Iowa Democratic Steak Fry - Sept. 21, 2019

Thank You Iowa! So you know what, I can handle the snow, I can handle the rain and I can handle Donald Trump. So when they said what candidate wants to talk in the rain I said me. I am so happy to be here, happy to be here with your great AG secretary, former governor Tom Vilsack. And I always think of one thing, when I think of this steak fry. The biggest, biggest compliment of all and that Tom Harkin was Paul Wellstone’s best friend in the United States Senate.

So thank you Iowa for electing Cindy Axne and thank you for giving us Abby and thank you for Dave and we're really excited to call Rita a congresswoman next year. And are you ready to beat Steve King and let's get JD in the bag? So to do all that and to win that US Senate race, we don't just need to win, we don't just need to get by, we need to win big. And to win big that means we have to be focused on one thing and I know today we're focused on the primary and steak. Maybe not in that order. But we got one more thing and that is the general election and I can tell you what we need to do in Iowa and that we need to win that US Senate seat. We need to flip the legislature. We need to win those congressional seats and we need to send Mitch McConnell packing. To do that Iowa, you cannot just do it by winning the presidency, you have to bring in our fired up base and you have to bring along independents and moderate Republicans and win big and that is what I'm going to do as your president.

So, what do we have right now, we know how high the stakes are, the stakes are so high because we have a president that is running this country like a game show. We have a guy that would rather lie than lead. We have a president that doesn't see the difference between an America as good as its promise and an America he can sell for a promise. As I said the other day, what's the difference between Greenland and president Trump? Greenland is not for sale. Think about what he's done, Iowa. He has shared intelligence, Israeli intelligence, with Russia. He has believed Russia over his own intelligence officers. He has stood in front of that sacred wall of those we lost in the line of duty at the CIA and made a political speech. He said that he fell in love with Kim Jong Un. Who does that? That is someone that cannot differentiate between partisanship and our country. I can tell you this Iowa, I am someone that believes in America. I believe in the goodness of America and that's why I don't just want to be President for half of America, I want to be President for all of America. That is how we win. I just came back from a blue wall tour. What is this about? This is about those states that we did not win in 2016. It's about Pennsylvania. I went to Philadelphia and I went to Pittsburgh and I talked to Union members there. I talked to people that had voted for Donald Trump that feel that he sold them a bill of goods. They're not getting those promises met. And then I went to Michigan and I talked to those port workers. I talked to people in Milwaukee, I went to Wisconsin, I met with our farmers and then I went to Iowa. And all that way from Pennsylvania to Iowa, in 2020, my friends we are going to build a blue wall and we are going to make we are going to make Donald Trump pay for it. This is it, this is how we do that. Because we're here to talk about the primary today but if we really want to win that general election this is what we do. We go to those states, we talk to those voters, we meet them where we are. We say to them if you are tired of the noise and the nonsense, which is what I say every day, if you are tired of these extremes in our politics then you have a home with me. Because how we win this--how we win this, Iowa is with an optimistic economic agenda for this country. That is how we won the governorship of yes and beat Kris Kobach in Kansas. We won, that that is how we have four words: former governor Scott Walker. Right, that is why we as a party are leaders and I did this in Detroit; why we stand by the union workers at the United auto strike in Detroit on that picket line. That is what we are about.

