Excerpts from a speech
By Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jean Hay Bright
to Maine College Democrats Convention
Bates College, Lewiston
Sept. 30, 2006
...The reason I am in this race, the reason I am running to be one of 100 United States Senators, is that I want my country back.
The country I grew up in, the country in which our Constitution was the gold standard for the world, a nation where human rights were paramount, where the rule of law protected each and every one of us, does not exist anymore.
I'm talking about the Superman model of Truth, Justice, and the American way.
The American Way of my childhood has been disappearing for some time. Five steel mills chugged away in Youngstown Ohio when I was growing up. None of those mills exist today. Maine's textile mills, our shoe factories, are gone and our paper industry is disappearing. It is no longer possible to get a good job out of high school with a local manufacturer, work hard, buy a home, send your kids to quality public schools, and retire in comfort with the knowledge of a life lived decently and well.
What happened? Lots of things, including NAFTA, CAFTA, and laws that made it beneficial for corporations to outsource good jobs.
Truth started to disappear when George Bush was appointed president in 2000 by the U.S. Supreme Court. It disappeared entirely with the start of the illegal, immoral, and horribly unjust war in Iraq that has killed thousands of our good military men and women, tens of thousands Iraqis, and made us hated around the world.
And Justice disappeared Thursday, September 28, 2006, when the United States Congress voted to debase the Constitution, to deny habeas corpus rights to "enemy combatants," people designated as such on the President's word alone; when the U.S. Congress voted to allow the President to set the rules for what kinds of torture is acceptable for agents of the United States Government to inflict on our prisoners; when the U.S. Congress voted to allow hearsay evidence at military tribunals, to deny defendants the right to see what evidence is being used against them, and to deny defendants the right to face their accusers.
And Justice disappeared when the United States Congress voted to pardon George Bush for his warrant-less wiretapping of American citizens, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had already declared such wiretapping not only illegal, a violation of a specific law, but outright unconstitutional.
Olympia Snowe did not vote last Thursday, because she was here in Maine attending her aunt's funeral. She could have taken a pass. Instead, she issued a statement that, had she been in Washington, she would have voted in favor of all those bills.
This is not the America I grew up in. But it is the world the Republican-controlled Congress wants us to live in. And it clearly is the world Olympia Snowe wants us to live in.
When I started running for U.S. Senate a year and a half ago, I thought the American Way could be salvaged, that we just had to invoke the values embodied in our Constitution, that we had to remember and apply the standards of equality and justice and fairness and hard work on which our country was founded. But as the weeks and months have passed, I have noticed a change in people, in how they see what is going on, in their concerns.
People today are afraid, but they are not afraid of terrorists as much as they are afraid of their own government. I talk about my top three campaign goals in large groups - Iraq, national health care, renewable energy - but one on one, people talk to me about their fears for this country, about being afraid to speak out for fear of governmental retribution, of fear over losses of basic freedoms. They tell me they are making plans to move to Canada, or to Europe.
And then, last Thursday, their fears were confirmed. Justice died in America, and the American dream died along with it.
As of Thursday, Sept. 28, 2006, the Congress of the United States of America turned our great nation into a totalitarian state.
The 2006 election is about five weeks away. I hope in the deepest reaches of my soul that the American people will rise up on Nov. 7 and take back our country. I pray that they, we, will throw out of office the people who have gotten us to this awful place in American history, including our own Senator from Maine, Olympia J. Snowe.
Olympia Snowe's world view is the one coming out of Washington. My world view is one coming out of a working class family, homesteading in Maine, newspaper reporting, organic farming, and feeling a deep love for this great nation and the wonders of our remarkable Constitution.
How Maine votes in this election will make a difference in what happens next in this country. Use your vote well, and vote for the America you want to live in.
Jean Hay Bright
Writer, Organic Farmer, Democratic US Senate Candidate