Dream is alive and well, and where the United States remains the leading force for peace and prosperity in a highly competitive world, you should vote for Barack Obama.

I love our country- and I know we're coming back. For more than 200 years, through every crisis, we've always come out stronger than we went in. And we will again as long as we do it together. We champion the cause for which our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor- to form a more perfect union.

If that's what you believe, if that's what you want, we have to re-elect President Barack Obama.

God bless you - God bless America.

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VERSION #2

Transcript of Bill Clinton's Speech to the Democratic National Convention as delivered with audience reaction included (September 5, 2012)

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Sustained cheers, applause.) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Now, Mr. Mayor, fellow Democrats, we are here to nominate a president. (Cheers, applause.) And I've got one in mind. (Cheers, applause.)
I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. I want to nominate a man who ran for president to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before his election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression; a man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs that he saved or created, there'd still be millions more waiting, worried about feeding their own kids, trying to keep their hopes alive.
I want to nominate a man who's cool on the outside - (cheers, applause) - but who burns for America on the inside. (Cheers, applause.)
I want - I want a man who believes with no doubt that we can build a new American Dream economy, driven by innovation and creativity, but education and - yes - by cooperation. (Cheers.)
And by the way, after last night, I want a man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama. (Cheers, applause.)
You know - (cheers, applause). I - (cheers, applause).
I want - I want Barack Obama to be the next president of the United States. (Cheers, applause.) And I proudly nominate him to be the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party.
Now, folks, in Tampa a few days ago, we heard a lot of talk - (laughter) - all about how the president and the Democrats don't really believe in free enterprise and individual initiative, how we want everybody to be dependent on the government, how bad we are for the economy.
This Republican narrative - this alternative universe - (laughter, applause) - says that every one of us in this room who amounts to anything, we're all completely self-made. One of the greatest chairmen the Democratic Party ever had, Bob Strauss - (cheers, applause) - used to say that ever politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself. (Laughter, applause.) But, as Strauss then admitted, it ain't so. (Laughter.)
We Democrats - we think the country works better with a strong middle class, with real opportunities for poor folks to work their way into it - (cheers, applause) - with a relentless focus on the future, with business and government actually working together to promote growth and broadly share prosperity. You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own." (Cheers, applause.) It is.
So who's right? (Cheers.) Well, since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats, 24. In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private sector jobs.
So what's the job score? Republicans, 24 million; Democrats, 42 (million). (Cheers, applause.)
Now, there's - (cheers, applause) - there's a reason for this. It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. (Cheers, applause.) Why? Because poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth. (Cheers, applause.) When you stifle human potential, when you don't invest in new ideas, it doesn't just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all. (Cheers, applause.) We know that investments in education and infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase growth. They increase good jobs, and they create new wealth for all the rest of us. (Cheers, applause.)
Now, there's something I've noticed lately. You probably have too. And it's this. Maybe just because I grew up in a different time, but though I often disagree with Republicans, I actually never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate our president and a lot of other Democrats. I - (cheers, applause) - that would be impossible for me because President Eisenhower sent federal troops to my home state to integrate Little Rock Central High School. (Cheers, applause.) President Eisenhower built the interstate highway system.
When I was a governor, I worked with President Reagan and his White House on the first round of welfare reform and with President George H.W. Bush on national education goals.
(Cheers, applause.) I'm actually very grateful to - if you saw from the film what I do today, I have to be grateful, and you should be, too - that President George W. Bush supported PEPFAR. It saved the lives of millions of people in poor countries. (Cheers, applause.)
And I have been honored to work with both Presidents Bush on natural disasters in the aftermath of the South Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the horrible earthquake in Haiti. Through my foundation, both in America and around the world, I'm working all the time with Democrats, Republicans and independents. Sometimes I couldn't tell you for the life who I'm working with because we focus on solving problems and seizing opportunities and not fighting all the time. (Cheers, applause.)
And so here's what I want to say to you, and here's what I want the people at home to think about. When times are tough and people are frustrated and angry and hurting and uncertain, the politics of constant conflict may be good. But what is good politics does not necessarily work in the real world. What works in the real world is cooperation. (Cheers, applause.) What works in the real world is cooperation, business and government, foundations and universities.
Ask the mayors who are here. (Cheers, applause.) Los Angeles is getting green and Chicago is getting an infrastructure bank because Republicans and Democrats are working together to get it. (Cheers, applause.) They didn't check their brains at the door. They didn't stop disagreeing, but their purpose was to get something done.
Now, why is this true? Why does cooperation work better than constant conflict?
Because nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day. (Cheers, applause.)
And every one of us - every one of us and every one of them, we're compelled to spend our fleeting lives between those two extremes, knowing we're never going to be right all the time and hoping we're right more than twice a day. (Laughter.)
Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn't see it that way. They think government is always the enemy, they're always right, and compromise is weakness. (Boos.) Just in the last couple of elections, they defeated two distinguished Republican senators because they dared to cooperate with Democrats on issues important to the future of the country, even national security. (Applause.)
They beat a Republican congressman with almost a hundred percent voting record on every conservative score, because he said he realized he did not have to hate the president to disagree with him. Boy, that was a nonstarter, and they threw him out. (Laughter, applause.)
One of the main reasons we ought to re-elect President Obama is that he is still committed to constructive cooperation. (Cheers, applause.) Look at his record. Look at his record. (Cheers, applause.) Look at his record. He appointed Republican secretaries of defense, the Army and transportation. He appointed a vice president who ran against him in 2008. (Laughter, applause.) And he trusted that vice president to oversee the successful end of the war in Iraq and the implementation of the recovery act. (Cheers, applause.)
And Joe Biden - Joe Biden did a great job with both. (Sustained cheers, applause.)
He - (sustained cheers, applause) - President Obama - President Obama appointed several members of his Cabinet even though they supported Hillary in the primary. (Applause.) Heck, he even appointed Hillary. (Cheers, applause.)
Wait a minute. I am - (sustained cheers, applause) - I am very proud of her. I am proud of the job she and the national security team have done for America. (Cheers, applause.) I am grateful that they have worked together to make us safer and stronger, to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies. I'm grateful for the relationship of respect and partnership she and the president have enjoyed and the signal that sends to the rest of the world, that democracy does not have a blood - have to be a blood sport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest. (Cheers, applause.)
Now - (sustained cheers, applause) - besides the national security team, I am very grateful to the men and women who've served our country in uniform through these perilous times. (Cheers, applause.) And I am especially grateful to Michelle Obama and to Joe Biden for supporting those military families while their loved ones were overseas - (cheers, applause) - and for supporting our veterans when they came home, when they came home bearing the wounds of war or needing help to find education or jobs or housing.
President Obama's whole record on national security is a tribute to his strength, to his judgment and to his preference for inclusion and partnership over partisanship. We need more if it in Washington, D.C. (Cheers, applause.)
Now, we all know that he also tried to work with congressional Republicans on health care, debt reduction and new jobs. And that didn't work out so well. (Laughter.) But it could have been because, as the Senate Republican leader said in a remarkable moment of candor two full years before the election, their number one priority was not to put America back to work; it was to put the president out of work. (Mixed cheers and boos, applause.) (Chuckles.) Well, wait a minute. Senator, I hate to break it to you, but we're going to keep President Obama on the job. (Cheers, applause.)
Now, are you ready for that? (Cheers, applause.) Are you willing to work for it. Oh, wait a minute.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: (Chanting.) Four more years! Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
PRESIDENT CLINTON: In Tampa -
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: (Chanting.) Four more years! Four more years!
PRESIDENT CLINTON: In Tampa - in Tampa - did y'all watch their convention?
I did. (Laughter.) In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was actually pretty simple - pretty snappy. It went something like this: We left him a total mess. He hasn't cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in. (Laughter, applause.)
Now - (cheers, applause) - but they did it well. They looked good; the sounded good. They convinced me that - (laughter) - they all love their families and their children and were grateful they'd been born in America and all that - (laughter, applause) - really, I'm not being - they did. (Laughter, applause.)
And this is important, they convinced me they were honorable people who believed what they said and they're going to keep every commitment they've made. We just got to make sure the American people know what those commitments are - (cheers, applause) - because in order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn't say very much about the ideas they've offered over the last two years.
