All America PAC BLOG

It appears Bayh is making another bold move to position himself for a run in 08.

I liked his Dad and I see a lot of him in Evan, this man and a few others, are the future of the Democratic Party. Thanks for the link.

The Republicans must be getting a little worried about Bayh. I noticed today some have been posting on various Bayh sites trying to insinuate he's a "liberal". At this point in time they have made a point of trying to associate the word "liberal" with "bad". Their word association not mine. The problem is......Bayh is a very centered Democrat who they have nothing on. He's got to be one of the most conservertive Dems in the Senate. How will they fight him?. He's the GOP's worst nightmare for 08. They are endorsing other Dem potential candidates............hmmm. Makes ya wonder doesn't it? :nod:

best wishes marie

Signed up for the e-mail alerts and put the site in my favorites list. Of the possbile candidates for 2008 being discussed, Bayh, IMO, leads the pack.

What's the point of voting for someone like Bayh who doesn't seem like a real Democrat?

http://www.democraticwing.org/democraticwi...005/14_bayh.mp3

I'm having a hard time downloading this file.

http://www.allamericapac.com/buzz.html

I am posting the words to Bayh's speech. The thing I have found about Bayh is that he is more liberal then what people think. He's definately a centrist but he's not afraid to step up to the plate for Democrats. Don't let the media determine your judgements about any candidate. I personally haven't decided who I'd support in 08. Bayh is my state senator and I happen to think he's more then up to the task. I will support whoever is nominated as I am a loyal Dem. If it's Bayh I'll fight for him. If it's Kerry I'll fight for him or Hillary. All more then qualified. All I intend to do here is share info on my state senator and support Bayh's efforts. If you don't like him after you've researched him.......that's cool. I'm just the informer here.


Keynote speech by U.S. Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN)
Democratic Party of Colorado Jefferson-Jackson Dinner
March 5, 2005

Thank You very, very much for that warm Colorado welcome, and to my friend Ken Salazar, I want to thank you for that very generous introduction. All those many nice things you had to say, Ken. You know, I’m always still a little bit surprised when I am introduced pretty much the way I wrote it. So I’m grateful to you for all those wonderful things you were kind enough to recount there. You know it’s a team sport – I stand here today on the shoulders of many, many people – and so they deserve a lion’s share of the credit for all those things as well.

I’ve learned not to take kind introductions like Ken’s for granted. You know, as he’d mentioned, I’d been privileged to serve my state for 8 years as our Governor. I served with Roy Romer all 8 of those years; a wonderful man he and Bea. And here I’d just left the Governorship and I was running for the United States Senate, and I’d been out of town, and I flew back, Ken, to Indianapolis, Indiana and I got off the plane and I’m walking through the airport, and I hear these footsteps, you know, coming up behind me, pounding in the terminal, and finally this voice says “Wait, wait!” And I kind of stop and turn around, and I think, well, one of my constituents has recognized me and they want to have a word or two – of course I’ll stop for this good citizen. So I stopped, and he was all out of breath, and he said, “I know you….I know you…you’re Dan Quayle!” Talk about putting your ego right in check, I’ll tell you what. So Ken, thanks - no cases of mistaken identity tonight. I’m very, very grateful for that.

You know I’d like to echo the words of thanks that have been said for so many deserving people here tonight – and in some ways this is like a walk down memory lane for me. When I was privileged to be elected Governor for the first time in 1988, we hadn’t had a Democratic Governor in Indiana for 20 years. We didn’t have a majority in either house of our state legislature – and I had been the only statewide elected Democrat. But we began to change that by a lot of work from folks just like you here tonight – people who preceded me up to the dais. We elected a Lieutenant Governor along with me, we elected an Attorney General – not once, but twice. We became the first state since reconstruction to elect not one, but two African Americans to statewide office. We elected a majority in our House of Representatives and began to provide good governance to the people of our state.

So I’d like to congratulate your legislative leaders – Andrew Romanoff, Joan Fitzgerald for their successes. They’re going to do a great job leading the state of Colorado and I know this is just laying the foundation, Ken, for electing that Governor in 2 years you referred to and then we’ll really move Colorado forward into the 21st Century in the way that we need to.

