Change We Can Believe In, by Barack Obama: on Principles & Values

Moved to Illinois as community organizer, for $13,000 a year

My work took me to some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. I joined with pastors and lay-people to deal with communities that had been ravaged by plant closings. I saw that the problems people faced weren’t simply local in nature--that the decision to close a steel mill was made by distant executives; or that the lack of textbooks and computers in schools could be traced to the skewed priorities of politicians a thousand miles away.

It was in these neighborhoods that I received the best education I ever had, and where I learned the true meaning of my Christian faith.

I’ve been in DC long enough to know that it must change

End politics of division; make it about addition

You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington, to end the political strategy that’s been all about division, and instead make it about addition, to build a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states. Because that’s how we’ll win in November, and that’s how we’ll finally meet the challenges that we face as a nation.

We’re choosing unity over division and sending a powerful message that change is coming to America.

Hope is the bedrock of this nation

For many months we’ve been teased, even derided, for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It’s not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.

Hope is what led me here today, with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas, and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation, the belief that our destiny will not be written for us but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

We are choosing hope over fear

The time has come for a president who will be honest about the choices and the challenges we face, who will listen to you and learn from you even when we disagree, who won’t just tell you what you want to hear but what you need to know.

In no other country is my story even possible

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional of candidates. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts; that out of many, we are truly one.

This candidacy is not just an exercise in affirmative action

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely o the desire of wild and wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, and that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Rev. Wright that have caused such controversy and, in some cases, pain. For some, nagging questions remain.

Rev. Wright’s comments were not only wrong, but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity, racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve problems that confront us all.

We’ve never really worked through complexities of race

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through--a part of our union that we have not yet made perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care or education or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Working together we can move beyond some old racial wounds

But I have asserted a firm conviction, a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people, that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life.

This union may never be perfect, but can always be perfected