They couldn't because they want to the same old policies that got us in trouble in the first place. They want to cut taxes for high- income Americans, even more than President Bush did. They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts. They want to actually increase defense spending over a decade $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they'll spend it on. And they want to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor children.
As another president once said, there they go again.
(Laughter, cheers, applause.)
Now, I like - I like - I like the argument for President Obama's re-election a lot better. Here it is. He inherited a deeply damaged economy. He put a floor under the crash. He began the long, hard road to recovery and laid the foundation for a modern, more well- balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses and lots of new wealth for innovators. (Cheers, applause.)
Now, are we where we want to be today? No.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: No!
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Is the president satisfied? Of course not.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: No!
PRESIDENT CLINTON: But are we better off than we were when he took office? (Cheers, applause.)
And listen to this. Listen to this. Everybody - (inaudible) - when President Barack Obama took office, the economy was in free fall. It had just shrunk 9 full percent of GDP. We were losing 750,000 jobs a month.
Are we doing better than that today?
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Yes! (Applause.)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: The answer is yes.
Now, look. Here's the challenge he faces and the challenge all of you who support him face. I get it. I know it. I've been there. A lot of Americans are still angry and frustrated about this economy. If you look at the numbers, you know employment is growing, banks are beginning to lend again. And in a lot of places, housing prices are even beginning to pick up.
But too many people do not feel it yet.
I had the same thing happen in 1994 and early '95. We could see that the policies were working, that the economy was growing. But most people didn't feel it yet. Thankfully, by 1996 the economy was roaring, everybody felt it, and we were halfway through the longest peacetime expansion in the history of the United States. But - (cheers, applause) - wait, wait. The difference this time is purely in the circumstances. President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. Listen to me, now. No president - no president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years. (Cheers, applause.)
Now - but - (cheers, applause) - he has - he has laid the foundation for a new, modern, successful economy of shared prosperity. And if you will renew the president's contract, you will feel it. You will feel it. (Cheers, applause.)
Folks, whether the American people believe what I just said or not may be the whole election. I just want you to know that I believe it. With all my heart, I believe it. (Cheers, applause.)
Now, why do I believe it?
I'm fixing to tell you why. I believe it because President Obama's approach embodies the values, the ideas and the direction America has to take to build the 21st-century version of the American Dream: a nation of shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, shared prosperity, a shared sense of community.
So let's get back to the story. In 2010, as the president's recovery program kicked in, the job losses stopped and things began to turn around. The recovery act saved or created millions of jobs and cut taxes - let me say this again - cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people. (Cheers, applause.) And, in the last 29 months, our economy has produced about 4 1/2 million private sector jobs. (Cheers, applause.)
We could have done better, but last year the Republicans blocked the president's job plan, costing the economy more than a million new jobs.
So here's another job score. President Obama: plus 4 1/2 million. Congressional Republicans: zero. (Cheers, applause.)
During this period - (cheers, applause) - during this period, more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama. That's the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s. (Cheers, applause.) And I'll tell you something else. The auto industry restructuring worked. (Cheers, applause.) It saved - it saved more than a million jobs, and not just at GM, Chrysler and their dealerships but in auto parts manufacturing all over the country.
That's why even the automakers who weren't part of the deal supported it. They needed to save those parts suppliers too. Like I said, we're all in this together. (Applause.)
So what's happened? There are now 250,000 more people working in the auto industry than on the day the companies were restructured. (Cheers, applause.)
So - now, we all know that Governor Romney opposed the plan to save GM and Chrysler. (Boos.) So here's another job score. (Laughter.) Are you listening in Michigan and Ohio and across the country? (Cheers.) Here - (cheers, applause) - here's another job score: Obama, 250,000; Romney, zero.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: (With speaker.) Zero. (Cheers, applause.)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Now, the agreement the administration made with the management, labor and environmental groups to double car mileage, that was a good deal too. It will cut your gas prices in half, your gas bill. No matter what the price is, if you double the mileage of your car, your bill will be half what it would have been. It will make us more energy independent. It will cut greenhouse gas emissions. And according to several analyses, over the next 20 years, it'll bring us another half a million good new jobs into the American economy. (Cheers, applause.)
The president's energy strategy, which he calls "all of the above," is helping too. The boom in oil and gas production, combined with greater energy efficiency, has driven oil imports to a near-20- year low and natural gas production to an all-time high. And renewable energy production has doubled.
(Cheers, applause.)
Of course, we need a lot more new jobs. But there are already more than 3 million jobs open and unfilled in America, mostly because the people who apply for them don't yet have the required skills to do them. So even as we get Americans more jobs, we have to prepare more Americans for the new jobs that are actually going to be created. The old economy is not coming back. We've got to build a new one and educate people to do those jobs. (Cheers, applause.)
The president - the president and his education secretary have supported community colleges and employers in working together to train people for jobs that are actually open in their communities - and even more important after a decade in which exploding college costs have increased the dropout rate so much that the percentage of our young people with four-year college degrees has gone down so much that we have dropped to 16th in the world in the percentage of young people with college degrees.
So the president's student loan is more important than ever. Here's what it does - (cheers, applause) - here's what it does. You need to tell every voter where you live about this. It lowers the cost of federal student loans. And even more important, it give students the right to repay those loans as a clear, fixed, low percentage of their income for up to 20 years. (Cheers, applause.)
Now what does this mean? What does this mean? Think of it. It means no one will ever have to drop out of college again for fear they can't repay their debt.
And it means - (cheers, applause) - it means that if someone wants to take a job with a modest income, a teacher, a police officer, if they want to be a small-town doctor in a little rural area, they won't have to turn those jobs down because they don't pay enough to repay they debt. Their debt obligation will be determined by their salary. This will change the future for young America. (Cheers, applause.)
I don't know about you - (cheers, applause) - but on all these issues, I know we're better off because President Obama made the decisions he did.
Now, that brings me to health care. (Cheers, applause.) And the Republicans call it, derisively, "Obamacare." They say it's a government takeover, a disaster, and that if we'll just elect them, they'll repeal it. Well, are they right?
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: No!
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Let's take a look at what's actually happened so far.
First, individuals and businesses have already gotten more than a billion dollars in refunds from insurance companies because the new law requires 80 (percent) to 85 percent of your premium to go to your health care, not profits or promotion. (Cheers, applause.) And the gains are even greater than that because a bunch of insurance companies have applied to lower their rates to comply with the requirement.
Second, more than 3 million young people between 19 and 25 are insured for the first time because their parents' policies can cover them.
(Cheers, applause.)
Millions of seniors are receiving preventive care, all the way from breast cancer screenings to tests for heart problems and scores of other things. And younger people are getting them, too.
Fourth, soon the insurance companies - not the government, the insurance companies - will have millions of new customers, many of them middle-class people with pre-existing conditions who never could get insurance before. (Cheers, applause.)
Now, finally, listen to this. For the last two years - after going up at three times the rate of inflation for a decade, for the last two years health care costs have been under 4 percent in both years for the first time in 50 years. (Cheers, applause.)
So let me ask you something. Are we better off because President Obama fought for health care reform? (Cheers, applause.) You bet we are.
Now, there were two other attacks on the president in Tampa I think deserve an answer. First, both Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan attacked the president for allegedly robbing Medicare of $716 billion. That's the same attack they leveled against the Congress in 2010, and they got a lot of votes on it. But it's not true. (Applause.)
Look, here's what really happened. You be the judge. Here's what really happened. There were no cuts to benefits at all. None. What the president did was to save money by taking the recommendations of a commission of professionals to cut unwarranted subsidies to providers and insurance companies that were not making people healthier and were not necessary to get the providers to provide the service.
And instead of raiding Medicare, he used the savings to close the doughnut hole in the Medicare drug program - (cheers, applause) - and - you all got to listen carefully to this; this is really important - and to add eight years to the life of the Medicare trust fund so it is solvent till 2024. (Cheers, applause.)