I want to congratulate your Congressional delegation. You know I had the privilege of meeting a little bit earlier with Mark Udall and his wife Maggie, you know I think the world of Mark Udall…there’s only one thing that sticks in my craw. I just can’t understand how people would use a well-known name to seek high public office. Just something about that bothers me. He’s a wonderful person, and I tell you what…nothing would make me happier than to see him join Ken and me in the United States Senate. You got half the job done last year, let’s finish the job in 2008!

John Salazar is with us. John, is it true that all over Colorado people are changing their last name to Salazar to run for office? John, I want to congratulate you. You know, you will be a breath of fresh air in the House of Representatives. We need to work on getting you a majority – and we intend to do what we can in Indiana to make that happen. So good luck to you.

Diana couldn’t be with us tonight, but she’s putting here best foot forward by having her husband and her daughter with us so I want to give them some recognition.

To Pat Waak, I want to congratulate you on your election, and to, Chris, I want to say to you, “Job well done.” You know, what Ken was saying is true – we may occasionally have differences of opinion but when we obsess on our few differences the only people we make happy are those on the other side – with whom there is a yawning chasm - the Karl Roves of the world. So let’s bring this Party together. Let’s move forward together. Let’s move Colorado together. Let’s move forward from tonight and do that.

I’d like to, for just a few moments…have a conversation about the future of our country and the future of our party and what we can do together to move both in a better direction.

But here at the beginning I’ll take just a couple of seconds to share with you something about me because I think its important to know a few things about who it is you’re having that conversation with.

I’ve had four defining moments in my life.

The first, as Ken mentioned, was growing up in a family that honored public service. From my parents I’d learned that the important thing in life is not what you take out of it, but what you put back. What’s important is not who helps you, but what you can do to help other people. That’s what makes life, really, worth living. I was privileged to be elected Governor of our state, with good people, to try to move Indiana forward. To create jobs for people who wanted to work for a living and provide for their families. To expand healthcare for pregnant women and newborn infants. To raise our environmental standards. To improve our schools. And I learned from that experience that this great enterprise that we call public service, is not some theory, its not political science, its not the editorial writers. It’s a practical undertaking that we can do together to improve the quality of opportunity in the daily lives of people across your state and mine who count on us to do exactly that.

The second thing is when my mother, at age 39, got breast cancer, and seven years later passed on. I learned from that experience that life can be very short and sometimes it can be awfully harsh, and you never know what lies just around the bend. So you better live it to its fullest. You better appreciate every day and hold those that you love tight.

The third thing was, 20 years ago next month, Ken. I married a wonderful woman. She’s a wonderful mother, she’s been a great wife, and for 8 years she was a fantastic First Lady. She made her cause the cause of fighting adult illiteracy. When I became Governor, in my state, our largest employer was General Motors. We still make more steel than any state in the United States of America, and US Steel was our 2nd largest employer. Do you know that more than half of the employees at both General Motors and US Steel were functionally illiterate? Well my wife set out to try to break that pattern of ignorance – to teach people to read…so their children could read. She did a wonderful job. She waited tables for 7 years to put herself through college and through law school. In our first few years of marriage we saved money to pay off our student loans. I admire her more than I could say and I wouldn’t be here tonight without her.

The fourth thing I’ll mention, because I think it’s a god segue-way into everything else that matters – is to mention the birth of my children. We have twin nine year old boys, and they’re the most important people on the face of this earth. And I’d like to tell you the story of the day they were born – because I’ll never forget it as long as I live, and I suspect that those of you that have children feel the same way.

It wasn’t always easy for us…we had a miscarriage the first time Susan was pregnant, but we kept going, and finally we were told that we’d been blessed doubly. This was a big deal in our state. I was the first sitting Governor since 1830 to have kids while in office, so you want to talk about the loss of privacy in public life, try sitting there in the maternity room watching the 6 o’clock news where live, live, I’m not making this up, live, they were reporting how often my wife was having contractions. And I look at Susan and say, “How the hell do they know?” Well she was in labor for 25 hours and, finally, the doctors tell her, “Look, your blood pressure’s up, so we’ve got to do something about this.” So we headed to have a “C” section. And the doctors go to work and we had decided to be surprised by the gender of our children. So after a while the doctor holds up our first child and says, “You have a healthy baby son.” And Susan looks at him and says, “Oh, he’s so beautiful.” And in other couple of moments he holds up our second child and he says, “And he’s got a healthy baby brother.” And he cleaned our boys off, and they wrapped them up and placed them in my arms. And I remember looking down at them and thinking to myself, “You know what? I’m one of the first things in life that they’re going to see.” And the sense of profound responsibility that swept over me is more than I could possibly describe. And my desire to do right by those boys and to give them the opportunity to make the most of their god given talents and abilities and to live my life in a way that would be worthy for them is something that is going to go with me all the way to the very end.

