Description: Internet Question #3 - General
Candidate: Sen. Obama
Question: What don't you know and how will you learn it? ]
BROKAW: All right, gentlemen, we've come to the last question.
And you'll both be interested to know this comes from the Internet and it's from a state that you're strongly contesting, both of you. It's from Peggy (ph) in Amherst, New Hampshire. And it has a certain Zen-like quality, I'll give you a fair warning.
She says, "What don't you know and how will you learn it?"
(LAUGHTER)
Senator Obama, you get first crack at that.
OBAMA: My wife, Michelle, is there and she could give you a much longer list than I do. And most of the time, I learn it by asking her.
But, look, the nature of the challenges that we're going to face are immense and one of the things that we know about the presidency is that it's never the challenges that you expect. It's the challenges that you don't that end up consuming most of your time.
But here's what I do know. I know that I wouldn't be standing here if it weren't for the fact that this country gave me opportunity. I came from very modest means. I had a single mom and my grandparents raised me and it was because of the help of scholarships and my grandmother scrimping on things that she might have wanted to purchase and my mom, at one point, getting food stamps in order for us to put food on the table.
Despite all that, I was able to go to the best schools on earth and I was able to succeed in a way that I could not have succeeded anywhere else in this country.
The same is true for Michelle and I'm sure the same is true for a lot of you.
And the question in this election is: are we going to pass on that same American dream to the next generation? Over the last eight years, we've seen that dream diminish.
Wages and incomes have gone down. People have lost their health care or are going bankrupt because they get sick. We've got young people who have got the grades and the will and the drive to go to college, but they just don't have the money.
And we can't expect that if we do the same things that we've been doing over the last eight years, that somehow we are going to have a different outcome.
We need fundamental change. That's what's at stake in this election. That's the reason I decided to run for president, and I'm hopeful that all of you are prepared to continue this extraordinary journey that we call America.
But we're going to have to have the courage and the sacrifice, the nerve to move in a new direction.
Contents
Prev
Next
Last