So - (chuckles) - so President Obama and the Democrats didn't weaken Medicare; they strengthened Medicare. Now, when Congressman Ryan looked into that TV camera and attacked President Obama's Medicare savings as, quote, the biggest, coldest power play, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - (laughter) - because that $716 billion is exactly, to the dollar, the same amount of Medicare savings that he has in his own budget. (Cheers, applause.) You got to get one thing - it takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did. (Laughter, cheers, applause.)
So - (inaudible) - (sustained cheers, applause) - now, you're having a good time, but this is getting serious, and I want you to listen.
(Laughter.) It's important, because a lot of people believe this stuff.
Now, at least on this issue, on this one issue, Governor Romney has been consistent. (Laughter.) He attacked President Obama too, but he actually wants to repeal those savings and give the money back to the insurance company. (Laughter, boos.)
He wants to go back to the old system, which means we'll reopen the doughnut hole and force seniors to pay more for drugs, and we'll reduce the life of the Medicare trust fund by eight full years. (Boos.)
So if he's elected, and if he does what he promised to do, Medicare will now grow (sic/go) broke in 2016. (Boos.) Think about that. That means, after all, we won't have to wait until their voucher program kicks in 2023 - (laughter) - to see the end of Medicare as we know it. (Applause.) They're going to do it to us sooner than we thought. (Applause.)
Now, folks, this is serious, because it gets worse. (Laughter.) And you won't be laughing when I finish telling you this. They also want to block-grant Medicaid, and cut it by a third over the coming 10 years.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No!
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Of course, that's going to really hurt a lot of poor kids. But that's not all. Lot of folks don't know it, but nearly two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for Medicare seniors - (applause) - who are eligible for Medicaid.
(Cheers, applause.) It's going to end Medicare as we know it. And a lot of that money is also spent to help people with disabilities, including - (cheers, applause) - a lot of middle-class families whose kids have Down's syndrome or autism or other severe conditions. (Applause.) And honestly, let's think about it, if that happens, I don't know what those families are going to do.
So I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to do everything I can to see that it doesn't happen. We can't let it happen. (Cheers, applause.) We can't. (Cheers, applause.) Now - wait a minute. (Cheers, applause.) Let's look -
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Let's look at the other big charge the Republicans made. It's a real doozy. (Laughter.) They actually have charged and run ads saying that President Obama wants to weaken the work requirements in the welfare reform bill I signed that moved millions of people from welfare to work. (Jeers.) Wait, you need to know, here's what happened. (Laughter.) Nobody ever tells you what really happened - here's what happened.
When some Republican governors asked if they could have waivers to try new ways to put people on welfare back to work, the Obama administration listened because we all know it's hard for even people with good work histories to get jobs today. So moving folks from welfare to work is a real challenge.
And the administration agreed to give waivers to those governors and others only if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20 percent, and they could keep the waivers only if they did increase employment. Now, did I make myself clear? The requirement was for more work, not less. (Cheers, applause.)
So this is personal to me. We moved millions of people off welfare. It was one of the reasons that in the eight years I was president, we had a hundred times as many people move out of poverty into the middle class than happened under the previous 12 years, a hundred times as many. (Cheers, applause.) It's a big deal. But I am telling you the claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform's work requirement is just not true. (Applause.)
But they keep on running the ads claiming it. You want to know why? Their campaign pollster said, we are not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers. (Jeers, applause.) Now, finally I can say, that is true. (Laughter, cheers, applause.) I - (chuckles) - I couldn't have said it better myself. (Laughter.)
And I hope you and every American within the sound of my voice remembers it every time they see one of those ads, and it turns into an ad to re-elect Barack Obama and keep the fundamental principles of personal empowerment and moving everybody who can get a job into work as soon as we can. (Cheers, applause.)
Now, let's talk about the debt. Today, interest rates are low, lower than the rate of inflation. People are practically paying us to borrow money, to hold their money for them.
But it will become a big problem when the economy grows and interest rates start to rise. We've got to deal with this big long- term debt problem or it will deal with us. It will gobble up a bigger and bigger percentage of the federal budget we'd rather spend on education and health care and science and technology. It - we've got to deal with it.
Now, what has the president done? He has offered a reasonable plan of $4 trillion in debt reduction over a decade, with 2 1/2 trillion (dollars) coming from - for every $2 1/2 trillion in spending cuts, he raises a dollar in new revenues - 2 1/2-to-1. And he has tight controls on future spending. That's the kind of balanced approach proposed by the Simpson-Bowles Commission, a bipartisan commission.
Now, I think this plan is way better than Governor Romney's plan. First, the Romney plan failed the first test of fiscal responsibility. The numbers just don't add up. (Laughter, applause.)
I mean, consider this. What would you do if you had this problem? Somebody says, oh, we've got a big debt problem. We've got to reduce the debt. So what's the first thing you say we're going to do? Well, to reduce the debt, we're going to have another $5 trillion in tax cuts heavily weighted to upper-income people. So we'll make the debt hole bigger before we start to get out of it.
Now, when you say, what are you going to do about this $5 trillion you just added on? They say, oh, we'll make it up by eliminating loopholes in the tax code.
So then you ask, well, which loopholes, and how much?
You know what they say? See me about that after the election. (Laughter.)
I'm not making it up. That's their position. See me about that after the election.
Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic. (Sustained cheers, applause.)
If - arithmetic! If - (applause) - if they stay with their $5 trillion tax cut plan - in a debt reduction plan? - the arithmetic tells us, no matter what they say, one of three things is about to happen. One, assuming they try to do what they say they'll do, get rid of - pay - cover it by deductions, cutting those deductions, one, they'll have to eliminate so many deductions, like the ones for home mortgages and charitable giving, that middle-class families will see their tax bills go up an average of $2,000 while anybody who makes $3 million or more will see their tax bill go down $250,000. (Boos.)
Or, two, they'll have to cut so much spending that they'll obliterate the budget for the national parks, for ensuring clean air, clean water, safe food, safe air travel. They'll cut way back on Pell Grants, college loans, early childhood education, child nutrition programs, all the programs that help to empower middle-class families and help poor kids. Oh, they'll cut back on investments in roads and bridges and science and technology and biomedical research.
That's what they'll do. They'll hurt the middle class and the poor and put the future on hold to give tax cuts to upper-income people who've been getting it all along.
Or three, in spite of all the rhetoric, they'll just do what they've been doing for more than 30 years. They'll go in and cut the taxes way more than they cut spending, especially with that big defense increase, and they'll just explode the debt and weaken the economy. And they'll destroy the federal government's ability to help you by letting interest gobble up all your tax payments.
Don't you ever forget when you hear them talking about this that Republican economic policies quadrupled the national debt before I took office, in the 12 years before I took office - (applause) - and doubled the debt in the eight years after I left, because it defied arithmetic. (Laughter, applause.) It was a highly inconvenient thing for them in our debates that I was just a country boy from Arkansas, and I came from a place where people still thought two and two was four. (Laughter, applause.) It's arithmetic.
We simply cannot afford to give the reins of government to someone who will double down on trickle down. (Cheers, applause.) Really. Think about this: President Obama - President Obama's plan cuts the debt, honors our values, brightens the future of our children, our families and our nation. It's a heck of a lot better.
It passes the arithmetic test, and far more important, it passes the values test. (Cheers, applause.)
My fellow Americans, all of us in this grand hall and everybody watching at home, when we vote in this election, we'll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in. If you want a winner-take- all, you're-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket. But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility, a we're-all-in-this-together society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. (Cheers, applause.) If you - if you want -
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: (Chanting.) Four more years! Four more years!
PRESIDENT CLINTON: If you want America - if you want every American to vote and you think it is wrong to change voting procedures - (jeers) - just to reduce the turnout of younger, poorer, minority and disabled voters - (jeers) - you should support Barack Obama. (Cheers, applause.)
And if you think - if you think the president was right to open the doors of American opportunity to all those young immigrants brought here when they were young so they can serve in the military or go to college, you must vote for Barack Obama. (Cheers, applause.) If you want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American dream is really alive and well again and where the United States maintains its leadership as a force for peace and justice and prosperity in this highly competitive world, you have to vote for Barack Obama.
(Cheers, applause.)
Look, I love our country so much. And I know we're coming back. For more than 200 years, through every crisis, we've always come back. (Cheers.) People have predicted our demise ever since George Washington was criticized for being a mediocre surveyor with a bad set of wooden false teeth. (Laughter.) And so far, every single person that's bet against America has lost money because we always come back. (Cheers, applause.) We come through ever fire a little stronger and a little better.
And we do it because in the end we decide to champion the cause for which our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor - the cause of forming a more perfect union. (Cheers, applause.) My fellow Americans, if that is what you want, if that is what you believe, you must vote and you must re-elect President Barack Obama. (Cheers, applause.) God bless you and God bless America. (Cheers, applause.)
END
***

