Thank you all. Thank you, thank you. Hey, it’s great to be with you, what a tremendous turnout here in the state of Utah. Are y’all fired up? (Audience cheers.) Are you fired up? (Cheers). Ready to go? (Yeah!) Fired up? (Yeah!) Ready to go? (Cheers) I say Barack, you say Obama. Barack! (Obama!) Barack! (Obama!) Barack! (Obama!)

Folks, you know what, we can all have differences of opinion but there’s only one way to go for the USA, and that is forward. And we’re going to do that by reelecting Barack Obama in 2012 (Applause.)

I want to say thank you for your kindness. I’m going to share a few thoughts here tonight.

I am very, very appreciative of what it means to serve for six years as a party chair. That has to be one of the most important, and also at the same time one of the most thankless jobs in any party, and so Wayne—who for six years that Katie has allowed him to do this job—we salute you and thank you. (Applause.)

I also want to thank Vice Chair Karen Hale and her husband Jon. Senator Romero—is he here? I’ll say it again since a lot of people want to cheer and clap. Senator Romero! (Cheers) Also Representative Litvack. (Applause) And you all have a great mayor in Mayor Becker. And he’s accomplished big things.

This Utah Democratic Party, Mr. Chair, is my kind of party, because you have a lot of mayors. And I love mayors. Ralph Becker, Peter Corroon, and former Mayor Rocky Anderson is a dear friend of mine in the US conference of Mayors. There’s something great about the job of mayor. Because there’s no Democratic or Republican way of filling a pothole or picking up the trash. You don’t have to explain to people why you’re doing what you’re doing, and there’s no way to hide whether or not you’re doing it. And I think that’s the sort of leadership our country needs right now. Make no mistake about it: our country is at a critically important junction.

We are in a fight for our economic future. You know, just down the road at the National Governors Association, we had three governors visit us from China—from provinces of China. And they are making investments in their country. We have profound differences, but they are making the investments required for a modern economy to create jobs. And moving forward, that’s what our President needs us to do. When he talks about the imperative of educating, innovating, rebuilding—it’s really all about that most important building block that there is for expanding and growing our middle class, for making our country better than when our parents gave it to us. And that is a job.

The most important place in our country is the family’s home. The most important decisions that are made are the decisions made around that kitchen table. How are we going to raise our kids? How are we going to pay the bills? How are we going to send them to college? And add to that all of the devastation that’s happened to us economically because of the wrong-headed policies that drove this great and strong Republic into the worst economic downturn that we’ve seen in a long, long time. You know, there are important but difficult things that we can only do together. And the most important thing we need to do together right now is to rally around our President and to move our country forward. To create jobs and to create opportunity and to have the guts and the courage and the willingness to bet on the better America that requires action right now.

Now, Wayne Holland mentioned my kids, and I have my son William, who is a very old soul. He is now 13, but he came into this Earth with about 80 years of experience under his belt, I truly believe. In early cultures they call it early enlightenment. And I’m fond of this story when we were watching the History Channel—there aren’t many 8-year-olds who watch the History Channel—and there was a story about Rosa Parks and that history. And he’s watching this, and he’s saying “you’ve got to be kidding me.” He said, “Some people in the front of the bus, some people in the back of the bus.” He said, “Dad, back then,” which he implied to mean sometime in the time of the dinosaurs, the American Revolution, he said “back then, they said some people had to ride in the front of the bus and some people in the back of the bus?” And I said, “Yeah, that was the law.” And he said, “They said that and you guys actually listened?” And I said, “Well, yes we did,” and he said, “Well didn’t they know they were all going to the same place? Didn’t they know they were all going to the same place?”

I have to tell you I haven’t spent a lot of time in your state. You have a very beautiful state. It’s very far away from Maryland. But for all of our diversity, there’s a lot more to the United States that unites us than divides us, and we are all going to the same place. And in fact, there are still good people in the party of Lincoln that want America to be stronger, and want America to be better.

Tonight I wanted to talk to you about jobs, about that imperative that we have in our generation of extending opportunity. Also I’d like to talk to you about the differences, because by golly, this is a Democratic dinner, and we have to underscore our differences. And there are very profound differences about how we see some Democratic governors—most Democratic governors governing—and the way that some Republic governors are governing. And it’s critically important that we understand the differences here, especially when we look at what’s happening around us.

We don’t need to recap the pain of these past several years in this recession. But give this a moment of perspective. Thirty years ago when I graduated high school, our country ranked #1 in high school graduation rates among our global competitors. Today, we’ve slipped to 11th.

Thirty years ago, our country, America, ranked #1 in college completion. My dad was one of those guys that went to college only because of the GI bill. A generous but insightful country that understood that the more you learn the better you earn and the better the contributions you could make to your country. Today, we’ve slipped from #1 in college completion to #12.

