A House United In Favor Of Itself Cannot Help But Stand

Cooper Union Commencement
May 23, 2006

Thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this important day in your lives. And thank you for giving me the chance to return to Cooper Union, an American treasure.

It was the first institution to offer tuition-free higher education to women and men, to immigrants and working people at a time when universities were largely populated by the economic and social elite. In mirroring the modern commitment to democratic higher education, Peter Cooper was far ahead of his time. You are the heirs of his rich and wise vision.

Even before classes began in 1859, Cooper's great hall offered a magnetic platform for all kinds of speakers to address a discriminating audience in the commercial, cultural and media capital of the nation, President Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, Taft and Theodore Roosevelt all spoke here before they were elected. President Wilson and I spoke while in office.

I came here in 1993, to make my case for my new economic plan, a dramatic reversal of the "trickle down" theory of the previous 12 years which had quadruples the national debt, increased poverty, concentrated extreme wealth in few hands, and left middle class wages stagnant. I made the case for a controversial "invest and grow plan" that was fiscally conservative but socially progressive, raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, reducing them for lower income working families, cutting less essential government spending and investing more in education and new technologies to fuel economic growth.

My Cooper Union debut must not have been too persuasive - the plan passed by only one vote in the House and in the Senate, with vice President Gore breaking the tie: Still, the Cooper Union forum gave me a chance to voice a plan that ultimately produced the largest economic expansion and largest job growth in peace time history, with three consecutive budget surpluses for the first time in 70 years, and one hundred times more people moving out of poverty than in the previous twelve years.

As important as that speech was to me and to our country, its significance pales in comparison to the greatest address ever delivered here, by Abraham Lincoln on February 27, 1860. Lincoln accepted an invitation to speak in New York, not only to push his modern progressive arguments that the federal government had the power to forbid the spread of slavery beyond the south, but also in the hope of catapulting himself into the front ranks of contenders for the presidential nomination of the young Republican party, along with the frontrunner Senator William Seward of New York.

The speech was so well received and so widely publicized that the enthusiastic acclaim lifted Lincoln to the Republican nomination and the Presidency.

You may fairly ask why I would dwell on an address delivered 146 years ago when there is so much to address today - terror, religious and ethnic conflict, nuclear arms, Iraq, Darfur, Avian Influenza AIDS, TB, and malaria, poverty and global warming, along with all the positive benefits of this age of global interdependence.

I do so because I hope to persuade you that how Lincoln made his case and what his larger purpose was have particular relevance to your future.
You have intelligence, knowledge, and skills, a vast reservoir of personal power to pursue your dreams. The question I want you to ask and answer is the one Lincoln answered here 146 years ago: how will you use them, and to what end, not only as professionals but as citizens.

By today's standards, Lincoln's address was highly unusual. It was long, about 3,200 words. He did an exhaustive amount of research into the questions of what the 39 signers of the constitution believed about the power of the federal government to limit slavery. He wrote every word himself. And he made a highly reasoned argument for his position based on the facts he found. The speech offered a minimum of rhetorical flourish and political potshots.

Lincoln strongly defended his position and clearly stated his differences with his opponents - those on the right who favored the extension of slavery at least in the states where a majority voted for it and those on the left who favored its immediate abolition even if it broke the United States in half. However, he also treated his adversaries with respect and urged them to agree to pressure the union in spite of all their differences.

In those days, once nominated, Presidential candidates did not make speeches or personally campaign. After the Cooper Union speech, Lincoln gave several more talks in the East, all of them slightly modified versions of what he said here. In essence, the Cooper Union speech was Lincoln's campaign. The Republican platform reflected it.
And when people wanted to know what he stood for, Lincoln's supporters gave them copies of the Cooper Union address, with its singing closing conversation that "Right Makes Might."

This matters to you because Lincoln's painstaking reliance on the evidence and on arguments that flowed from it, and his determination to preserve our national union are desperately needed today as we confront the challenges and opportunities of global interdependence.

Too often in the past twenty-five years our elections and political discourse have been marked by the triumph of personal attacks, baseless or irrelevant assertions, and blind ideology over evidence argument. Too often the purpose of an election has been to concentrate wealth and power by dividing the public and diverting our attention away from pressing problems to matters that excite deep political passions but that will take up less than 1% of a candidates time if he or she is elected.

But all the attacks, accusations, and ideological diatribes cannot make the facts go away. They matter. So do thinking, reasoning, and honest respectful arguing, especially when the problems and solutions are complex.

And this is a complex time. To those of us with a good education, access to technology, the certainty of fulfilling work, and a high comfort level with our increasingly diverse society, it is a great time to be alive. To the victims of terror and ethnic and religious conflict, or workers in wealth countries whose incomes fall further behind as their jobs grow more insecure, or the billions of people who live on two dollars a day or less, or those who suffer from untreated AIDS, TB, Malaria and infections related to dirty water because they are poor, or those who live in places already being harmed by the most rapid warming of the climate in 200,000 years - to them, the modern world is all but a mixed blessing.

The great challenge of the 21st century is to build up the positive force of interdependence and reduce the negative ones, and in so doing, to build more integrated communities, locally, nationally, globally. Integrated communities require three things: shared responsibilities, shared opportunities, and shared values - everyone deserves a chance and has a responsible role to play; competition is good but we do better when we work together; are differences matters, making life more interesting and the search for answers more promising, but our common humanity matters more.

We can only build these communities of we have both responsible government policies and vigorous efforts to advance the common good by private citizens. When the tsunami struck South Asia, Americans donated
1.2 billion dollars to relief and recovery efforts. Thirty percent of our households contributed, more than half of them over the Internet, which has given ordinary citizens enormous power to do public good when they band together. Interestingly Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, is the only Muslim nation where public approval of the U.S has dramatically increased since the Iraq War, because of the work of U.S. military and civilian personnel, and of citizens involved in religious and secular non-governmental organizations. The NGOs are exploding in numbers and scope of activities all over the world, and offer all of us the chance to make a difference.

But politics and government remain profoundly important. We cannot hope to move from the present unequal and unstable state of interdependence to integrated national and global communities if we continue to fight elections on narrow grounds, with tactics assured to produce more heat than light, and to divide us into warring camps, incapable of principled compromise.

I believe the American people know this. The deep yearning for a larger, unifying politics explains at least in part the strong positive reaction former President Bush and I have received for our work together in the aftermath of the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. It explains why lawmakers like my wife and Senator McCain are trying to find common ground on climate change, and why Hillary has reached out to Republicans as well as Democrats to find common solutions to our healthcare problem, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the needs of our men and women in uniform.

At Cooper Union, Lincoln's entire argument for the proposition that the federal government could limit slavery and should do so were based on his original research into the opinions on the subject of the
39 signers of the Constitution. He wanted to be faithful to our founding principles and to the permanent mission given to America by the Founding Fathers: to form a more perfect union.

They knew enough about human nature to understand that our nation could never be perfect. But they also believed in the idea of progress and the power of dreams - we could always be more perfect than we are.

The Founders were right. And Lincoln was right to follow them, as were his most faithful and progressive successors. That's why we're still around today, as you embark on the next great adventure of your life.

I urge you to remember, in your work and in your citizenship, not only the education you received at Cooper Union, but the lessons taught by Abraham Lincoln on that remarkable night 146 years ago: use evidence, reason, and respectful argument to search for a more perfect union. Do so with an inquiring mind and an open heart, in Mr. Lincoln's immortal words, "with malice toward none."

Life is precious and fleeting. Live your dreams. Do what you can to empower others to live theirs and to preserve the same chance for you children and grandchildren.