VERSION #3
a version showing Clinton’s additions to the written text in italics and his deletions from the written text struck out with a single line

Now, Mr. Mayor, fellow Democrats, We're here to nominate a president, and I've got one in mind.
I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. I want to nominate A man who ran for president to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before the election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression. A man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs were created and saved he saved or created, there were still millions more waiting, trying to feed their children and worried about feeding their own kids, trying to keep their hopes alive.
I want to nominate a man cool on the outside but burning who burns for America on the inside. I want A man who believes with no doubt that we can build a new American Dream economy driven by innovation and creativity, but [sic] education and - yes - by cooperation.
And by the way, after last night, I want A man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.
I want Barack Obama to be the next president of the United States and I proudly nominate him as the standard bearer of the Democratic Party.
Now, folks, In Tampa a few days ago, we heard a lot of talk all about how the president and the Democrats don't really believe in free enterprise and individual initiative, how we want everyone to be dependent on the government, how bad we are for the economy.
The Republican narrative - this alternative universe - is says that all of us every one of us in this room who amounts to anything, are we're all completely self-made. One of our greatest Democratic chairmen the greatest chairmen the Democratic Party ever had, Bob Strauss, used to say that every politician wants you every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself, but, as Strauss then admitted, it ain't so.
We Democrats, we think the country works better with a strong middle class, with real opportunities for poor people folks to work their way into it and with a relentless focus on the future, with business and government actually working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. We think You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own." It is.
So Who's right? Well, since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs. So What's the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million.
Now, there's a reason for this. It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, Why? because discrimination, poverty poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth, When you stifle human potential, when you don't invest in new ideas, it doesn't just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all. We know that while investments in education, and infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it growth, creating more They increase good jobs and they create new wealth for all the rest of us.
Now, there's something I've noticed lately. You probably have too. And it's this. Maybe just because I grew up in a different time, but Though I often disagree with Republicans, I actually never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate our President Obama and the a lot of other Democrats. After all, that would be impossible for me because President Eisenhower sent federal troops to my home state to integrate Little Rock Central High and President Eisenhower built the interstate highway system. And as governor When I was a governor, I worked with President Reagan and his White House on the first round of welfare reform and with President George H.W. Bush on national education goals. I am actually grateful to - if you saw from the film what I do today, I have to be grateful, and you should be, too - that President George W. Bush for supported PEPFAR, which is saving It saved the lives of millions of people in poor countries and to And I have been honored to work with both Presidents Bush for the work we've done together after on natural disasters in the aftermath of the South Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake. horrible earthquake in Haiti.
Through my foundation, both in America and around the world, I'm work working all the time with Democrats, Republicans and Independents, Sometimes I couldn't tell you for the life who I'm working with because who are focused we focus on solving problems and seizing opportunities, not fighting each other. all the time.
And so here's what I want to say to you, and here's what I want the people at home to think about. When times are tough, and people are frustrated and angry and hurting and uncertain, the politics of constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. But what is good politics does not necessarily work in the real world. What works in the real world is cooperation. What works in the real world is cooperation, business and government, foundations and universities. Ask the mayors who are here. Los Angeles is getting green and Chicago is getting an infrastructure bank because Republicans and Democrats are working together to get it. They didn't check their brains at the door. They didn't stop disagreeing, but their purpose was to get something done. Now, why is this true? Why does cooperation work better than constant conflict? Because After all, nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day. All of us are destined to live our lives between those two extremes. And every one of us - every one of us and every one of them, we're compelled to spend our fleeting lives between those two extremes, knowing we're never going to be right all the time and hoping we're right more than twice a day.
Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn't see it that way. They think government is always the enemy, they're always right, and compromise is weakness. Just in the last couple of elections, they defeated two distinguished Republican senators because they dared to cooperate with Democrats on issues important to the future of the country, even national security. They beat a Republican congressman with almost a hundred percent voting record on every conservative score, because he said he realized he did not have to hate the president to disagree with him. Boy, that was a nonstarter, and they threw him out.
One of the main reasons America should we ought to re-elect President Obama is that he is still committed to constructive cooperation. Look at his record. Look at his record. Look at his record. He appointed Republican secretaries of defense, the army and transportation. He appointed a vice president who ran against him in 2008, and he trusted him that vice president to oversee the successful end of the war in Iraq and the implementation of the recovery act. And Joe Biden did a great job with both.
He - President Obama - President Obama appointed several members of his Cabinet members who even though they supported Hillary in the primaryies. Heck, he even appointed Hillary. Wait a minute. I am - I am very proud of her. I'm so proud of her and grateful to our entire I am proud of the job she and the national security team have done for America. for all they've done I am grateful that they have worked together to make us safer and stronger and to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies. I'm grateful for the relationship of respect and partnership she and the president have enjoyed and the signal that sends to the rest of the world, that democracy does not have a blood - have to be a blood sport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest. 
Now besides the national security team, I'm also very grateful to the young men and women who serve our country in the military who've served our country in uniform through these perilous times and I am especially grateful to Michelle Obama and Jill Joe Biden for supporting those military families when while their loved ones are were overseas and for helping supporting our veterans, when they come home bearing the wounds of war, or needing help with education, housing, and jobs. or jobs or housing.
President Obama's whole record on national security is a tribute to his strength, and to his judgment, and to his preference for inclusion and partnership over partisanship. We need more if it in Washington, D.C.
Now, we all know that He also tried to work with congressional Republicans on health care, debt reduction, and jobs, but And that didn't work out so well. Probably But it could have been because, as the Senate Republican leader said, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two full years before the election, their No. 1 priority was not to put America back to work, but it was to put the President Obama out of work. Well, wait a minute Senator, I hate to break it to you, but we're going to keep President Obama on the job. 
Now, are you ready for that? Are you willing to work for it. Oh, wait a minute. In Tampa - in Tampa - did y'all watch their convention? I did. In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was actually pretty simple pretty snappy: we left him a total mess, he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in. 
Now - (cheers, applause) - but they did it well. They looked good; the sounded good. They convinced me that they all love their families and their children and were grateful they'd been born in America and all that - really, I'm not being - they did. And this is important, they convinced me they were honorable people who believed what they said and they're going to keep every commitment they've made. We just got to make sure the American people know what those commitments are.
Because In order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn't couldn't say very much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years. You see They couldn't because they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place: They want to cut taxes for high-income Americans even more than President Bush did; They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts; They want to actually to increase defense spending over a decade $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they'll spend the money it on; And they want to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor kids children As another president once said- there they go again.
Now I like the argument for President Obama's re-election a lot better. Here it is. He inherited a deeply damaged economy, He put a floor under the crash, He began the long hard road to recovery, and laid the foundation for a modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for the innovators.
Now Are we where we want to be today? No. Is the president satisfied? No Of course not. But Are we better off than we were when he took office, with an And listen to this. Listen to this. Everybody - (inaudible) - when President Barack Obama took office, the economy was in free fall, It had just shrunk 9 full percent of GDP. We were losing 750,000 jobs a month. Are we doing better than that today? The answer is yes.
I understand the challenge we face. Now, look. Here's the challenge he faces and the challenge all of you who support him face. I get it. I know it. I've been there. I know many A lot of Americans are still angry and frustrated with the about this economy. Though If you look at the numbers, you know employment is growing, banks are beginning to lend again. And in a lot of places, and even housing prices are picking up a bit even beginning to pick up, too many people don't feel it. But too many people do not feel it yet.
I experienced had the same thing happen in 1994 and early 1995. We could see that the Our policies were working, that and the economy was growing but most people didn't feel it yet. Thankfully, By 1996, the economy was roaring, everybody felt it, and we were halfway through the longest peacetime expansion in American history the history of the United States. But - wait, wait. The difference this time is purely in the circumstances. President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. Listen to me, now. No president- no president, not me or not any of my predecessors, no one could have repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.
Now - but - he has - he has laid the foundation for a new, modern, successful economy of shared prosperity. But conditions are improving and if you'll renew the President's contract you will feel it. I believe that with all my heart. Folks, whether the American people believe what I just said or not may be the whole election. I just want you to know that I believe it. With all my heart, I believe it. Now, why do I believe it?
I'm fixing to tell you why. I believe it because President Obama's approach embodies the values, the ideas, and the direction America must has to take to build a 21st century version of the American Dream in: a nation of shared opportunities, shared prosperity and shared responsibilities. shared responsibilities, shared prosperity, a shared sense of community.
So let's get back to the story. In 2010, as the president's recovery program kicked in, the job losses stopped and things began to turn around.
The Recovery Act saved and created millions of jobs and cut taxes - let me say this again - cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people. And, In the last 29 months the our economy has produced about 4.5 and one-half million private sector jobs. We could have done better, But last year, the Republicans blocked the president's jobs plan costing the economy more than a million new jobs. So here's another jobs score: President Obama plus 4.5 and one-half million, congressional Republicans zero.
Over that same period, During this period - during this period, more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama- That's the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s. And I'll tell you something else. The auto industry restructuring worked. It saved more than a million jobs, and not just at GM, Chrysler and their dealerships, but in auto parts manufacturing all over the country. That's why even the auto-makers that who weren't part of the deal supported it. They needed to save the those parts suppliers too. Like I said, we're all in this together.
So what's happened? Now there are 250,000 more people working in the auto industry than on the day the companies were restructured. So - now, we all know that Gov. Romney opposed the plan to save GM and Chrysler. So here's another jobs score: Are you listening in Michigan and Ohio and across the country? Here's another job score: Obama 250,000, Romney, zero.
Now, The agreement the administration made with management, labor and environmental groups to double car mileage over the next few years is another good deal that was a good deal too: it will cut your gas prices in half, your gas bill in half. No matter what the price is, if you double the mileage of your car, your bill will be half what it would have been. It will make us more energy independent, It will cut greenhouse gas emissions, and add another 500,000 good jobs according to several analyses, over the next 20 years, it'll bring us another half a million good new jobs into the American economy.
President Obama's "all of the above" energy plan The president's energy strategy, which he calls "all of the above," is helping too- the boom in oil and gas production combined with greater energy efficiency has driven oil imports to a near 20-year low and natural gas production to an all-time high. Renewable energy production has also doubled.
We do need more new jobs, lots of them, Of course, we need a lot more new jobs. but there are already more than three million jobs open and unfilled in America today, mostly because the applicants the people who apply for them don't yet have the required skills to do them. We have to prepare more Americans for the new jobs that are being actually going to be created in a world fueled by new technology. The old economy is not coming back. We've got to build a new one and educate people to do those jobs. That's why investments in our people are more important than ever.
