As many of you know, I have put countless hours into this campaign, and I am truly devastated by its outcome. On Nov. 2, we lost not just a presidential election, but Senate races and House races and mayoral races and school board races and, perhaps most importantly, we lost on ballot propositions that infringe upon our collective civil rights. The results of this election are overwhelming, and I feel like my heart has been crushed. Even so, let me be clear on this: I do not love America or Americans any less than I did before this election took place. I do not believe any less that this is a great country founded on sacred principles, and I will fight for this country and those principles today and tomorrow and the day after that with President Bush in the White House just as I would have had John Kerry been elected. In this respect, if in no other, nothing has changed.
The results of this election are bad, and the state of affairs in our nation is going to get a lot worse over the next four years. The fact that George W. Bush won this election does not validate his campaign lies, his ceaseless insistence that the economy is getting better, that we are winning the war in Iraq or that we are more safe today than we were on Sept. 11, 2001. Make no mistake about it: We are in for an incredibly difficult, painful, heartwrenching four years, and America needs us now more than ever.
We Democrats have learned a thing or two about losing since President Bush took office in 2001. Some among us have lost our jobs; some of us have lost our healthcare; some of us have lost our civil liberties; some of us have even lost our lives. Now, we have lost an election. But what we have not lost, what we cannot allow ourselves to lose, is our hope, our passion and our willingness to keep on fighting as hard as we can for as long as it takes. We cannot let this dark moment break our spirit, nor can we save our fight for the next campaign four years from now. There are innumerable problems in this nation, large and small, and they are affecting the lives of Americans right now. I'm not ready to give up on them. Are you?
President Bush has made it clear that he plans to roll out an ultra-conservative agenda during his second term. He wants to overhaul and privatize social security, a plan which will mean drastic cuts in benefits and will cost an additional one trillion dollars up front. He decided that more tax cuts for the wealthy are the best way to keep the economy going-that is to say, not going very well-and he hopes to make these changes to the tax code permanent. He wants to tie more public school funding to standardized test scores. He's going to continue to limit the rights of women, people of color and the LBGTQ community. Perhaps most frightening of all, he will likely have the chance to fill one or several Supreme Court vacancies with his favorite kind of judges: strict originalists like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. If William Rehnquist does indeed step down due to his cancer, Thomas will likely be the next chief justice, giving him enormous influence over which cases the Court will hear and how they will rule on those cases.
These are all serious problems, and we leftists are going to have to fight tooth and nail to keep the second Bush administration from destroying decades of democratic progress, from Roosevelt's New Deal to Johnson's Great Society to Clinton's booming economy. We are up against an administration that is arguably the most radically right-wing of any in our nation's history, and they have a conservative Congress, Court and electorate to back them up. We are decidedly in the minority, but we are by no means down for the count. Submission and centrist compromise are no longer options for Democrats. This is going to be the fight of our lives, for the very core beliefs that make this country uniquely spectacular, and there's no way we can win if every one of us who agrees doesn't join the fight. There's no way we can win if we insist on wallowing in depression, disillusionment and disgust rather than remaining committed to the ideas we worked so hard for during the campaign. There's no way we can win if we write off entire regions and religions as unwilling to join our cause. There's no way we can win if we lose sight of how blessed we are to live in a nation like the United States of America, a nation which has given us opportunities most people on earth could never dream.
We can't change what happened on Nov. 2. What we can do is show each other and the world that we are proud to be Americans and that we will work not just election day, but every day to make our country the amazing nation we know it can be. We start now, here, today. I hope you will join our fight, both here at Amherst and in the world beyond. With an enemy as perilous as this one, idle observance is not an available course. We need your help. We will not triumph without you.