Thank you very much. My goodness. Thank you. My goodness. Thank you. Thank You. Thank You. Thank you. Glen, thank you for a very nice introduction.

I want to thank Gina Cooper, who has put in so much time organizing all of this and Nolan Treadway. I -- and I want to thank all the NetRoots Nation volunteers. This is great. I think this is the biggest one we've ever had. This is really great. Thank you very, very much.

For those of you who were involved in the campaign four years ago, you probably remember that I would end a lot of speeches talking about sending George W. Bush back to Crawford, Texas. Well, today I went to Crawford, Texas, for the first time in my life. It is actually an incredibly pleasant place. We had about 100 people show up, which is pretty good, although a lot of them were media from Waco and places like that, but there's only 700 people in Crawford, Texas. And guess what? The people in Crawford, Texas want change also, and we're going to do that.

So -- so we started the message, "Register for change in Crawford, Texas." And Crawford, Texas is going to have some changes coming itself. It is now going to become a retirement community for George W. Bush, a retirement community for Dick Cheney, because he doesn't want to go back to Wyoming. John McCain can't go back to Arizona, so there's the retirement community in Crawford, Texas. And how about all those other places like all those other folks like Alberto Gonzalez, and all those famous people that are all going to go back to Crawford, Texas. 1200 acres is a lot of acres. Nobody is going to notice. It's a nice town and it's going to stay a nice town.

Let me -- let me just make it clear what this is about. We went to Crawford, Texas, because there are a lot of Crawford, Texas's all over America where people are paying over $4.00 a gallon for gas and they can't afford to commute to work anymore; where people have sent their sons and daughters to die in Iraq for a war that George Bush sent us to without telling us the truth; and John McCain also bears responsibility for that war because he voted for that war, too. And we went to Crawford, Texas, to show that we do not want a third term for George W. Bush, because that's what John McCain represents. The difference between Barack Obama on the one hand and John McCain on Iraq policy alone is 98 years in Iraq, and we don't want to be in Iraq for 98 years.

John McCain's policy for the economy is exactly the same as George Bush's. John McCain's policy on health care is veto everything you can, exactly the same as George Bush's. We want real change in America, and Crawford, Texas, wants real change in America, because American small towns are under siege because of Republican economic policies, and we can do better, and we will do better when Barack Obama is President of the United States.

Let me -- let me just do a couple things before I get going on this stuff. First of all, there are a lot of great people running for office here, and I was going to name them. And then I suddenly realized I had to name about 35 people. Thank you for the candidates that you're supporting. There is one I am going to mention, because he's the hometowner. I think Rick Noriega has a great shot of winning and becoming the next senator from Texas. I really do believe that. I really do. So please help him and all these other fantastic candidates.

You know, you-all picked a lot of winning candidates in 2006. In fact, if it wasn't for the NetRoots Nation, we would not have a majority in the United States House of Representatives. You picked those folks, and I thank you for it. And I thank you also for the work you did on my behalf when I was running for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. And we have changed the Democratic National Committee a lot.

We have staff in every single state. We have helped elect some folks that most people didn't think had a chance at all to the Congress of the United States. We have helped make sure that Ohio and California and Minnesota had Democratic Secretaries of States, because the best way to fix the problems with black box voting machines are you sure -- to be sure you have honest Secretaries of State who understand that their obligations to the people of the United States in maintaining our democracy and not to the Republican party.

And now I am going to ask you to help us change America permanently. We have a candidate for President of the United States who is a new generation of candidate. He understands that America is beyond being a melting pot, that the younger generation is a multi-cultural generation that looks like the rest of the world. That America needs to have -- be healed again. American family needs to include everybody, and we intend to do just that. And when Barack Obama is President of the United States, he will have become president of all 50 states, not just those people who agreed with him. And he will be president of all Americans, not just those who agree with him, and we really will be empowered. Because what the Obama campaign is about is not just Barack Obama. It's about a new America.

This is -- this count -- this race is very much like the race of the 1960s. In 1960, John F. Kennedy ran as a candidate of the new generation. Richard Nixon ran as a candidate -- a candidate of the old generation. And John Kennedy won that race. It was a very close race.

I believe that this is going to be a very close race. But I believe that hope in the future will always triumph over the candidate who is looking backwards. Barack Obama is the candidate of the future of America. He is somebody who understands that everybody has to be included, and he is also someone who understands that his job is to heal America. To end 30 years of ugly divisive policies filled with hate and begin to embrace all Americans as part of one family in order to build the kind of country that we believe we can have.

