- CPAC
2013 « Former Gov. Jeb Bush
Ronald Reagan Dinner
2013 Conservative Political Action Conference
National Harbor, MD
March 15, 2013
DEMOCRACY IN ACTION TRANSCRIPT video
Thank you guys, thank you very much. Thank you all, Sam.
Sam, thank you for that kind introduction. Let's close the bar
off so everybody in the back can stop chattering. That's the best
introduction I've gotten in a long while. I wish you'd all heard
it. I want to particularly thank my old friend, not by age but by
longevity of friendship, Al Cardenas, for his selfless dedication to
the American Conservative Union and to the conservative cause. It
is, it's a pleasure to be here tonight honoring one of America's
greatest presidents, Ronald Reagan.
I'd like to begin, I'd like to begin by expressing my deepest
appreciation for the kind thoughts and prayers for my dad. He got
out of the hospital about six weeks ago, and as he so aptly said, "put
away the harps." He's back at home and he's doing well.
That's the good news.
That's the good news. The bad news is that he's no longer
pampered by the nurses at Memorial Hospital in Houston, Texas. He
has a new caregiver. Her name is Barbara Bush and she is really
tough. You see this is proof positive that no matter what your
age and even if you were once the leader of the free world life has a
way of keeping us humble.
Sometimes in our lives we even get to cross the thin line between
humbling and downright humiliating. A couple of weeks ago, Peter
Hamby of CNN tweeted a picture of me from 1970 with what appeared to be
a catcher's mitt on my head. [b&w
photo
on
the
screen] I still have that sport coat by the
way. Hamby felt compelled to comment on my hairstyle and said
that I was wearing a mullet. I responded of course that it wasn't
a mullet, just an unruly head of hair; in 1970 we all had that.
Hamby's response was even better. He said, technically you're
right; there's a party in the front and a party in the back.
I find Hamby's comment strangely relevant to us tonight because if
you think about it the same could be said about the Republican
Party. We used to be the party in the front. After this
last election, sadly, we're the party in the back.
The question is how do we get to be the party in the front again,
and please take —oh good, I'm glad it's gone. That's what I'd
like to talk about tonight.
How do we start once again to elect Republican presidents in the
mold of the great man we honor tonight. But before we answer that
question, I'd like to share some things that I observed recently.
Some of you may know I had the privilege of serving as governor of
Florida for eight years. It was a blast; it was a joy. But
since 2007 I've been involved in education reform around the country
and pursuing my own business opportunities that have taken me around
the globe. I travel a lot, and I've seen first hand the explosive
economic growth in places like China, Singapore and Brazil. In
some of their cities, on any given day you can see dozens of cranes
building modern skyscrapers and the streets bustle with people alive
with the energy of commerce and innovation.
When I return home, the mood is different, different and
worse. Americans have the sense that our economy is fragile, its
rewards are unfairly tilted towards the few and that the greatest
prosperity in this century will be enjoyed by other people in other
lands, and not by our own children.
But tonight I'm here to tell you that this conclusion is 100-percent
wrong. We potentially find ourselves at the threshold of our
nation's greatest century. We can, as President Reagan did,
restore the great confident roar of American progress and growth and
optimism. Tonight as surely as you sit here the fundamentals are
aligning in a way that could allow us to race past our global
competitors and usher in a true American renaissance for the next
hundred years. It's there for the taking if we have the courage
to grab it and push beyond the problems that divide us today.
Consider the facts. Take energy. With our new drilling
technologies America will soon have an energy surplus. This means
trillions of dollars in new wealth for Americans, trillions of
dollars. And a foreign policy, and a foreign policy not overly
influenced by oil.
How about food? America will be the Saudi Arabia of grain in a
century when the world is clamoring for more food. Just as crude
oil determined the wealth and power of nations in the latter part of
the last century, food will do so in this century.
Technology. Wireless communication, artificial intelligence
and rapid advances in life sciences are transforming at a breathtaking
pace every facet of American business and daily life.
Manufacturing jobs that were shipped to China a decade ago are now
returning to America, but this time the work is being performed by our
robots. But the good news is that there are robots built in
America by American workers and along with low energy costs create the
potential for a new wave of American manufacturing in this
country. Entire classes of diseases are on the verge of being
eradicated by manipulating individual molecules on the surfaces of
living cells. Driverless vehicles will flawlessly move people and
products across our highways, never getting lost, never having
accidents. Already a prototype driverless car has traveled more
than 300,000 miles in the crowded maze of California streets without a
single accident. 3-D printing machines are being developed and
downscaled for home use that will allow you to instantly create
thousands of objects at the touch of a button. Already cars are
being designed and built that are printed from the computer.
