Patrick Leahy, US Senator, Vermont
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
August 26, 2008

I'm Patrick Leahy. I live on a dirt road in a town of 1,800 in Vermont. I know rural America. Vermont is proud to be part of rural America, but like communities across the heartland, we are struggling from eight years of the Bush/Cheney economy. Rural communities face disproportionately high unemployment rates, violent crime is up, and no one is hurt by record high energy prices more than we are.

Finally, after eight years of failed policies and misplaced priorities, we can turn the page. Rural America can't afford more of the same. Rural America needs the change Barack Obama offers. Our communities have suffered a 10 percent drop in household income, three times the national average. As jobs continue to disappear, 8 million rural Americans now live in poverty.

Through it all, George Bush and Dick Cheney have sided with big business and big oil and left the rest of us to fend for ourselves. As much as John McCain would like us to believe he's different, his economic plan offers not a single new idea, just more of the same.

Barack Obama will give us the change we need. He will lift our economy immediately by taking some of big oil's windfall profits and returning $1,000 to the pockets of working families. He will invest in what rural America needs most of all, good new jobs, with a clean energy initiative that will move us away from oil and put 5 million Americans to work. And unlike John McCain, for whom the internet is a mystery, Barack Obama understands that rural communities can't be competitive until we have high-speed internet access across the heartland.

Now, as a former prosecutor, I know rural Americans value safe homes and secure communities. That's why the rural spike in violent crimes is so disturbing to us. George Bush wants to cut funding from local law enforcement. Joe Biden and I worked together on the COPS Program that put 100,000 officers on the beat. Now, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have a plan to hire even more.

No one in America escapes the burden of gas prices that have nearly tripled during the Bush administration, but no one feels it worse than rural communities, where we travel the furthest distances to commute to work, take our children to school and buy groceries. Instead of helping us, George Bush heaps billion-dollar tax breaks on top of big oil's multi-billion-dollar profits and, now, the very same oil companies that have called the shots in the Bush White House are doubling down on McCain.

Big oil knows McCain's a sure bet to look out for them. We know Barack Obama will look out for us. Unlike Senator McCain, Senator Obama has a comprehensive and balanced energy plan to lower prices. He will stop speculators from bidding up prices; responsibly produce more oil here at home; and, most importantly, he'll move us away from oil and towards clean, renewable fuels.

So, for rural America, this choice could not be clearer. John McCain offers four more years of the same Bush-Cheney policies that have failed us. Barack Obama is on our side and he'll deliver the change we desperately need. After eight long years, now is our chance to get our country back on the right track. When Barack Obama is president, we can once again look with hope to a prosperous new day for our rural communities, from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to the Green Mountains of Vermont.