The Honorable Lib Tolbert, The Mayor of Barnesville, and our cherished leader, and stalwart friend; energetic members of the Northern Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club, and friends:
The Democratic Party is the party of life. It has been the Party of my family in Maryland since 1796 when Thomas Jefferson started it and David Shriver became a member of the first, I believe, Maryland Legislature. It renews itself with every generation. It seeks new people. It is the party of Franklin Roosevelt’s concern for the depressed and the weak, of Harry Truman’s toughness. It is the party of John Kennedy’s courage and Lyndon Johnson’s desire to help people as poor as he had been. It is the party of Eugene McCarthy’s witness in cold New Hampshire, and of Robert Kennedy’s desire “to tame the savageness of man.” It is the party of Jimmy Carter’s Middle East Peace Initiative at Camp David and of Bill Clinton’s peace initiative in Ireland.
It is the party of Mayor Daley of Chicago and Shirley Chisholm, of Averell Harriman, the multi-millionaire and Philip Murray, the labor leader, of Hubert Humphrey and Cesar Chaveez, of Paul Tsongas and Ed Muskie. It is the party of Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski, of Mike Barnes, of Ben Cardin and Steny Hoyer. It is the party of immigrants, of diversity, of hope. It is the party of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, of The Marshall Plan, The Peace Corps, The Job Corps, Legal Services for the Poor, of Community Action, “Head Start"; and of the 1964 Civil Rights legislation.
But we are in danger of losing that kind of progress. No one wants to enter politics these days.
Why?
First. The amount of work you have to put in night and day, 365 days a year, to be a success doesn’t earn you the respect of lots of people and,
Second. You have to work; it seems, for ten or fifteen years to get to a point where you are influential.
Third. Even when you are influential, you are continually required to compromise your ideas in order to gain support from others so that legislation you propose can pass. In other words, you have to spend months and months and years and years to get to a point where you can hope to have a moderate amount of power to achieve the goals you have set.
Compare these facts to life in business today.
Just last week the April 27th issue of the Washington Posts’s Business Section was devoted to the “New Guard.” On the cover were pictured nine people who were described in the article as representing “a changing of the guard in Washington business.” They’re young, most in their forties. They’re building new businesses on the cutting edge of technology and finance. They’re having fun just look at their smiles. And why not? They’re creating wealth on a scale this region has never seen.”
Why wouldn’t any bright young man or woman want to join their ranks instead of becoming a politician at 1/10th the pay, and 100 times the time and effort?
Ask Mark Shriver!
In the last session of the Legislature, he expedited the building of an essential bridge on Route 28. He originated the program to suspend the Driver’s Licenses of men who fail to pay their debts to their divorced wives who need the money to take care of their children. What results? $22 million dollars to those women from their ex-husbands. Annually, those women are getting $30 million plus from those men who in 1990 to 1997 gave their wives nothing!
This year the Maryland House of Delegates added $50 million dollars for school construction, money desperately needed here in our county. Mark Shriver was a leader in that effort. And he’s active in our county in boys and girls clubs, in civic organizations, in the business community and with its leaders.
How does he do all these things, and simultaneously work seven days a week with his wife, Jeanne, as the two of them create a fabulous, tender, adoring atmosphere for their brand-new baby, Molly, who is only two months old?
Don’t ask me how he does it, or how she-does it, I can only say they both perform their roles with extraordinary compassion, joy, and success.
What difference does all of this make or mean?
It means that we Democrats are not forgetting or divorcing ourselves from the political, economic, or civic needs of our country now, or for the future.
The 21st Century, which is just about to arrive, is giving our country, the USA, the greatest opportunity for world leadership in the history of humanity. From our position of worldwide, military, economic, and social leadership, we can make the 21st Century into the most peaceful, the most progressive, the most humanistic century in world history. No more war.
“Never again war”, said the Catholic Pope, Paul VI, to the United Nations back in the 1980s, when the likelihood for such a new and perfect world was hardly possible. But today that possibility is real and attainable. That’s why we need women, the Northern Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club, to mobilize all women to establish a new and peaceful world for the 21st Century. It can be done. Young, intelligent, hard-working politicians can do it.
We Democrats have twice as many women in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives as the Republicans. We probably can mobilize twice as many young men like Mark for service in legislatures as the Republicans can.
So let’s get going, and show by our example in Maryland that America can lead the way to a new, better and more peaceful world. The world of the 21st Century, inspired by Marylanders like those in the earliest days in the party of Thomas Jefferson, our creator and intellectual leader, and his followers like David Shriver.
May God rest their souls!