Or how about our youthful potential. As a nation if we get
immigration right—and I hope and pray that that's the case this year—
we're going to stay young. By 2050, China will have more old
people than America has people. America remains younger than all
industrialized nations.
These are but a few of our advantages, and collectively they point
toward a century of prosperity and world leadership that is
unparalleled in world history.
But, there is a very dark cloud on the horizon. All of these
advantages are at risk if the federal government continues on its arc
of irresponsibility. Our federal spending addiction and the
lackluster system of public education are the two greatest impediments
to achieving our potential in this century.
Conservatives have the solutions to these problems, and liberals
have the proposals that will only make them worse.
I know. As governor of Florida I balanced our budget for eight
years in a row while cutting taxes every year. And I've dedicated
much of my adult life trying to revolutionize our schools so they serve
children and parents and not an indifferent bureaucracy. But you
must know this. All of our successes at the state level, and all
of the work being done in the private sector that's incredible can be
undone if we continue to lose presidential elections.
We'll forfeit our ability to chart a better future for our
republic. This would be tragic in every sense of the word.
So when I think about our options going forward, I think about Sam
Palmisano, who was kind enough to introduce me tonight.
As you know, Sam is the former CEO of IBM and probably the best CEO in
America in the last decade. Sam's also just a fantastic human
being. He's easy to talk to, but he's also a visionary and a true
leader. Sam told me an amazing story. He was deeply
involved in assembling the team that created Watson, a super-computer
that can understand natural language with all the ambiguities
associated with human speech.
Watson can breeze through more than 200 million pages of text to
find an answer in less than three seconds. So what do you do when
you have this kind of amazing capability at your fingertips.
Naturally, you appear on a TV game show. Watson, Watson competed
on the game show Jeopardy and
easily defeated the all time human champion Ken Jennings. Do you
know what Watson's doing today? Watson is now being used in
research hospitals like Sloan-Kettering to diagnose and suggest
treatment options for desperately ill cancer patients. Watson is
able to look at all of the available information, listen closely and
make critical medical recommendations without the personal biases that
afflict mere mortals. The thing that most astounds me is that
Watson can learn from his past mistakes, and every decision that it
makes helps the next decision to be a little more accurate. The
first round of Jeopardy for
example ended with Watson tied for first place with $5000 in
winnings. By the time the second match ended, Watson had won over
$77,000 and Ken Jennings had only won 24 grand. A little scary
right? Well I wonder what Watson would say if it brought all that
computing power to bring to bear on the political future of the
Republican Party.
First, Watson would probably note that Republicans lost the popular
vote in five of the last six presidential elections. In those six
elections, Watson would be quick to point out that Democrat candidates
received 26,064,651 more votes than our Republican candidates.
That's a staggering number. How can it be?
If Watson were to read the blogs, the tweets, the Facebook posts
that mention the Republican Party, it would find that all too often
we're associated with being anti-everything. Way too many people
believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science,
anti-gay, anti-worker, and the list goes on and on and on. Many
voters are simply unwilling to choose our candidates, even though they
share our core beliefs, because those voters feel unloved, unwanted and
unwelcome in our party. So tonight my thought is this. If
Watson can learn from its past mistakes, so can we. This means
that we must move beyond the divisive and extraneous issues that
currently define the public debate.
Never again, never again can the Republican Party simply write-off
entire segments of our society because we assume our principles have
limited appeal. They have broad appeal. They have broad
appeal and we need to be larger than that. For exactly the same
reason that millions of immigrants were drawn to our shores from every
nation we need to draw into our party people from every corner of
society because conservative principles and not liberal dogma best
reflect the ideals that made this nation great.
We should be united in the principle that everyone should be given
the opportunity to rise to the top, to raise a family and to be
free. Our core principles—greater individual responsibility, more
personal freedom, smaller and more effective government—are the
only principles that can offer our children the full measure of their
potential in the greatest of American centuries.
I'm here to tell you there is no "us" or "them." The face of
the Republican Party needs to be the face of every American, and we
need to be the party of inclusion and acceptance. It's our
heritage and our future and we need to couch our efforts in those
terms. As Republicans we need to get reacquainted with the notion
that relationships that really matter are not made through Twitter or
social media, real relationships take time to grow and they begin with
a genuine interest in the stories, the hopes, the dreams and the
challenges harbored within each of us.
