...and/or read the full transcript of Renzella's statement and Clark's response to it below:
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"Corey Renzella (Exeter High School Student): General Clark, you were in the
military for over thirty years; practically your entire adult life. It's
obvious, therefore, that you have foreign policy credentials, but what in your
career has prepared you for the domestic challenges that you will surely face if
elected President.
"Wesley Clark: Well, I was responsible in every stage of the military for the
people that served under me, and for the families that were there. And what we
discovered in the volunteer army was that you couldn't ignore these people. The
army's sixty percent of more married. And so, their housing, the schools the
children went to, the availability of health care, the time off they had with
their families, the ability to get the children babysitters or later child
development center spaces, all that was very important to being able to build a
unit and a team. And so, like every other leader in the army, I was very
concerned with it.
"When I was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe I had forty-four thousand
schoolchildren located in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Germany,
Italy and Turkey. And we worried about those schools. They were funded by the
Department of Defense. They were my responsibility. And the students that were
there were children of the people that worked for me. And so we had to make sure
the curriculum was right, the funding was right, the administration for it was
right, the parent teacher student associations were right. We changed the
curriculum, we changed the leadership in some of the schools. We put in new
procedures. We tried to give greater local control. We got rid of Mathland. We
fought to get Headstart in those schools and so forth. But I worried equally
about health care. The doctors, the hours the clinics were open.
"When I was the commander at Fort Irwin out in the Mojave destert, we were a
complete isolated community. I held Town Hall meetings. I owned everything on
that post. I remember driving down post one day and my wife said 'You see that
big pothole?!'. I said 'Yes dear'. She said 'That's your pothole!'. She said
'Your engineers, they've been threatening to fix that pothole for a week and
it's still there! When are you going to do something about it?'. I said 'Yes
dear'. And she said 'By the way', she said, 'Do you know that your commissary is
out of Pampers?!'. I said 'No dear, but I'll fix that too.'
"I mean, I was responsible for the whole kit and kaboodle. And so, I've been on
the delivery end. I never made a law about social services but when people talk
about those laws I see the faces of people who came to my office. I see memorial
services where we honored people who were killed in line of duty and in one case
a child who was killed by an angry parent in the home. And when I think about
those cases and those laws, to me they have very deep personal significance. So
I've been on the delivery end of the social work in a way that probably no other
candidate has been.
"I can hardly wait to get on the other end and fix some of the problems I've
seen in this country as I've lived through it for thirty-five years."
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Thanks, "plant", wherever, whoever you are...
Good enough for me - how about for the rest of you out there?
(And a special thanks to "Debby" for sending this to me earlier today!)
Steve