Now, on this bus port tour that we started today in Crawford, Texas -- we are here in Austin, of course, which is kind of an easy sell, but tomorrow we're going to Louisiana and Mississippi. And, you know, some of the folks in the media, on the right end of the spectrum, are kind of making fun of us.

Well, you know, it seems to me the last two Congressional elections we won, which were one month and two months ago, respectively, we just won Congressional seats in Louisiana and Mississippi. And it seems to the me in 2007, we just won back the State Senate in the state of Mississippi. We can win everywhere -- and that's why we're doing this. And in Texas, not only do we want Barack Obama to win in Texas, which is a possibility, we want Rick Noriega to win in Texas, but there are five seats in the Texas House of Representatives, that if we pick those up, we will undo the horrible, crooked scheme to cheat Texans out of their rightful representation in the United States Congress and undo what Tom DeLay did to -- all that time ago, we don't -- we deserve better in the state of Texas than the likes of Tom DeLay. And we're going to have honesty back in government in Texas, in Mississippi and Louisiana, not to mention Pennsylvania and Michigan. We can do all those things together.

Five seats in the Texas House of Representatives is all that stands between decent health care in Texas again, and a fundamental understanding -- a fundamental understanding we can bring honesty back in Government again after the incredible damage of the last eight years. We can do better and we will do better.

Now, I want to thank Senator Obama because he also has embraced the 50-state strategy. That doesn't mean, as I have often said, that we're going to put all this money into every single state and treat everybody equal. We know some states that are going to require more resources than others, but every state is going to have resources and no state will be lacking.

He has -- I was very flattered about the things Glen said about our campaign, but the truth is that Barack Obama has done everything that we pioneered and multiplied it by 10. Millions of donors. The average gift is $68. You want campaign finance reform, I'll tell you campaign reform. When your average gift to your presidential campaign is $68, you are owned by nobody but the American people. And I want to thank both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for an extraordinary campaign in the state of Texas. In the state of Texas.

In the state of Texas more people voted for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the primary this year than voted in the general election for our Democratic candidates in 2000 and 2004. Texas is back. The Democratic party in Texas is reborn. And Texas is turning blue.

I want to talk a minute about young people. This is going to be a close election. People always say they want change, but then they get nervous about change when they get in the ballot box, and we're going to have change. The question is: How much change? But America is changing.

In 2004, young people increased their turnout by 20 percent over 2000, and 56 percent of them voted for John Kerry. In 2006, the turnout among young people increased by 24 percent over 2002 and 61 percent of them took Democratic ballots -- in the primary, voted for Democratic candidates for Congress. In Alabama, in 2008, 60 percent of people under 30 voted in the Democratic primary. This is a changing nation. But the real extraordinary change is what this younger generation thinks like.

We try to build a nation, in my generation, based on the teachings of Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but we didn't grow up with all kinds of different people. And so even though we tried to do the right thing and we knew what we should be doing, we did not succeed, but the younger generation has succeeded. That doesn't mean that race doesn't matter. Race isn't as dead, or ethnicity doesn't matter anymore, but it means that the younger generation sees themselves the way America really looks -- where everybody counts and everybody is part of America.

And if you look at -- if you look at the future of this country, it looks like the six people -- seven or eight people who are originally on that stage in January debating, it doesn't look like the Republicans. It doesn't. The Republicans are exclusive. We are inclusive. And we are not perfect, but we believe that you cannot rebuild America to be the nation we ought to be without including everybody and using everybody's talents, and we welcome people. It is not an accident.

It is not an accident that the people in Congress who are of color, the people of Congress who have come from other countries, the people of Congress who are gay or openly gay or lesbian are Democrats. And why is that? Because the Democratic party gave them a chance to make the most of their talents. That is what the dream of America is. That dream has been forgotten by the Republican Party. Everybody deserves a chance. Everybody deserves an opportunity. The new generation is a generation that believes that.

Millions of new people have been registered to vote, including Independents and Republicans, who become Democrats out of disgust of what's become the Republican Party in this country.

It has been an extraordinary thing. As you know, when I came to Washington, we fired all the Washington consultants because we paid them a lot of money to tell us how to lose every four year and -- and we hired a lot of really smart, young people who helped us catch up to the Republicans. They were beating us in technology. We now have a single voter file. So if you have two people running against each other, even in a Democratic primary in St. Paul, Minnesota, for the city council, we get those names at the DNC that night and everybody gets to use them. And when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ran against each other in 50-state primaries and six territorial primaries, we got all those name back at the DNC. And in this fall, when Barack Obama runs and wins and becomes President of the United States, in two years the people who are running for Congress and governor -- and in less than that -- the people who are running for the city council and who are running for mayor in small towns all across America are going to use our voter list, because we are not, one, a group of individuals, who build voter lists for themselves and then horde them for the next four years. We are one team of people. All of us are going to work together on this.