When I ran for governor in 1998, a woman named Berthy Aponte, the
mother of a developmentally disabled child from Fort
Lauderdale, and at a time, at the time a complete stranger to me, stood
up in a town hall meeting I had and challenged me to help children like
hers. I'm sure I said something pleasant in response, but it
wasn't good enough for Berthy. She wouldn't let me up for
air. Over the next months that followed, I traveled South Florida
with Berthy and visited group homes and talked to parents who feared
nothing more than having their disabled child outlive them and become a
ward of an uncaring state. Imagine what it would be like to be a
mom or a dad of a child and your biggest worry was that you would die
before they did and no one would take care of them. When I became
governor, we had a renewed focus on helping the developmentally
disabled. And in elevating their lives I actually found out that
we elevated the lives of all Floridians. All this flowed from my
personal connection with Berthy.
We used to be the party that understood personal connections, and
that they mattered. We need to be that party again. And
when we speak to people and make the case for conservative principles,
you should know that the happy exception does not always prove the
rule. It is not a validation of our conservative principles if we
can only point to the increasingly rare individual who overcomes
adversity and succeeds in America.
Here's reality. If you're fortunate to count yourself among
the privileged, much of the rest of the nation is drowning. In
our country today if you're born poor, if your parents didn't go to
college, if you don't know your father, if English isn't spoken at your
home, then the odds are stacked against you. You're more likely
to stay poor today than at any time since World War II.
Unfortunately the great tragedy of the last decade is that liberals
have channeled the anger and frustration that comes from this
oppressive dynamic and used it as an opportunity to attack the very
idea of success itself. In their view, anyone who has climbed to
the top one-percent or top ten-percent or top twenty-percent for that
matter has committed some form of gross social breach and they
deserve our scorn. This is enormously short-sighted because in a
fair capitalist system financial success should be the by-product of
innovation and achievement. And without innovation and
achievement we will no longer move forward as a nation.
And so our central mission as conservatives is to reignite social
and economic mobility in this country. It's called the right to
rise. There are many facets to our mission, but let me briefly
mention four.
First, we need to re-establish in America the idea that success is a
good thing rather than being viewed with distaste and suspicion.
Success desperately needs to be cool again. We need to offer the
citizens of our nation role models who demonstrate that success isn't
about taking, it's about creating something where nothing before
existed. It's about the way wealth ripples from a bold idea to
spread to every part of our nation.
Second, we need to equip every child with the best tools to
rise. Every child in America deserves the best education on the
planet. Why not? After all, after all, we're already paying
for it. We spend more per student than any country in the world
and yet our kids frequently rank in the bottom quartile on math and
science scores. I could stand here all night and tell you about
the details of the system that could get us there—don't worry I
remember I'm only supposed to speak for 25 minutes—but we need to have
the leaders and the authority to put that system in place.
Somewhere in America a child is being born who will design and build
the next and better version of Watson. His or her creation may
save your life or the lives of your children and grandchildren.
It may save the lives of millions. The tragedy is that for every
child who reaches their full abilities, who builds that Watson, there
are hundreds who could have done the same thing but are stuck in
failing and indifferent schools. We are squandering America's
greatest resource and I believe only reform-minded conservatives have
the resolve to confront and end the single greatest waste of human
potential in my mind in the history of the world. We need a
transformation of education based on standards benchmarked to the best
in the world, a system of no excuses accountability that refuses to
accept failure and rewards improvement and excellence; a culture based
on empowering parents with an abundance of choices for their children's
education. and a deep understanding of the transformative power of
digital learning.
Third, we need to have a government that allows small people to rise
and large businesses to fall. Government should help create a
level playing field. Maximize the opportunities for the players
and then step back. This doesn't mean government plays no role in
regulating business, but it does mean that government doesn't pick the
winners and losers or create such huge costs that only the large can
comply.
And finally, and finally we need to realize that each of us in the
conservative movement has a far greater role to play as a private
citizen than as part of a government or as its critic. There is a
political realm and a social realm and we shouldn't confuse the
two. We shouldn't rely on government bureaucracies to instill
virtue in people. Government should fill potholes; it's our
individual duty to fill the holes in the human heart. As
conservatives we need to recognize the limits of government and the
much more powerful influences of parents, churches, charities and role
models. We can do so much more by setting an example and by
living our principles than by merely taking. We need to be out in
our communities helping our neighbors, mentoring our children and
demonstrating that generosity, compassion and human potential are
immensely more powerful than a thousand government programs.
So I see our path forward as conservatives and I believe the future
is extraordinarily bright.
I'll end where I started. As to the rumors of the demise of
the conservative movement, as my dad said, put away the harps. We
have within our grasp the means by which our country will reclaim its
momentum, leave its imprint on this remarkable century and secure a
better future for all. God bless you all. Thank you for
coming.
# # #