The president and his education secretary has have supported community colleges and employers in working together to train people for open jobs that are actually open in their communities. And, even more important after a decade in which exploding college costs have increased the drop-out rate so much that we've fallen to the percentage of our young people with four-year college degrees has gone down so much that we have dropped to 16th in the world in the percentage of young people with college degrees. So the president's student loan is more important than ever. Here's what it does - (cheers, applause) - here's what it does. You need to tell every voter where you live about this. It his student loan reform lowers the cost of federal student loans and even more important, it gives students the right to repay the those loans as a clear, fixed, low percentage of their incomes for up to 20 years.
Now what does this mean? What does this mean? Think of it. It That means no one will ever have to drop-out of college for fear they can't repay their debt, and no one will have to turn down a job, as a teacher, a police officer or a small town doctor because it doesn't pay enough to make the debt payments. And it means that if someone wants to take a job with a modest income, a teacher, a police officer, if they want to be a small-town doctor in a little rural area, they won't have to turn those jobs down because they don't pay enough to repay they debt. Their debt obligation will be determined by their salary. This will change the future for young Americans.
I don't know about you, but on all these issues, I know we're better off because President Obama made these decisions he did.
Now, That brings me to health care.
The Republicans call it derisively Obamacare and They say it's a government takeover of health care that they'll repeal a disaster, and that if we'll just elect them they'll repeal it. Well, Are they right? Let's take a look at what's actually happened so far. First, Individuals and businesses have secured already gotten more than a billion dollars in refunds from their insurance premiums because the new law requires 80 percent to 85 percent of your premiums to be spent on go to your health care, not profits or promotion.
And the gains are even greater than that because a bunch of Other insurance companies have lowered applied to lower their rates to meet comply with the requirement. Second, More than 3 million young people between 19 and 25 are insured for the first time because their parents' policies can cover them can now carry them on family policies. Millions of seniors are receiving preventive care including all the way from breast cancer screenings and to tests for heart problems and scores of other things. And younger people are getting them, too. Fourth, Soon the insurance companies, not the government, the insurance companies, will have millions of new customers many of them middle class people with pre-existing conditions who never could get insurance before.
Now, finally, listen to this. And For the last two years - after going up at three times the rate of inflation for a decade,for the last two years, health care spending has grown costs have been under 4 percent, in both years for the first time in 50 years.
So let me ask you something. Are we all better off because President Obama fought for health care reform it and passed it? You bet we are.
Now, There were two other attacks on the president in Tampa that I think deserve an answer. First, Both Gov. Romney and congressman Ryan attacked the president for allegedly robbing Medicare of $716 billion. That's the same attack they leveled against the Congress in 2010, and they got a lot of votes on it. But it's not true. Look, here's what really happened. You be the judge. Here's what really happened. There were no cuts to benefits at all. None. What the president did was to save money by taking the recommendations of a commission of professionals to cut cutting unwarranted subsidies to providers and insurance companies that weren't making people any healthier and were not necessary to get the providers to provide the service.. And instead of raiding Medicare He used the savings to close the donut hole in the Medicare drug program, and - you all got to listen carefully to this; this is really important -and to add eight years to the life of the Medicare Trust Fund so it is solvent till 2024. It's now solvent until 2024. So President Obama and the Democrats didn't weaken Medicare, they strengthened it Medicare.
Now, When congressman Ryan looked into the that TV camera and attacked President Obama's Medicare savings as, quote "the biggest coldest power play" in raiding Medicare, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. You see, because that $716 billion is exactly to the dollar the same amount of Medicare savings congressman Ryan had he has in his own budget. You got to get one thing - it takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did. So ... now, you're having a good time, but this is getting serious, and I want you to listen. It's important, because a lot of people believe this stuff.
Now, At least on this issue, on this one issue, Gov. Romney's been consistent. He attacked President Obama too, but he actually wants to repeal the those savings and give the money back to the insurance companies, He wants to go back to the old system, which means we'll re-open the donut hole and force seniors to pay more for drugs, and we'll reduce the life of the Medicare Trust Fund by eight full years. So now if he's elected and does what he promised to do Medicare will now go grow [sic] broke by 2016. Think about that. If that happens, you That means, after all, we won't have to wait until their voucher program to begins kicks in in 2023 to see the end Medicare as we know it. They're going to do it to us sooner than we thought.
Now, folks, this is serious, But because it gets worse. And you won't be laughing when I finish telling you this. They also want to block grant Medicaid and cut it by a third over the coming decade 10 years. Of course, that will hurt that's going to really hurt a lot of poor kids, but that's not all. Lot of folks don't know it, but nearly Almost two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for Medicare seniors who are eligible for Medicaid. 
It's going to end Medicare as we know it. And a lot of that money is also spent to help and on people with disabilities, including kids from middle class families, with special needs like, Down syndrome or autism a lot of middle-class families whose kids have Down's syndrome or autism or other severe conditions. I don't know how those families are going to deal with it. And honestly, let's think about it, if that happens, I don't know what those families are going to do. So I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to do everything I can to see that it doesn't happen. We can't let it happen. We can't.
Now - wait a minute - let's look at the Republican charge other big charge the Republicans made. It's a real doozy. They actually have charged and run ads saying that President Obama wants to weaken the work requirements in the welfare reform bill I signed that moved millions of people from welfare to work. Wait, you need to know, here's what happened. Nobody ever tells you what really happened - Here's what happened.
When some Republican governors asked if they could have waivers to try new ways to put people on welfare back to work, the Obama administration listened because we all know it's hard for even people with good work histories to get jobs today. So moving folks from welfare to work is a real challenge. And the administration agreed to give waivers to those governors and others only said they would only do it if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20 percent and they could keep the waivers only if they did increase employment. You hear that? More work. Now, did I make myself clear? The requirement was for more work, not less. So this is personal to me. We moved millions of people off welfare. It was one of the reasons that in the eight years I was president, we had a hundred times as many people move out of poverty into the middle class than happened under the previous 12 years, a hundred times as many. It's a big deal. So But I am telling you the claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform's work requirement is just not true.
But they keep on running the ads claiming it running ads on it. You want to know why? As their campaign pollster said "we're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." Now finally I can say, that is true. I couldn't have said it better myself- I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad. And I hope you and every American within the sound of my voice remembers it every time they see one of those ads and it turns into an ad to re-elect Barack Obama and keep the fundamental principles of personal empowerment and moving everybody who can get a job into work as soon as we can.
Now, Let's talk about the debt. Today, interest rates are low, lower than the rate of inflation. People are practically paying us to borrow money, to hold their money for them. But it will become a big problem when the economy grows and interest rates start to rise. We have to deal with it We've got to deal with this big long- term debt problem or it will deal with us. It will gobble up a bigger and bigger percentage of the federal budget we'd rather spend on education and health care and science and technology. It - we've got to deal with it. Now, what has the president done? President Obama He has offered a reasonable plan with $4 trillion in debt reduction over a decade, with $2 of spending reductions for every $1 of revenue increases, with 2 1/2 trillion (dollars) coming from - for every $2 1/2 trillion in spending cuts, he raises a dollar in new revenues - 2 1/2-to-1 and tight controls on future spending. It's That's the kind of balanced approach proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission, a bipartisan commission.
Now, I think the president's this plan is better than the Governor Romney's plan, because First, the Romney plan failsed the first test of fiscal responsibility: The numbers just don't add up.
It's supposed to be a debt reduction plan but it begins with $5 trillion in tax cuts over a 10-year period. I mean, consider this. What would you do if you had this problem? Somebody says, oh, we've got a big debt problem. We've got to reduce the debt. So what's the first thing you say we're going to do? Well, to reduce the debt, we're going to have another $5 trillion in tax cuts heavily weighted to upper-income people. That makes the debt hole bigger before they even start to dig out. So we'll make the debt hole bigger before we start to get out of it. 
 Now, when you say, what are you going to do about this $5 trillion you just added on? They say they'll oh, we'll make it up by eliminating loopholes in the tax code. When So then you ask "well, which loopholes and how much?" You know what they say? "See me about that after the election on that." I'm not making it up. That's their position. See me about that after the election.
Now, People ask me all the time how we delivered got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic. If - arithmetic! If they stay with a $5 trillion tax cut plan - in a debt reduction plan? - the arithmetic tells us no matter what they say that one of three things will is about to happen:
1) assuming they try to do what they say they'll do, get rid of - pay - cover it by deductions, cutting those deductions, one, they'll have to eliminate so many deductions like the ones for home mortgages and charitable giving that middle class families will see their tax bill go up an average of $2,000 year while people making over anybody who makes $3 million or more  a year get will still get a 250,000 dollar tax cut see their tax bill go down $250,000; or
2) they'll have to cut so much spending that they'll obliterate the budget for our the national parks, for ensuring clean air, clean water, safe food, safe air travel; or they'll cut way back on Pell Grants, college loans, early childhood education, child nutrition programs, all the and other programs that help to empower middle class families and poor children help poor kids, not to mention cutting Oh, they'll cut back on investments in roads and bridges and science and technology and biomedical research. That's what they'll do. They'll hurt the middle class and the poor and put the future on hold to give tax cuts to upper-income people who've been getting it all along.
Or 3) in spite of all the rhetoric, they'll just do what they've been doing for more than thirty plus years now- They'll go in and cut taxes way more than they cut spending, especially with that big defense increase, and they'll just explode the debt and weaken the economy. And they'll destroy the federal government's ability to help you by letting interest gobble up all your tax payments. Remember, Don't you ever forget when you hear them talking about this that Republican economic policies quadrupled the national debt before I took office, in the 12 years before I took office, and doubled it after I leftthe debt in the eight years after I left, because it defied arithmetic. It was a highly inconvenient thing for them in our debates that I was just a country boy from Arkansas, and I came from a place where people still thought two and two was four. It's arithmetic. We simply can't afford to give the reins of government to someone who will double-down on trickle-down.
Really. Think about this: President Obama's plan cuts the debt, honors our values, and brightens the future for of our children, our families and our nation. It's a heck of a lot better. It passes the arithmetic test, and far more important, it passes the values test. 
My fellow Americans, all of us in this grand hall and everybody watching at home, when we vote in this election, you have to decidewe'll be deciding what kind of country you we want to live in. If you want a you're on your own, winner take all winner-take- all, you're-on-your-own society you should support the Republican ticket. But If you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities- a "we're all in it this together" society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
If you want every American to vote and you think it's wrong to change voting procedures just to reduce the turnout of younger, poorer, minority and disabled voters, you should support Barack Obama. And If you think the president was right to open the doors of American opportunity to all those young immigrants brought here as children when they were young so they can serve in the military or go to college who want to go to college or serve in the military, you should must vote for Barack Obama. If you want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American Dream is really alive and well again, and where the United States remains the leading maintains its leadership as a force for peace and prosperity in this a highly competitive world, you should have to vote for Barack Obama.
Look, I love our country so much.- and I know we're coming back. For more than 200 years, through every crisis, we've always come back we've always come out stronger than we went in. People have predicted our demise ever since George Washington was criticized for being a mediocre surveyor with a bad set of wooden false teeth. And so far, every single person that's bet against America has lost money because we always come back. We come through every fire a little stronger and a little better. And we will again as long as we do it together. We And we do it because in the end we decide to champion the cause for which our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor- to form the cause of forming a more perfect union.
If that's what you believe, if that's what you want, we have to re-elect President Barack Obama. My fellow Americans, if that is what you want, if that is what you believe, you must vote and you must re-elect President Barack Obama.
God bless you - God bless America.