As a nation, even with all of the signs of climate change and the stresses that our planet’s population is placing on natural resources, we actually spend more in our country every year on potato chips than we do on research into clean and renewable energy.

We’re better than that. And it’s not what the other countries are doing to us; it’s what we’re not doing for ourselves. It’s what we’re not doing for ourselves.

Both Marylanders and people who are proud of this place called Utah, we, regardless of when our families came to this country, have inherited a legacy of a pioneering, and revolutionary people. Not a cowardly people, not a retractive or retreating people. These are not people who believed the future was a gift; these were people that understood the future’s an achievement.

So to create jobs, we know that the modern economy requires modern investments. And that’s not a Democratic idea, that’s not a Republican idea, that’s an economic fact.

Now does that mean that we just spend our way into recovery without balancing our budgets? Heck no. The 20 men and women that serve as Democratic governors throughout our country have to balance their budgets every day as well. They do it in a different way than some of our Republican opponents. We don’t vilify humans. We don’t bash humans. We don’t like the mess that George Bush left us in any more than anyone else, but we bring people together. We acknowledge the reality of the present, and we make the decisions we must in order to make a better future, in order to make our government work.

Well, does that mean you just spend your way to a better economy? No, far from it. I didn’t run promising this—but we cut $6.8 billion from our state budget in the State of Maryland. But we’ve also protected our priorities—we’ve gone four years in a row without a penny’s increase in college tuition. We funded education at all-time high levels, and have been three years in a row the best public schools in America—not by chance, but by choice and investment in our future. (Applause)

And I can hear the birds in the rafters now—“I bet you also raised taxes”—yup, you know what, we did, we asked people to pay another penny for a better future for our kids. (Applause)

What does that do to your business climate, what does that do to your competitiveness as a state? Well, we think the most important thing that we have to offer to businesses in the new economy is smarter, and better educated people. (Applause)

And maybe that’s why the US Chamber of Commerce named Maryland one the top two states for innovation and entrepreneurship. Maybe that’s why the Kauffman Foundation put us in the top three for taking advantage of the new economy. Maybe that’s why the Milken Institute ranked us number two in science and technology. The future is not a gift, the future is an achievement.

But let me talk to you a little bit, because I know the people of Utah are very proud of your dinosaur history. Right? That’s what they told me—very proud of it. So let’s have a little fun here—turn to your neighbor and say let’s have some fun here. I’d like to talk to you, ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to talk to you about dinosaurs and tea praters.

They can be a very volatile Jurassic Park mix.

If you look up the definition of “tea party” in the dictionary, you will read this among several definitions: “A group of children who play with imaginary friends.” You know, there are some newly-elected Republican governors—and I want to underscore not all—but there are some characters who actually do play with imaginary friends.

There is for example a very colorful character from the state of New Jersey who has declared that high-speed rail is candy. That Pell Grants to send people to college are candy—that’s not the sort of real things that government should be doing.

And for all their bombast and bluster, there is this newly elected group, tea party, FDR-hating, Republican governors who’d have us believe a whole lot of things that aren’t true.

In their make-believe world, that we could eat cake to lose weight. They would have us believe that massive, permanent tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans don’t actually cost the public a dime—they’re free, no expense.

They’d have us believe that massive, public sector layoffs somehow are good for the economy—that somehow that makes us stronger.

Some of these Tea Party Republican governors would have us believe that bridges are kind of like trees—if you leave them alone they’ll somehow grow taller and stronger with age.

But you and I both know that their tea party is a lot more Alice and Wonderland than it is Sam Adams. It’s a lot more Mad Hatter than it is James Madison. (Applause)

And when this small new stem of Republican governors say they want to take America back, well, we know they really mean they want to take America backwards. Like back to the 1920s. In their backwards, make-believe world—where colorful characters like Chris Christie of New Jersey reside—there is no need to pay bills, no need to protect bond ratings, no need to invest in the future. Because in their make believe world, down is up, up is down, candy is a vegetable, and vegetables are candy.

So rather than making the tough choices necessary to create jobs and bring people together, to do what President Obama has called on all of us to do, which is to educate, innovate, and rebuild, instead they use this crisis to go after unions, to dismantle Democratic progress, to settle old political scores.

Is it any wonder that in places like Ohio, places like Wisconsin, that people are having “buyer’s remorse?” They thought they were voting for change, they were voting for more job creation, they didn’t know they were voting to send us back into the ideological ditch of the late ’20s.