And you know what? That, in a very profound way, is the genius of America. Each generation trying to do right by those who will follow in our footsteps. To try and give them more opportunity and more freedom, more hope, more security – so that they can have a better way of life. And I’m here in Denver Colorado tonight, I can tell you that I am deeply concerned – deeply concerned, that if we don’t do something to head our nation in a better direction, that we’re on the cusp of becoming the first generation in the history of this nation to not keep faith with those boys and the children of Colorado and the children of Indiana and we can not let that happen.

Our future is being shaped, today, by powerful forces that, if we don’t address, are going to shape it for us, whether we like it or not. The globalization of the economy and what we have to do to compete with people in places like India and China who are willing to work for 2 or 3 dollars a day. Now how are we going to do that? How are we going to prepare our children to do that. The changing demographics and the aging population have put us in a position of honoring our commitment to our parents and grandparents but also doing right by our children to make sure that they inherit from us something other than our unpaid bills.

Try to strengthen families across this country, strengthen families so many of whom are struggling to make ends meet, with two incomes, or single parents, who are working harder than ever before for a standard of living that just doesn’t seem to be quite the same as our parents enjoyed. How are we going to give them the time to spend with their children they need to give them values that we would like to see them have? How are we going to do that in the future, in the twenty-first century? The changing security situation that we know challenges following nine-eleven, and, in some ways, the apathy and the cynicism at the heart of our politics that involves people not in this room here tonight. I wish everybody was here. But folks who in this last election, forty percent of the American people, who we couldn’t convince even to take the most elementary act of citizenship, going to the polls to vote, because they were so disconnected with our democracy they just didn’t think that it mattered. How can we reach out to them and reenlist them in the cause of shaping their own destiny? Those are the challenges that face us.

And on each and every one of those challenges, the administration in Washington is heading down the wrong path. They’re in denial about the facts and the truth, and of the flaw of a radical ideology so divorced from the reality of the daily lives of most Americans that they’re just not going to get the job done. And that must change.

It’s gonna change, my friends, when we go to the American public, and convince them that its going to take all of us to move this country forward. Young and old, rich and poor, rural and urban, black and white. Because in the words of the civil rights leader I had the privilege to listen to, about 20 years ago now, “We may have arrived in this country in different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.” That’s right. And we need to tell the American people the truth, the truth the other side doesn’t want them to hear. You know, those folks, Karl Rove and that crowd, they’re so good, they’re so good at dividing this country, dividing this country along lines of race or ethnicity, or religion or orientation, for cheap short-term political gain. But it hurts this country. It hurts this country. We need to do better than that. We need to be better than that. By reconciling differences, by building bridges across the divide, by reminding the American people of the truth that we realize here in Colorado here tonight, that we’re one people, with a common heritage, forged from a common bond, with a common destiny. That’s the truth. That’s the truth.

When the history books are written, I predict, that one of the most serious indictments of this administration will be, you remember, that he ran as a “uniter not a divider” but the last four years he’s governed in a way that has divided this country in a way more seriously than at any time in the last generation. That must change.

It was one thing Bobby Kennedy had right. He was in my state, he was in my state, the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. You know, Indianapolis, Indiana, was the only major city in this country that didn’t have an outbreak of violence that day. And most people credit it to Robert Kennedy. Because he was given the news, and he was traveling to a rally of several thousand people, in our inner city. And he climbed up on the back of a truck and he looked out at that crowd and he said, “I’m sorry to tell you, but I’ve got bad news to report, Martin Luther King was shot and killed earlier today.” And you could hear the gasps in the crowd.