What is this optimistic and economic agenda? It is a simple idea that our work does not end on Election Day, but it begins on Inauguration Day. It is telling the people of this country that no, after Charlottesville there were not two sides when the other side is the Ku Klux Klan. There is only one side and that is the American side. One side, that's what it is. It is about standing by our farmers in this state and telling them, “you know what I as your president will not treat you like a poker chip in a bankrupt casino,” 'cuz guess what I don't even own a casino. We are going to treat them with fair, we're gonna stop those oil waivers to those big oil companies and as someone who is on the Agriculture Committee, who has worked so hard for rural America, I understand that is not just one size that fits all. That hospitals are not the same in big metro areas and small towns. That our education in our schools is not the same in big metro areas and small towns and that if we want to bridge the rural/urban divide, then at least we better be able to send our email to our grandma because we don't even have high speed broadband in every county in Iowa. I will deliver that to every county in the country by 2022. That is bridging it and when it comes to climate change, the big crisis of our time, this president has moved us backward. Just this week he stopped California and its efforts to do something about it. Well I can tell you on day one I will sign us back into the International Climate Change Agreement. On day two I will bring back the clean power standards. On day three I will bring back those gas mileage standards. On day four, five and six I will introduce sweeping legislation to take on greenhouse gases and to do something about climate change and on day seven I will rest. I won't really rest, I won’t really do that. Gun safety, last night I was in Cedar Rapids at an LGBTQ event and a kid named Brandon came up to me. He was a survivor of Pulse Nightclub and he asked what we would do about gun safety and I told him what I would say to the President on the debate stage. I would say this, Mr. President, I sat across from you after Parkland and I listened to you and I looked at you and I wrote down with hash marks on a piece of paper. Nine times when he said that he wanted universal background checks, nine times. Just like he said after Midland Odessa and after El Paso and after Dayton, nine times. But what happened there? Thirty seconds in Dayton Ohio, nine people gunned down. The cops got there in a minute, it still wasn't enough. Why did it all happen? Because the day after he met with me in the White House and we tried to push for sensible gun safety legislation, he met with the NRA and he folded. As your president I will not fold. We will get this done.

And we cannot achieve any of this my friends if we do not have voting rights, if we do not have a democracy that works. That's why we must reauthorize the Voting Rights Act. Stop the voter suppression, pass my bill to register every kid in this country when they turn 18 and pass--and pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. That's how we get all this stuff done. That's how we do it and we must not just get all these great policies passed. That's what the debates have been about right? We must also change the tone in our politics. We must reach out to our friends and say you know what, imagine if every morning you didn't have to wake up to one of those mean tweets. I don't know what the media would do, they'd have to like go to sleep again. What would we do, what would our life be like? And you say to your friends and neighbors and people you know that may have voted to Donald Trump, and we know there’s plenty of them here in Iowa, you say to them look what he has done. He hasn't kept his promises, he gloats about an economy he didn't create. That our workers and our businesses were so resilient out of the downturn, they got us to where we are and he sits there and gloat and then when anything goes wrong of his own making from his trade wars and from his ethanol waivers and from how he's handled the farm economy, what does he do? He whines. So you tell your friends who work hard every day, that may have made an error, may have voted for Donald Trump, you tell them we don't want a whiner in the White House. We do not need that anymore. We need someone who is strong, is the backbone of this country. We need someone who's willing to take on the challenges of this country and then remember my friends the march we are on. We are not alone in this march. It started the day after Inauguration Day when millions of people, including in this state of Iowa, peacefully marched all over this country. When the next day 6,000 women signed up to run for office, that happened. When on day nine you were not alone, people spontaneously showed up when that mean-spirited refugee order came out and they went to airports. They went to non-international airports, they stood up and they protested. You go to day 100, my favorite march, the March for science, my favorite sign, “What do we want? Science. When do we want it? After peer-review.” You go to the summer where the fighting 48 Democrats in the Senate were joined by three brave Republicans when they tried to do that mean-spirited thing and overturn the Affordable Care Act and overturn people's simple right to stay on their insurance when they have pre-existing conditions. What happened? We won, we won because of all of you. That is a march you’re on and in the fall in those glimmers of hope in New Jersey and Virginia and those legislative races, when all of a sudden people were winning in places we never thought they could win. My favorite, a guy in New Jersey that said the day of the Women's March, “I hope they'll be home in time to make dinner.” That guy lost, he was beaten by an African American woman, that happened. And then in that victory of decency and dignity Doug Jones wins in the state of Alabama, we won in Alabama. And those students in Florida, that is the March we are on. Let's win Iowa 2020!