If The Strong Exploit The Weak, Democracy

I Believed Afghanistan Was Always Going To Be Hard. It's The Fifth Poorest Country In The World. And When You Fly Over It, You Realize That There's Not Much There. And, Of Course, It Has The Problem, Too, Of Being On That Border With Pakistan In Basically An Ungoverned Region That Has Given The Terrorists A Staging Ground. So It's A Very Difficult Place. But I Do Believe That The Mission There Can Succeed If Success Is Defined As Helping The Afghans To Prevent The Taliban From Being An Existential Threat To The Afghan Government.

To Say That People Around The World Deserve The Same, The Same Life That We Have In The United States, The Same Freedoms That We Have, That Seems To Me, Humble. I Think It's Humble To Say That The United States, Which Has Been Given So Much, Should Give Back.

I Find That The Great Majority Of Public Servants Across The Entire Political Spectrum Come Because They Believe In The United States And They Want To Change The World.

I Grew Up In A Very Loving Middle Class Family. My Parents Were Educators. I'm Not Even The First Phd In My Family. They Tried To Shield Me, Just As Other Parents In My Neighborhood Tried To Shield Their Children. But You Knew There Was A Reason That You Couldn't Go To That Theme Park Or To A Movie Theater Or To A Hamburger Stand. They Couldn't Shield You Completely. What They Did Though Was They Never Let It Be An Excuse For Not Achieving, And They Always Said Racism Is Somebody Else's Problem, Not Yours. They Tried In That Way Not To Make Us Bitter About Birmingham.

But We Do Have Confidence In Our Institutions. We Are Not Russia. We Have An Executive That Is Constrained. We Have A Legislature That Is Real. We Have A Press That Is Free. We Have Courts That Are Independent. This Is Not Russia.