And we believe that this race should not be confined in areas that we're comfortable in, like the Midwest and the Northeast. We believe that it was important to add Nevada and South Carolina, because we can win in the west, and we can win in the south. And it was important to add all kinds of new people into those early states where they had a chance to say who they were going to be asked to vote for in November. And we are going to be in Nevada. And we're going to be in Colorado. And I am proud to say that.

I am proud to say that there are 50 people here who were selected as bloggers to do something that, quote, "mainstream media" doesn't get to do. You sit with your -- each state in this country has a -- has a blogger -- an official blogger, who sits with the delegation and on the floor of the Convention. Now, maybe next time we can do more than that, but we are -- this kind of stuff -- this is new politics where ordinary people get to say what's going on from their perspective. There's no spin. You can go down there and write whatever you want and blog whatever you want. We had an open contest where everybody could apply -- one from each state was chosen. We are going to change this country by giving ordinary people the opportunity to say what they think because we know very well that FOX News and the corporate media isn't going say what needs to be said in this country, and you are.

We can do better than we've seen in the last eight years. First of all, Senator Obama, as you know, is many things, but one of things he does is teach constitutional law. Won't it be a pleasure in the White House to have somebody who knows the Constitution, respects the Constitution, has read the Constitution. Won't it be a pleasure in the White House if somebody would stop talking about health care while they are busy vetoing health care for small children and voting for it, as John McCain did, and instead have Barack Obama, who is going to finally, finally bring the United States of America into the ranks of the industrialized democracies that have health insurance for all our people.

And you know what, people -- people have said, "Well, there's a liberal Democratic idea." Well, I am pretty proud it's a liberal Democratic idea, but this is not an idea that is just good for Democrats or good for the people that we care about. This is an idea that is good for business.

Do you know one of the reasons we lose jobs is because our companies have to pay increases of 10 or 20 percent every single year in health care, and countries that have universal health insurance have that cost -- their business community has that cost under control. This is a job's proposition, not simply a do-gooder proposition for the people we care about. You want jobs in America, you've got to have universal health care. So there's going to be real change coming to American.

The thing that I think is the most important change that we're going to see is the healing of America and regaining the moral authority that America used to have between the end of World War I and the day that George Bush misled this country into sending our brave troops into Iraq when they didn't belong there. And what I mean by that, you know, there have been a lot of great things that American presidents have done over the years -- and we're not perfect. But it's an extraordinary thing for an American president to sit down and bring Catholics and Protestants together in Northern Ireland and help to end the horrible war that had killed 3,000 civilians and gone on for many decades. It is an extraordinary thing to have democratic presidents sit down with the Palestinians and the Israelis and make real progress. We've got a long way to go there. But you can sit at the table with the Israelis and the Palestinians, you can't sit at the table with the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland, you can't sit down with Indians and Pakistanis and bring peace, unless you have the moral authority to do so. And you can't have moral authority if you stoop to the same level as the people who have attacked us. If you want moral authority, you cannot use torture and you cannot have Guantanamo Bay open to do those things. You can't.

Look, we need to defend ourselves against terrorism. Terrorism is evil and it hurts people that we care about. And we need to defend America. But you can't defend America, if you think that the only defense America has is great troops, a strong and well-trained military. Part of our defense is having moral authority. Part of our defense is having a higher standard than the folks that are attacking us and that means we cannot do the same things they do. We can be tough. We can be ruthless in defending America, but what we can't do is things that the Constitution of the United States prohibits, because if we do that we lose our moral authority. And Barack Obama will restore the moral authority of the United States of America, so that we can stand tall everywhere we go in the world, and have it understood that we stand -- we stand for the thing that people talk about all the time, but don't deliver. We stand for real human rights. And "human rights" mean respecting those people who disagree with us, not just the people who agree with us. That we stand for the kind of human rights which makes sure that we take care of our kids here at home, not just those kids elsewhere. That real "human rights" means that we treat the least among us the way they ought to be treated, including those people who are incarcerated and need a hand up so they can rejoin society in a reasonable, thoughtful way. That "real human rights" means respecting the rights of women and making sure that the government does not try to tell them what to do in their personal life. That "real human rights" -- that "real human rights" means not being afraid to stand up against bigotry aimed at gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-gendered Americans.