And Kennedy continued, he said, “And those of you who are tempted to lash out in anger or violence, I can only say that I too had a relative who was killed. He, too, was killed by a white man.” He continued on in that vein, and here’s what he concluded, by saying, he said, “What America needs today, what America so desperately needs today, is not more anger or more division or more hatred, what America needs today is more compassion, more brotherhood, more common ground, and yes, more love for one another.” It was true then, it’s true today.

And we’re going to achieve that unity by appealing to the better instincts of the American people, not their more baser instincts. By calling them to a higher mission beyond self-interest. It’s what I like to think of as a new, broader, deeper, more meaningful patriotism - something some of the crowd in Washington that runs things today, I think, can barely comprehend.

You know, of course, we need to support our troops. Absolutely. By the way, you might be interested to know something, we’re debating a bankruptcy bill, in Washington, today. And this crowd that likes to talk about supporting the troops, when Senator Durbin and I submitted an amendment Ken Salazar supported, that said that when National Guards men and women are called up to duty or when reservists are called up to duty, and because of that and the loss of income they suffered, they’re forced to file for bankruptcy, that we shouldn’t let that happen, that we ought to give them a pass? Those folks who claim to support the troops voted against that.

We need to lift those soldiers up and do right by them. Not force those willing to take the oath of physical sacrifice to deal with financial sacrifice too. It’s just not right.

We need to call the American people to a deeper kind of patriotism. You know, I was in Iraq in December. And you would be proud of those young men and women. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. You can tell that they’re there for what they believe, in their heart, to be all the right reasons. And they’re putting it on the line each and every day. And too many of them have ended up in places like Walter Reed Army Hospital, where I went to about nine months ago with some of my colleagues. And we’d go from room to room, and here were these, mostly young men, in the prime of their lives, trained almost as athletes. Early twenties. And here an arm is missing and there a leg. They’re trying to keep it together and their families are there, but you can tell that it’s just hard. It’s just hard. And I left the hospital that day, thinking to myself, these people have made the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice…what about us? What are we doing to strengthen this country? What are we doing to make it more secure? What has our president called upon all of us to do to defend America?

I don’t know about in Colorado, but I know that in Indiana, following nine-eleven, I had folks talking to me on the street, saying, you know, “What can I do? What can I do?” Can you remember when the President of the United States was asked that question? There was about a week’s worth of silence, and then do you know what he said? “Go to the mall, go shopping.” That’s what they assigned America to do, that’s what they call leadership, but it is not. We can do better than that.

If I’d been in charge, if I’d been in charge, I would have gone on national teevee, and I would have said this, “We need a new declaration of independence in this country.” A declaration of energy independence. Because it’s not right, that we’re as dependent as we are on places like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Russia. It’s not good for our economy, its not good for our nation’s security, it’s not good for our imbalance of payments, and we need to do something about this to set our children free.

This isn’t pie in the sky stuff. We’re experimenting with new high strength, low weight alloys now that can reduce the weight of a motor vehicle by 30, 40, maybe even 50% some day. Fuel additives that might get 20 to 30 percent more miles per gallon. Cars that for the first 30 miles will operate on electric battery until they switch over to gasoline. Most folks don’t drive more than 30 miles in a day. And other things that can make a real difference. And this administration has just dropped the ball. Just dropped the ball.

I think about what will summon people to that deeper patriotism. To do right by our country. We’ll get’em there when we have an agenda that convinces them that we have some ideas that will resonate in the course of their daily lives. I think about the economic challenges that I mentioned. You know I was in India with Susan, I’d never been there before, we went in December. That was a real eye-opener, my friends. They have hundreds of millions of people, in India, who are willing to work for next to nothing. We’re competing with those people today. But you know what? They’ve got folks who are engineers now, and scientists now. GE employs 6,000 people in this state, you know where GE’s global innovation center is? Bangalore, India. That’s the competition we’re up against.

You know, I look at the economic policy of this administration, it reminds me of that old saying, Mark: “Don’t know where you’re going, well, any road will take you there.”

