On behalf of the Empire State and the family of New York, I thank you for the great privilege of being able to address this convention. Please allow me to skip the stories and the poetry and the temptation to deal in nice but vague rhetoric.
We speak for the minorities who have not yet entered the mainstream. We speak for ethnics who want to add their culture to the magnificent mosaic that is America. We speak, we speak for women who are indignant that this nation refuses to etch into its governmental commandments the simple rule "thou shalt not sin against equality," a rule so simple -- I was going to say, and I perhaps dare not but I will, it's a commandment so simple it can be spelled in three letters -- E.R.A.!
We speak for young people demanding an education and a future. We speak for senior citizens who are terrorized by the idea that their only security - their Social Security - is being threatened. We speak for millions of reasoning people fighting to preserve our environment from greed and from stupidity. And we speak for reasonable people who are fighting to preserve our very existence from a macho intransigence that refuses to make intelligent attempts to discuss the possibility of nuclear holocaust with our enemy. They refuse. They refuse, because they believe we can pile missiles so high that they will pierce the clouds and the sight of them will frighten our enemies into submission.
Now we're proud of this diversity as Democrats. We're grateful for it. We don't have to manufacture it the way the Republicans will next month in Dallas, by propping up mannequin delegates on the convention floor. But while we're proud of this diversity as Democrats, we pay a price for it. The different people that we represent have different points of view. And sometimes they compete and even debate, and even argue. That's what our primaries were all about. But now the primaries are over and it is time when we pick our candidates and our platform here to lock arms and move into this campaign together. If you need any more inspiration to put some small part of your own differences aside to create this consensus, all you need to do is to reflect on what the Republican policy of divide and cajole has done to this land since 1980.
Now the president has asked us to judge him on whether or not he's fulfilled the promise he made four years ago. I believe that as Democrats, we ought to accept that challenge. And, just for a moment let us consider what he has said and what he's done. Inflation is down since 1980. But not because of the supply- side miracle promised to us by the president. Inflation was reduced the old-fashioned way, with a recession, the worst since 1932. We could have brought inflation down that way. How did he do it? Fifty-five thousand bankruptcies. Two years of massive unemployment. Two hundred thousand farmers and ranchers forced off the land. More homeless than at any time since the Great Depression in 1932. More hungry, in this nation of enormous affluence, the United States of America, more hungry. More poor - most of them women - and he paid one more thing, a nearly $200 billion deficit threatening our future.
Now we must make the American people understand this deficit because they don't. The president's deficit is a direct and dramatic repudiation of his promise to balance our budget by 1983. How large is it? The deficit is the largest in the history of this universe; President Carter's last budget had a deficit of less than one-third of this deficit. It is a deficit that, according to the president's own fiscal adviser, may grow as high as $300 billion a year for "as far as the eye can see."
And, ladies and gentlemen, it is a debt so large that as much as one-half of our revenue from the income tax goes just to pay the interest. It is a mortgage on our children's future that can be paid only in pain and that could bring this nation to its knees.
Now don't take my word for it - I'm a Democrat.
Ask the Republican investment bankers on Wall Street what they think the chances of this recovery being permanent are. You see, if they're not too embarrassed to tell you the truth, they'll say that they are appalled and frightened by the president's deficit. Ask them what they think of our economy, now that it has been driven by the distorted value of the dollar back to its colonial condition - now we're exporting agricultural products and importing manufactured ones. Ask those Republican investment bankers what they expect the rate of interest to be a year from now. And ask them, if they dare tell you the truth you will hear from them, what they predict for the inflation rate a year from now, because of the deficit.
Now, how important is this question of the deficit.
Think about it practically: What chance would the Republican candidate have had in 1980 if he had told the American people that he intended to pay for his so-called economic recovery with bankruptcies, unemployment, more homeless, more hungry and the largest government debt known to humankind? Would American voters have signed the loan certificate for him on Election Day? Of course not! That was an election won under false pretenses. It was won with smoke and mirrors and illusions. And that's the kind of recovery we have now as well.