You know, many years ago, Adlai Stevenson came here to Utah, and he addressed a group of great Democrats like this one. And I wanted to share this with you. He said, “… the same Republicans (the dinosaur-wing of that party) who object to service from our Government – who call everything “creeping socialism” … these same men begin to hint that we are ‘subversive,’ .... when we boast of the great strides toward social justice and security we have already made and the still greater strides to come,… we must never let them confuse us about the difference between what government should do if possible and what it must do if America is to survive."

And my friends, right now we are at one of those junctures, where we have to figure out as a people how we can get those things done that are necessary for our very survival.

We are watching in our own time, I submit to you, have you been watching the television? About the default, and the total lack of intellectual honesty, any sort of flexibility or reasonableness. We are watching the latest incarnation, I believe, of the dinosaur wing of the Republican Party.

A dinosaur wing that refuses to allow more moderate members of the party of Lincoln to engage in the honorable compromises necessary to get our country through these tough times and into better times. It is this sort of intransigence, this sort of extremism, that economic observers across the political spectrum all agree that is wrong for the country, is not in our best economic interest.

What ever happened to that proud Party of Lincoln?

Get this. There is a new Jurassic Park predator that has emerged on the modern political landscape. Let’s call him Partisan-a-saurus. Partisan-a-saurus.

Now imagine, if you would, the body of Tyrannosaurus Rex, and the head of Eric Cantor.

And Partisan-a-saurus has one goal and one goal only: and that is to keep President Obama from getting reelected by killing jobs and the recovery.

Now they’ve got two ways to do this. They can use force, massive cuts to retire a Bush deficit, which they didn’t give a whimper of objection to in the last eight years,… or their other device is to insist that our country needlessly be driven in to defaulting on her debt for the first time in the proud history of this Republic.

Now get this, Partisan-a-saurus never objected when for eight years George Bush was spending without funding the things that he chose to do—like tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans. Partisan-a-saurus never objected to year after year of an increase in the federal deficit when George Bush was president. Partisan-a-saurus in fact probably even voted a few times to raise the debt limit when there was a Republican president, and Partisan-a-saurus never objected at all when a series of wars were charged to our children’s credit cards instead of being financed as they were fought. (Applause)

Folks, I have a lot of friends that have a great deal of respect for many people in the Republican Party. But I don’t have a lot of respect, in fact, I have no respect for the sort of cynical, political game that is being played with America’s standing in this world and our credit rating. It is a cynical, cynical game. (Applause) It is a cynical game of politics and our country’s fragile jobs recovery is the ball that they are kicking around.

Commenting on these extremist efforts to drive the United States into the deepest default, get this, the US Chamber of Commerce—now hardly a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party—recently wrote that pushing the United States towards default, by not raising the debt limit is “a risk that our country must not take.”

The Economist magazine, hardly a mouthpiece for the Democratic Governors Association, called their extremism, and I quote again, “economically illiterate, and disgracefully cynical.”

And you know—given the conservative efforts of that columnist magazine—that might be an awfully generous description on their part.

Friends, you and I know that there is not a modern nation on the planet that can retire its debt with ten percent unemployment. We need to get our people back to work, we need to America back to work, because America only wins when America goes to work with decent jobs. (Applause)

So, the choice is ours. The same choice that founded this country, the same choice that drew people to Utah, the choice we have to make. Quite frankly, a lot of the hardships we have to overcome are nothing compared to what they had to overcome. But we cannot allow Partisan-a-saurus to take over the Republican Party or the future of our country.

There are some things that we have to come together to do. And getting out of these very difficult times is one of them. Our President is right. We need to do a better job of innovating, educating, and rebuilding a new economy so that America can survive and America can thrive.

There’s something else I want to ask of all of you and, frankly, we’ve had some fun tonight, we’ve drawn some distinctions. But in all seriousness, I think there is a different type of politics that we need to rise to as a party. And that is the politics that allows for the truth that there are still good and responsible people in the Republican Party. And we need to allow for space for that goodness to breathe.

If we assume that members of their party don’t have at least partially good intentions for the better America that all of us want for our children, then we become victims to the same political quackery that is threatening to bring their party down. So as we underscored our differences tonight, let’s never lose sight of the fact, that there is so much more that connects us. That we are all, in fact, going to the same place.

Too many of our countrymen have come to confuse what it means to be an American citizen with what it means to be a member of Sam’s Club. And there’s a big, big difference. There is a big, big difference. (Applause) 

So in these difficult and challenging times, you and I have to acknowledge that there is no progress without struggling. That there is goodness in every citizen in this country. And we need to find out a way to stand out together. Face the challenges of our own day, and not only face them, but actually face them and win. And not just for ourselves, but really for our kids. And for the future that depends on us, and the future that is watching. Thank youall very, very much. (Applause)