You know, if you think they’ve got a strategy to empower our children and workers to compete in a global economy then you’d better think again. It starts with education because if you want high wages you better have high skills. We passed this no child left behind deal but then didn’t fund it. We need a president that will be committed to improving the quality of education, not just when the bill passes, but when its implemented, to make common cause with our teachers, and parents to lift our school children up so that they can fill their god-given potential.

I’m sometimes asked, of all the things I had the privilege to work on as governor, what I’m proudest of. And I’ll tell you what it is. In 1992, we passed something called the 21st Century Scholars. Every child growing up in our state today whose family qualifies for the free lunch program in the public schools, if they graduate from high school with passing grades, and they sign our pledge to not experiment with illegal drugs, every one of those children are entitled to a full college scholarship to the public college of their choice. That’s the kind of commitment we need in our country.

I think about the fiscal challenges that face our country, and the deficits these folks have run up, and you know, the fiscal policies of this administration are immoral. What does it say about us when we are on the cusp of handing our principal legacy to our children being our own unpaid bills. What does that say? We need to do better by them than that. And you know, half the money we’re borrowing today doesn’t come from Americans. More than half the money we’re borrowing today, doesn’t come from other Americans, comes from the Chinese central bank, and the Japanese central bank. We better remember the old saying that he who pays the piper calls the tune. I don’t want our children having to go to those folks with hat in hand and or on bended knee, but that’s the road we’re heading down if we don’t change course right now.

Final thing I’ll say about that. You know it reminds me of the elephant act in the circus. They always leave a heck of a mess to clean up after them. That’s the same situation we’ve got in Washington DC with this crowd.

Well, there’s lots of other things I could say about our nation’s security, and mending families, so that we instill in our kids the right and the values. About our security situation, I’ll only say this, you know, we still have our work cut out for us. Too many Americans just aren’t there yet in terms of believing that we will stand up and defend this country, when that is necessary. There was a poll taken about six weeks before the election. When asked the basic question: “Who do you trust to defend America?” “Who do you trust, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party? Even with everything that had gone wrong, all the problems that have gone on in Iraq, for which this administration should be held accountable, by two to one the American people still said the Republican Party.

And that’s not right, because it is not true. But if that’s the perception, then it’s a perception that we must change. And the good news is that we have a long and honorable heritage of defending this country and standing for freedom. Standing against oppression, whether it’s in apartheid South Africa, or Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. Or fascism. Or communism. Standing, for freedom, across the world. The freedom to benefit from the fruits of your labors, the freedom to choose your own elected officials, the freedom to worship your own god as you see fit and associate with those of your own choosing. That’s the heritage of the Democratic Party.

It was John Kennedy who called upon this country to pay any price and bear any burden. It was Harry Truman who drew the line in the sand against the spread of global communism. It was Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson who led this nation, and this world, through two world wars to make the planet safe for democracy. That’s the heritage we need to remind the American people of.

Let me conclude, by thanking you for your hospitality. And sharing, with you, another story that I think back to from time to time. Because it’s always meant a lot to me and I think it says a lot about what this country is really all about, and what are party is really all about, and why we’re all here tonight. My first job, after law school, was clerking for a federal judge in the southern district of Indiana. Four generations of my family have lived in southern Indiana. It’s the heartland of America. That’s our state motto – we’re the crossroads of America – we’re in the heartland, the middle of America. The highlight of our year, every year, is when we would have in the new applicants to be sworn in as US citizens. You owe it to yourself to go at least once. I always look forward to it.

They come in eighty, or ninety, or a hundred people, dressed up in their finest clothes, surrounded by their loved ones and their family members. And you could tell that they were just proud as they could be, about to become, something that too many of the rest of us take for granted: Americans. I’d hand each and every one of them a little American flag. And when the judge would come in, I’d ask them to rise and they would. And the judge would ask them to raise their right hand and repeat the oath of allegiance. But before he did that he took a couple of minutes to tell them what he thought the oath of allegiance was really all about.

He said, “The oath that you are about to take, unlike in a lot of other places, is not an oath to a political party or a racial group or a religion. Or an ethnic group. It’s not really even an oath to a particular geographic area. The oath of allegiance that you are about to take is an oath of allegiance to an idea. It’s an idea that we call ‘America.’ Which for more than two-hundred years has held out the promise of more hope and more opportunity, and more freedom for everyone willing to come to this country and work hard and sacrifice and make it so. Both for them and those who will follow. And that is the genius of America: keeping faith with those who have come before and doing right for those who will follow. And the crucible of that progress has always been the Democratic Party. And now the challenge of keeping that idea alive and vibrant is now the challenge of our generation.