The reason all this is important is because Barack Obama has a campaign that for the first time is willing to stand up to the campaign of hate and division and anger. You know, the American people -- I think if you look at the polls are something like 70 or 80 percent. I think the country is heading in the wrong direction. It's not just that it's heading the wrong direction in the economy, it's heading in the wrong direction with Iraq and so forth; it's that it doesn't matter what side you are on, if you are an American, you are tired of hating and being angry at other Americans. The real promise of Barack Obama is to say "no" to hate and the device of rhetoric and to scapegoating different groups every time you want to have a vote and get people to vote for you, because they have to be angry at somebody else.

The new generation and the new America doesn't have to be angry at other Americans in order to decide how to vote. The new generation and the new America pulls together. We reach out to Evangelical Christians. And the reason we reach out to Evangelical Christians is because the average Evangelical Christian under the age of 35 believes in three things more than anything else: (1) is dealing with poverty; (2) is dealing with climate change; and (3) is relieving the suffering in Darfur.

Now, that sounds to me like the Democratic Party platform. And why shouldn't we reach out to anybody who is willing to help us alleviate suffering and stand up for the folks that we care about. There is common ground -- and that's the thing I admire so much about Senator Obama. There is common ground among all Americans. We've got to stop the divisiveness. We ought to focus on the things that we can do together, on the things that we have in common, and stop focusing on the things that divide us. It is time to say "no" to the Republican politics of hate and division and say "yes" to the politics of hope and the future, and "yes" to the politics of our children.

So let me just close by saying "thank you." Many of you remember the campaign from four years ago. And I had somebody introduce me this morning at a rally in Brush Park, and they talked about the war in Iraq. The truth is that our campaign didn't get as far as it did because of the war in Iraq. Our campaign got as far as it did because our message was one of personal empowerment as Glen said. But the real power in America lies outside Washington, D.C., in that it's the business of people in Washington, D.C., to serve those outside rather than having those outside Washington, D.C., serve those inside. That's the real message of America. And the reason that our campaign did as well as it did is because of you.

The Internet is the most extraordinary invention since the printing press -- 550 years ago, because it enables people to take their power into their own hands. In my generation, we would have found a political group and tried to put pressure on politicians to get stuff that we wanted done. The generation of -- the NetRoots generation simply goes on-line to find an infinity group, and if you can't find one, you create one yourself to get what you need done. You bypass politics.

Now, you can't ever bypass politics entirely, because one of the big mistakes we -- look, we did a lot of good things in my generation, but we also did some things that weren't very good. And one of the things that we did that weren't very good is after we got a lot of the changes made, we thought that now it was time we could sit back because we changed America for the better. You can never sit back. You never can sit back. And the lesson that we'd like to pass on to you is that you can't ever be absent from politics -- not now, not when you're 35 or 45 and you have kids of your own and you're all immersed in your careers and your kids, you can't. Voting only gets you a "D" -- that's the bare minimum.

Democracy is not a natural state for human beings. It's only been around for 250 years in our 5- or 6- or 8- -- 10,000 year history. If you want to nourish democracy, you have to keep doing what you are doing.

You know most people -- most people who are under 30 years old get their news from John Stewart and the Internet, which I would submit is a much better place to get your news than most of the other news sources around. And what -- the reason for that, is they choose to get their news from you. They choose the empowerment that you give them, the choices that you allow individuals to have. And so you get a D, if you vote. If you vote and give money that's better, you get a C. If you vote and give money and work in somebody's campaign, you get a B. If you vote and give money and work in somebody's campaign and win for -- run for office -- and I don't mean necessarily Congress or senator or governor. I mean, city school board, I mean, local mayor, I mean, unpaid seat of a city council in a town of 400 people, that's when you get an A. And if you don't do it, if you don't do it, you'll make the mistake we did, and you'll have a great, big victory when Senator Obama comes in and changes a whole lot of things and moves America forward; and then if you sit on your hind legs, you'll -- what will happen is what happened to us and it happened to this country, is that a small group of right-wing ideologs who are very skilled in politics, but not very principled, will come in and, again, attack the greatest democracy ever founded in the face of this earth. This is up to you. We are passing the torch.

Much as what happened when John Kennedy took the oath in 1961 -- we talk about passing the torch to a new generation. That's what this campaign is really about. This is about passing a short -- a torch to a new generation. A generation that considers themselves citizens of the world. A generation that is much more prone to welcoming all kinds of different people no matter what they look like, no matter what their sexual orientation is, what gender they are, to the body of our politics in America. A generation that has high principles and has high ideals but has some practicality and understands that politics matters. That's this generation. That's the NetRoots generation.

This country needs you desperately. And the world needs you desperately. And I thank you for -- not just what you have done, I thank you for what you are about to do. It's an extraordinary responsibility, and I am pretty sure you can live up to it. Thanks so much.