***
 VERSION #4
C-SPAN's Digital recording of Bill Clinton delivering the speech on September 5, 2012 at the Democratic National Convention

A Modest Proposal + SOAPSTone Notes

* Read "A Modest Proposal" (1729) by Jonathan Swift
* Take SOAPSTone notes (Identify and explore the significance of speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, subject, and tone in the text. "Explore the significance" means write several thoughtful sentences that interpret the text and make direct references to the text.)
* Record your notes in the comment box below.
* WARNING: Stay on your toes, so to speak. Be careful not to take speaker, purpose, and tone at face value.

A Modest Proposal

by Jonathan Swift (an Anglo-Irish essayist, satirist, and poet; author of Gulliver’s Travels)

First Published in 1729 as a pamphlet. It was printed in Dublin, Ireland and later in London, England.

 

A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR PREVENTING THE CHILDREN OF POOR PEOPLE IN IRELAND FROM BEING A BURDEN TO THEIR PARENTS OR COUNTRY, AND FOR MAKING THEM BENEFICIAL TO THE PUBLIC

It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants: who as they grow up either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.

I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain age who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them as those who demand our charity in the streets.

As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and maturely weighed the several schemes of other projectors, I have always found them grossly mistaken in the computation. It is true, a child just dropped from its dam may be supported by her milk for a solar year, with little other nourishment; at most not above the value of 2s, which the mother may certainly get, or the value in scraps, by her lawful occupation of begging; and it is exactly at one year old that I propose to provide for them in such a manner as instead of being a charge upon their parents or the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the rest of their lives, they shall on the contrary contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands.

There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas! too frequent among us! sacrificing the poor innocent babes I doubt more to avoid the expense than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most savage and inhuman breast.

The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couples who are able to maintain their own children, although I apprehend there cannot be so many, under the present distresses of the kingdom; but this being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand breeders. I again subtract fifty thousand for those women who miscarry, or whose children die by accident or disease within the year. There only remains one hundred and twenty thousand children of poor parents annually born: the question therefore is, how this number shall be reared and provided for, which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture; we neither build houses (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land: they can very seldom pick up a livelihood by stealing, till they arrive at six years old, except where they are of towardly parts, although I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier, during which time, they can however be properly looked upon only as probationers, as I have been informed by a principal gentleman in the county of Cavan, who protested to me that he never knew above one or two instances under the age of six, even in a part of the kingdom so renowned for the quickest proficiency in that art.

I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl before twelve years old is no salable commodity; and even when they come to this age they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half-a-crown at most on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriment and rags having been at least four times that value.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle or swine; and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

I have reckoned upon a medium that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, increaseth to 28 pounds.

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.

Infant's flesh will be in season throughout the year, but more plentiful in March, and a little before and after; for we are told by a grave author, an eminent French physician, that fish being a prolific diet, there are more children born in Roman Catholic countries about nine months after Lent than at any other season; therefore, reckoning a year after Lent, the markets will be more glutted than usual, because the number of popish infants is at least three to one in this kingdom: and therefore it will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening the number of papists among us.

I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar's child (in which list I reckon all cottagers, laborers, and four-fifths of the farmers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat, when he hath only some particular friend or his own family to dine with him. Thus the squire will learn to be a good landlord, and grow popular among his tenants; the mother will have eight shillings net profit, and be fit for work till she produces another child.

Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcass; the skin of which artificially dressed will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.

As to our city of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose in the most convenient parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.

A very worthy person, a true lover of his country, and whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased in discoursing on this matter to offer a refinement upon my scheme. He said that many gentlemen of this kingdom, having of late destroyed their deer, he conceived that the want of venison might be well supplied by the bodies of young lads and maidens, not exceeding fourteen years of age nor under twelve; so great a number of both sexes in every country being now ready to starve for want of work and service; and these to be disposed of by their parents, if alive, or otherwise by their nearest relations. But with due deference to so excellent a friend and so deserving a patriot, I cannot be altogether in his sentiments; for as to the males, my American acquaintance assured me, from frequent experience, that their flesh was generally tough and lean, like that of our schoolboys by continual exercise, and their taste disagreeable; and to fatten them would not answer the charge. Then as to the females, it would, I think, with humble submission be a loss to the public, because they soon would become breeders themselves; and besides, it is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice (although indeed very unjustly), as a little bordering upon cruelty; which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, however so well intended.

But in order to justify my friend, he confessed that this expedient was put into his head by the famous Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa, who came from thence to London above twenty years ago, and in conversation told my friend, that in his country when any young person happened to be put to death, the executioner sold the carcass to persons of quality as a prime dainty; and that in his time the body of a plump girl of fifteen, who was crucified for an attempt to poison the emperor, was sold to his imperial majesty's prime minister of state, and other great mandarins of the court, in joints from the gibbet, at four hundred crowns. Neither indeed can I deny, that if the same use were made of several plump young girls in this town, who without one single groat to their fortunes cannot stir abroad without a chair, and appear at playhouse and assemblies in foreign fineries which they never will pay for, the kingdom would not be the worse.

Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about that vast number of poor people, who are aged, diseased, or maimed, and I have been desired to employ my thoughts what course may be taken to ease the nation of so grievous an encumbrance. But I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known that they are every day dying and rotting by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected. And as to the young laborers, they are now in as hopeful a condition; they cannot get work, and consequently pine away for want of nourishment, to a degree that if at any time they are accidentally hired to common labor, they have not strength to perform it; and thus the country and themselves are happily delivered from the evils to come.

I have too long digressed, and therefore shall return to my subject. I think the advantages by the proposal which I have made are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance.

For first, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the number of papists, with whom we are yearly overrun, being the principal breeders of the nation as well as our most dangerous enemies; and who stay at home on purpose with a design to deliver the kingdom to the Pretender, hoping to take their advantage by the absence of so many good protestants, who have chosen rather to leave their country than stay at home and pay tithes against their conscience to an Episcopal curate.

Secondly, The poorer tenants will have something valuable of their own, which by law may be made liable to distress and help to pay their landlord's rent, their corn and cattle being already seized, and money a thing unknown.

Thirdly, Whereas the maintenance of an hundred thousand children, from two years old and upward, cannot be computed at less than ten shillings a-piece per annum, the nation's stock will be thereby increased fifty thousand pounds per annum, beside the profit of a new dish introduced to the tables of all gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom who have any refinement in taste. And the money will circulate among ourselves, the goods being entirely of our own growth and manufacture.