With your help, and the right kind of leadership, and god willing, I’m confident that we’ll get the job done.

And thank you to the Democrats of Colorado for helping to lead the way.

Thank you for posting that Marie. That was a wonderful speech, and I'm quite impressed by what he had to say. What struck me were the personal stories he told that really got me emotionally. It also was cohesive and everything he said was true, and he sounded sincere. Another thing I noticed is that he is extremely proud to be an Indianan, and very humble about it all.

Thanks again.

I thought this speech made him a Democrat worth looking at in 08. I've always liked both of our Senators in Indiana. Bayh is well respected by both Dems and Republicans in our state. It's time the rest of America found out why this Dem has won the hearts of Indiana. Whether he runs or not I think we're pretty lucky. Lugar is cool too.......

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti...466/1008/NEWS02

Bayh likes sound of 'president'



Although the $6.8 million in U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh's campaign fund is more than most of his colleagues have on hand, Bayh continues to cross the country to raise more, according to his most recent campaign disclosure report.

The Indiana Democrat won't say whether he's preparing for a potential presidential bid in 2008. But he apparently doesn't mind joking about the possibility.

Before talking Tuesday at the Mortgage Bankers Association conference in Washington, Bayh was introduced by Michael Petrie, the chairman of the group and president of P/R Mortgage and Investment Corp. of Carmel.

Bayh told Petrie he liked his title.

"A president from Indiana," Bayh said. "It kind of has a little resonance to it."

Tree-mendous

Senate business kept U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., from appearing recently as "Walnut Man" for a charity performance of a play written around lawmakers' alleged alter egos.

But Lugar, who grows walnut trees and other products on his 600-acre Marion County farm, will still get to use his superpowers to make the Capitol a leafier place.

On Arbor Day on Friday, Lugar will plant a black walnut tree from his farm on the Capitol grounds.

Lugar offered the tree to help replace those that had to be removed to build a visitors center.

Not all offers of trees are accepted by the architect of the Capitol, according to Lugar's office. But Lugar's was particularly appropriate, because he's the former chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Forestry and Nutrition Committee.

Camp Get-along

One man in the audience at Wednesday's town hall meeting in Lawrence had a novel suggestion to end the squabbling between the Republican-led City Council and Democratic Mayor Deborah Cantwell:

Send all the city's leaders to a team-building camp.

Everyone from corporate executives to troubled teens has been known to attend the camps, which basically force participants to work together.

Would they be willing?

"Certainly, I would," Cantwell told the crowd.

"I'm selling tickets," Lawrence Township Assessor Paul Ricketts, a Republican, quipped from the back of the room.

Council members, however, said nothing.

Entrapment claim

Ronald "Ronnie" Adkins, the first Hoosier to face criminal charges as a result of an investigation by Gov. Mitch Daniels' newly created inspector general, acknowledges paying a $1,500 bribe to win two state park contracts to run saddle-barn concessions.

But Adkins, 66, Metamora, says he was entrapped.

"I didn't know I was doing anything wrong," he said. "They set me up."

Adkins agrees he had offered Teresa M. Marshall, a 23-year Department of Natural Resources employee, $1,000 earlier this year to ensure he would get a contract to run either the saddle barn at Versailles State Park or the barn at Fort Benjamin Harrison State Park.

The investigation began in March after Marshall told her supervisor she had been offered money by Adkins to help him win the state contracts.

Court records show Marshall reluctantly called Adkins back March 4, at the urging of State Police, to see if the offer was "still on the table." During the taped conversation, she told Adkins that she needed to make some "major car repairs."

"Yeah, I would sure give you $1,000 for Fort Ben," Adkins told her, according to a transcript of the tape.

On April 5, after the money had been paid, Adkins told State Police Detective Alan McElroy, who has been pulled from working homicide cold cases to assist the inspector general, that he had given the bribe in the form of a $1,000 check and an additional $500 in cash to get the Versailles park contract.