Fourthly, The constant breeders, beside the gain of eight shillings sterling per annum by the sale of their children, will be rid of the charge of maintaining them after the first year. Fifthly, This food would likewise bring great custom to taverns; where the vintners will certainly be so prudent as to procure the best receipts for dressing it to perfection, and consequently have their houses frequented by all the fine gentlemen, who justly value themselves upon their knowledge in good eating: and a skilful cook, who understands how to oblige his guests, will contrive to make it as expensive as they please.

Sixthly, This would be a great inducement to marriage, which all wise nations have either encouraged by rewards or enforced by laws and penalties. It would increase the care and tenderness of mothers toward their children, when they were sure of a settlement for life to the poor babes, provided in some sort by the public, to their annual profit instead of expense. We should see an honest emulation among the married women, which of them could bring the fattest child to the market. Men would become as fond of their wives during the time of their pregnancy as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf, their sows when they are ready to farrow; nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage.

Many other advantages might be enumerated. For instance, the addition of some thousand carcasses in our exportation of barreled beef, the propagation of swine's flesh, and improvement in the art of making good bacon, so much wanted among us by the great destruction of pigs, too frequent at our tables; which are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well-grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a lord mayor's feast or any other public entertainment. But this and many others I omit, being studious of brevity.

Supposing that one thousand families in this city would be constant customers for infants flesh, besides others who might have it at merry meetings, particularly weddings and christenings: I compute that Dublin would take off annually about twenty thousand carcasses, and the rest of the kingdom (where probably they will be sold somewhat cheaper) the remaining eighty thousand.

I can think of no one that will possibly be raised against this propasal, unless it should be urged that the number of people will be thereby much lessened in the kingdom. This I freely own, and it was indeed one principal design in offering it to the world. I desire the reader will observe, that I calculated my remedy for this one individual Kingdom of Ireland, and for no other that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon earth. Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients: Of taxing our absentees at five shillings a pound: Of using neither clothes, nor household furniture, except what is our own growth and manufacture: Of utterly rejecting the materials and instruments that promote foriegn luxury: Of curing the expensiveness of pride, vanity, idleness, and gaming in our women: Of introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence, and temperance: Of learning to love our country, wherein we differ even from Laplanders, and the inhabitants of Tompinamboo: Of quitting our animosities and factions, nor act any longe like the Jews, who were murdering one another at the very moment their city was taken: Of being a little cautious not to sell our country and consciences for nothing: Of teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants. Lastly, of putting a spirit of honesty, industry, into our shopkeepers, who, if a resolution could now be taken to buy only our native goods, would immediately unite to cheat and exact upon us in the price, the measure and goodness, nor could ever yet be brought to make one fair propasal of just dealing, though often and ernestly invited to it.

Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, till he hath at least a glimpse of hope that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them in practice. But as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly dispairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this propasal, which as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our own power, and whereby we can incur no danger in disobliging England. For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country that would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.

After all, I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion as to reject any offer proposed by wise men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual. But before something of that kind shall be advanced in contradiction to my scheme, and offering a better, I desire the author or authors will be pleased maturely to consider two points. First, as things now stand, how they will be able to find food and raiment for an hundred thousand useless mouths and backs. And secondly, there being a round million of creatures in human figure throughout this kingdom, whose whole subsistence put into a common stock would leave them in debt two millions of pounds sterling, adding those who are beggars by profession to the bulk of farmers, cottagers, and laborers, with their wives and children who are beggars in effect: I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.

(1729)

THE END

Resources for Week 1 Assignments

Compass Student Handbook
Annotate with underlining/highlighting and comments (ideas, feelings, questions) in the margin
or, take double-entry notes: information (quotations, paraphrase on the left; ideas, feelings, questions on the right).
Be prepared to use your annotations or notes in a Socratic Seminar on Friday, September 7.

Rhetorical Analysis Web Directions
Read the directions and ask questions on Thursday, September 6.
Webs are due Wednesday, September 12.

Summer Session #3: Dogtown, rhetorical purpose, rhetorical analysis, synthesis writing, art observation

AP English Language and Composition Seminar #3

Dogtown by Elyssa East

Seminar Goals

·         Deepen our understanding of the relationship between purpose, argument and rhetorical strategies & techniques

·         Deepen our understanding of how to synthesize research, experience, and observation to gain understanding and to make arguments

·         Deepen our understanding of our own relationship with where we live and important places in our lives

Seminar Activities

Introduction to the Cape Ann Museum and to the seminar’s goals and activities

Achieving a purpose

Use brainstorm writing, pair sharing, and whole group sharing to explore the purpose of Dogtown: to persuade, to inform, to engage.

What is Elyssa East trying to persuade her audience of? What point is she trying to make ?

What were you informed of while reading the book? (Students wrote down two specific things.

How does East effectively engage her audience? What choices did East make that did not engage you?

Noticing & Analyzing

Use brainstorm writing, pair sharing, and whole group sharing to explore Elyssa East’s purpose(s), argument(s), and rhetorical strategies/techniques.

(in the Folly Cove Auditorium)

What did you notice about East's rhetorical strategies and techniques? What did you notice about her use of storytelling, setting imagery, and characterization? How does the organization of the book contribute to her argument and other purposes? What did you notice about her style, voice, and tone? How is point of view significant in the book?

Use direct observation and note-taking to explore Marsden Hartley’s use of artistic techniques to create meaning and effect in his art. 

What do you see in the paintings: composition, color, line, shape, space, texture, pattern?

What effect does the painting have on you? What feelings and ideas does it produce?

How do the choices made by the artist contribute to its effect and meaning?

(Marsden Hartley exhibit)

Researching & Synthesizing

Use Socratic seminar observations and thoughts about Marsden Hartley’s art to understanding Elyssa East’s Dogtown.

How does your experience observing and thinking about the paintings affect your understanding of parts of East's book?

(in the Folly Cove Auditorium)

Use Socratic seminar to explore how Elyssa East synthesizes research, experience, and observation to persuade, inform, and entertain her reader.

(in the Folly Cove Auditorium)

Reflecting & Taking next steps

Use direct observation and note-taking to reflect on the relationship between art and ourselves.

(in the Museum--tba)

Use brainstorm writing, pair-sharing, and Socratic seminar to explore the relationship between research and ourselves.

(in the Folly Cove Auditorium)

Compile questions to send to Elyssa East.

Discuss how all of this will inform what we do during the school year.

Those of you who did not attend the third AP English Language and Composition summer seminar must write a substantial response (300+ words) to the summary provided above. Your response may be informal but it must thoughtfully relate your careful reading of the memoir with the concepts presented in the summary. Although you are free to respond to anything in the summary of the first session, you might want to pay particular attention to the underlined passages. I look forward to hearing from you.

All summer work (except for the quotation responses for your choice book) must be completed by the first day of class August 26, 2012. (In other words by 8/26/12 quotation responses for All Souls, Omnivore's Dilemma, and Dogtown must be completed, and students who did not attend one or more seminar must complete blog comments for the seminar(s) they missed.)

Summer Session #2: Omnivore's Dilemma, Deepening Rhetorical Analysis, and Making Arguments of Your Own

On Monday, July 30 we convened for the second AP English Language and Composition summer seminar. We spent the entire class in room 2207 which had been recently cleaned. The desks were arranged in four rows with the two rows on the left facing to the right and the two rows on the right facing to the left. This set-up allowed us to share in pairs at a few points during the seminar.

I had several goals for the seminar. (1) I wanted to practice rhetorical analysis using Omnivore's Dilemma. (Rhetorical analysis is figuring out what argument a text makes and how it makes that argument.) Rhetorical analysis is at the core of AP English Language and Composition. (2) I also wanted you to practice making your own arguments in response to positions presented in a complex text.

Why these goals? On the AP English Language and Composition exam you will write three essays. (1) One essay asks you to analyze the rhetorical strategies in a piece of writing. (2) Another essay asks you to understand a position (an argument, a point, a thesis) and then to respond to that position with an argument of your own. (3) A third essay requires that you read several sources and then synthesize the sources into an argument of your own. (Omnivore's Dilemma is a book-length version of the third type of essay.) The summer is all about laying the foundations for writing these three essays.

Opening: Building a Bridge from All Souls to Omnivore's Dilemma
I opened the session by emphasizing the importance of making connections and analyzing the writer's choices when responding to quotations. I then quickly reviewed the quotation response grading rubric and returned your All Souls quotation responses. I asked you to remember the rhetorical strategies used by Michael Patrick MacDonald in All Souls and to explain how those strategies contributed to his purposes.

I explained that we read All Souls first because, like the fiction (novels and plays) that you're used to reading in English classes, memoirs rely on characters, setting, and series of related events to convey their themes and achieve their purposes. So although for many of you rhetorical analysis is new, the type of book was not new. On the other hand, Omnivore's Dilemma is probably quite different from what you're used to reading, and it presents readers with new challenges. We spent most of the seminar trying to make sense of what we found in the book and why it was put there (that way) by the author.

Rhetorical Analysis
After a five minute break I presented two big questions which I wrote on the board (using different words than I'll use here):

* What stands out in Omnivore's Dilemma? (In other words, what parts seem most interesting, most memorable, most important, most moving, most difficult, etc.?)

* In Omnivore's Dilemma what is the big argument that Michael Pollan makes? (In other words, what is his main point? What is his thesis?)

Then I divided the book into its three sections: I. Industrial, II. Pastoral, III. Personal. (I also divided the second section into its two parts (Big Organic and Polyface). Each section was given its own column on the whiteboard at the front of the class.

Industrial
In pairs you brainstormed "what stood out" in the first section. After the brainstorm the pairs shared their responses with the whole class. In the "Industrial" column I wrote down what the pairs reported out.

As we went I asked "how does that thing that stood out--that detail, that passage, that language choice, that idea--help reveal and contribute to Pollan's overall purpose in the book?"On the left side of the board I started to write down your ideas about Pollan's overall purpose. We continued making connections between what stood out and Pollan's purpose.

We decided that in the first section Pollan's purpose was  (1) to reveal what's hidden behind and within the food most of us eat; (2) to show that industrial food unnaturally changes the human body, the environment, plants, and animals; (3) to show that emphasizing quantity over quality is bad for farmers, the environment, the health of eaters, animals, and tax payers; (4) to show that although industrial food feeds people cheaply and easily there are significant hidden costs; (5) to show that biodiversity is necessary: nature is a complex system (or organism) not a simple machine; (6) to remind readers of traditional ways that can help eaters and producers.

As we discussed how the parts that stand out contribute to the whole argument, we also discussed how parts relate to other parts, how parts relate to our own experiences, observations, and prior learning, and how the Pollan's particular strategies and choices--creating characters, telling stories, adding parenthetical comments, selecting details, weaving personal experience with research, organizing sections and creating sequences, writing in an authoritative but intimate voice--are effective or ineffective.

Pastoral & Personal
We spent more than an hour on the Industrial section so had less time for the Pastoral and Personal sections. However, we did have time for pairs to share "what stood out" in these sections and for the pairs to report out. We continued connecting the elements that stood out to Pollan's overall purpose.

Our Own Arguments
I'd hoped to have more time for this, but despite time constraints we were able to share in pairs and then report out our own opinions about particular, very specific parts of the book. Each of you chose one idea in the book (it could be one of Pollan's ideas or an idea presented by someone else) that you felt strongly about. I then asked you to decide whether you agreed with the idea, opposed it, or would revise it. We'll continue practicing our own arguments throughout the year.

During this part of class we also talked about becoming as knowledgeable as possible and making choices that support our opinions, particularly our most deeply held values.

Dogtown
At the very end of class I introduced the next book, Elyssa East's Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town. In your quotation responses look for the big ideas (the overall argument, the important themes). Ask yourself, how do the parts contribute to the whole? How do the writer's choices work? How do they contribute? Do they ever detract? If you're able to understand the argument and how its made, then you can respond: agreeing, disagree, or revising.
***
Those of you who did not attend the second AP English Language and Composition summer seminar must write a substantial response (300+ words) to the summary provided above. Your response may be informal but it must thoughtfully relate your careful reading of the memoir with the concepts presented in the summary. Although you are free to respond to anything in the summary of the first session, you might want to pay particular attention to the underlined passages. I look forward to hearing from you.
***
[Final final note, the last seminar--on Dogtown--has been moved to Wednesday, August 22, 9:00 a.m. at the Cape Ann Museum on Pleasant St. in Gloucester.]

Summer Session #1: All Souls & an Introduction to Rhetorical Analysis

On Monday, July 9 I held the first AP English Language and Composition 2012 summer seminar. We spent the first part of class in 2209 and then moved to the library. (Thank you Mr. Telles and Mrs. Saunders.)

The goals for the session were to introduce and have students work with (1) rhetorical analysis strategies (how do the writer's choices contribute to his purpose?) , (2) thematic tension (how do big concepts--like belonging and exclusion, civic pride and truth-telling--relate to each other in the book?), and (3) connections to yourself (how do your prior experiences and observations contribute to your understanding of the memoir and to its effect on you?)

(I've used italics to help you keep track of important concepts from the first session.)

Opening
I opened the session by asking you to think about what stood out to you in Michael Patrick McDonald's memoir All Souls. Then we considered how the book related to your prior experiences and knowledge. Although this might have seemed to be small talk, this opening contributed to our goals by getting us to notice the writer's choices, the memoir's themes, and the relationship those choices and themes have to our own lives.

Rhetorical Analysis
Then we went deeper into the concept of rhetorical analysis, a concept that is at the core of AP English Language and Composition. In small groups (pairs or trios) students shared preliminary ideas about the "purpose" of MacDonald's book. (Before we discussed I introduced three general possibilities for rhetorical purpose: to persuade, to inform, and to entertain. Most writing attempts some combination of all three.) The idea that MacDonald wanted to inform the reader about injustices in Southie came up. Another student thought that the memoir's purpose was to inform the reading by telling the truth about Southie. These ideas--and others--were woven through the rest of the session.

We then discussed some of the techniques that MacDonald used to achieve his purpose. Students seemed to agree that his narrative voice was important. It was suggested that MacDonald used informal, conversation language in the memoir. We then discussed how this choice of language might have contributed to his purpose (particularly in relation to "telling the truth about Southie). I also mentioned that when we talk about language choice we can speak more specifically about syntax (sentence structure) and type of word choice (diction). Syntax can be simple or complex. Syntax can be conventional or unconventional. Diction can be archaic, formal, standard, informal, colloquial, vulgar. These choice affect how a reader experiences a piece of writing.

We also talked about MacDonald's characterizations of people and places. For example, Frankie was characterized in a way that led to a certain amount of surprise about his death. Kevin was characterized in a way that made his death less of a surprise but still moving. MacDonald planted seeds earlier in the book so that the deaths would be moving. Again MacDonald's choices about how he portrayed characters served his larger purpose.

Another choice we discussed was the narrative structure. Why does MacDonald begin and end with the vigil? How does this contribute to his overall purpose?

Through this discussion of how the writer's choices contribute to his purpose we also discussed how Aristotle's rhetorical triangle could be used to explain the effectiveness of MacDonald's writing. Aristotle suggested that there are three main forms of persuasion. A writer can use reason (the Greek word is logos), emotion (the Greek word is pathos), her/his own credibility or trustworthiness (the Greek word is ethos) to appeal to the audience. We discussed specific was that MacDonald cultivated  pathos and ethos in All Souls.

As we used discussed the rhetorical strategies used in All Souls important questions emerged. One question was in All Souls what is the relationship between "(1) the injustices, tragedies, and traumas in Southie; (2) the pride Southie residents feels about their neighborhood; (3) the need to tell the truth about what's happening in their neighborhood; and (4) healing from the traumas and improving the neighborhood?" We found this to be an essential but difficult question to answer. (For AP English Language the next question--which I never asked but which you might address in your rhetorical analysis web at the end of the summer--is how do MacDonald's rhetorical strategies contribute to his answer to that question? If you didn't attend the first session you might begin to address the question in your comment too.) 

Socratic Seminar
Then in the library we practiced an inner circle / outer circle Socratic seminar in the library by discussing which of the following word pairs "belonging and exclusion," "appearances and reality" or "pride and critique" was most and least relevant to MacDonald's purpose in All Souls. (I may have used slightly different words on Monday.) We tried to explain the relationship of the word pairs to specific passages in the memoir.

For our penultimate activity I asked you to go through your quotation responses and mark places where you would add to your analysis particularly considering the importance of rhetorical analysis (how a writer's choices contribute to purpose) and the relationship between the individual passages and the book's overall themes (how do the parts contribute to the whole).

Finally, I introduced the next book, Omnivore's Dilemma. In doing so I encouraged students to pay attention to your food choices at home and in the supermarket. I also encouraged students to visit the farmers market on Thursdays at Stage Fort Park. When you're writing your responses make sure you (1) discuss the meaning of the passage in context, (2) discuss the relationship of the passage to other parts of the book and/or to the work as a whole, and (3) discuss how the writer's choices contribute to meaning. 

[Final final note, the last seminar--on Dogtown--as been moved to Wednesday, August 22 at the Cape Ann Museum on Pleasant St. in Gloucester.]

Those of you who did not attend the first AP English Language and Composition summer seminar must write a substantial response (300+ words) to the summary provided above. Your response may be informal but it must thoughtfully relate your careful reading of the memoir with the concepts presented in the summary. Although you are free to respond to anything in the summary of the first session, you might want to pay particular attention to the italicized passages. I look forward to hearing from you.

Next session 8:00 a.m. July 30.