Les Roberts for Congress:
Announcement Speech

Democrat Les Roberts made the following speech at his Cortland headquarters to officially announce his campaign for the nomination to the seat in the House of Representatives currently held by Republican Sherwood Boehlert. Since the time of his announcement, Roberts has moved to the status of Democratic frontrunner, and Congressman Boehlert's fundraising has stumbled, leading to rumors that Boehlert will not run for re-election this year, but will leave the field open for Republican and Democratic candidates alike.

I'm here today to announce my candidacy for Congress in the 2006 election. My name is Les Roberts.

I grew up in Onondoga County. I started out my career here as a science teacher, but for the last 20 years, I have been working as a public health scientist, and that work has given me an enormous number of opportunities.

I have worked in eight war zones, primarily as an officer for the U.S. government. I have had the opportunity to testify before Congress. I have had the chance to brief the National Security Council several times, and in my presentation of information to the government at the highest levels, sometimes my evidence was taken and responded to, and sometimes it wasn't, but this has given me the chance to see your government, our government, at its best and at its worst.

I never thought about running for political office until I watched the response to Hurricane Katrina. For the last twelve years, I had been teaching federal employees how to respond to disasters, and I know a federal government a lot better than the one you saw last September.

Twelve years ago, I was a lieutenant in the public health service. You may recall that there was a nasty genocide in Rwanda. Then, there was a cholera outbreak among the Rwandans. Your government and my government got me there within 48 hours of the first case being reported. 4 years ago, a volcano destroyed a city in the Congo about the same size as New Orleans, and I got from Chenango County to the center of the Congo in two days. Within seven days a few of us, with a lot of local favor, managed to be providing a quarter of a million gallons a day of chlorinated, trucked water to these people who had lost their homes. I contrast that with what we just saw with Katrina.

My friends and former colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta tell me that there were teams of doctors who were ready to go who were held up for six days because the bureaucracy of Homeland Security wouldn't let them leave Atlanta. The Katrina experience was geographically far away from us, but I think it shows us that the government of George W. Bush is less capable of looking after you, and defending you here, and certainly less capable of representing you internationally, than our government was just six years ago.

As your congressman, in order to help get this federal house back in order, my highest three priorities would be to balance the federal budget, make sure that everybody in the country has health insurance, and to get some kind of a coherent, sustainable energy policy in place.

All of us balance our checkbooks at home. The federal government has the same responsibility. These recent tax shifts - I don't want to call them cuts because our government wasn't cut and it didn't get smaller - from the wealthiest two percent to your local taxes and to our debt, has been the height of irresponsibility. In the 24th District, probably the most acute effect we have seen has been the viability of Medicaid. We have the situation now where the counties here in Central New York are paying 50 to 90 percent of their budgets on this federally mandated Medicaid program. The state has a huge chunk of its budget spent on Medicaid as well. It seems to me on the verge of obscene for our Congress and our congressman to have, just a few weeks ago, voted to cut Medicaid.

Last year, two-thirds of hospitals lost money. Mary Grace, who you just met, is the director of the library down in Sidney. A couple of months ago, the hospital in Sidney went bankrupt and shut its doors. The hospitals in Upstate New York are in a fiscal crisis. There's a couple reasons for this. The ones most easily solved by the federal government are the inadequate funding or reimbursement of Medicaid, where you and I are subsidizing the inadequate funding when we pay our health insurance, and secondly the fact that so many people, working people, do not have health insurance. There are three million people without health insurance in New York State today, and those folks often have their illnesses and end up being treated in the emergency room. That is unpleasant and unkind for them, and it is expensive for us, showing up in our taxes and in our medical costs.

Half a century ago, John Kennedy challenged the country to put a man on the Moon within ten years. As a result, energy and money was infused into public schools. Research was initiated at universities, and wonderful economic ripple effects went through society. I think, today, our need to wean ourselves of foreign oil is far greater than our need was 40 years ago to put a man on the Moon. If we had an Apollo-like initiative to promote research into alternative energy sources, to implement energy resources that are out there and promote energy conservation in our homes, we would create a lot of jobs here in the 24th District.

We've got some big advantages here. Wind generation of electricity has already proven itself to be cost effective here, locally. Because of our dramatic temperature changes between the seasons, geothermal and hydrothermal have a lot of potential here. Also, we have five times more universities in the 24th District than is the norm in this country. We're exceedingly endowed with universities, and if research activities and activities for young people who have just finished their degrees existed, we would benefit disproportionately. On some visceral level, all of us understand the lack of a coherent energy policy we have right now, every time we fill up our cars with gas or pay our monthly heating bills.

Certainly, it is an uphill battle to beat a 12-term incumbent. We know that. I also know that I'm a scientist, and it's going to be an uphill battle to win this race because I'm not a professional politician. I not only accept that challenge. I welcome it. I have spent years and years of my life serving my country in foreign wars. I have spent time working on health problems in this country, and I think that, given the acute needs our nation has, that I am exceedingly well prepared to be your representative in Congress, to be your representative for common sense.

And so, I ask you, as your self-appointed advocate for common sense, is it common sense that we spend more in this country than any Western nation health, and yet by most health indicators, we are among the least healthy? Does it make sense that, this year, we're going to spend $16 billion on new nuclear weapons systems which virtually all of our allies tell us violate the nuclear nonproliferation treaties which we proposed just a few years ago? Does it make sense to go on pretending that our international standing has not diminished when sixty-two percent of Europeans think that the Bush-led administration is a threat to them personally, or when Amnesty International can say that our abuse of prisoners is the second biggest human rights problem on the globe? Is it common sense to have a Congress that tries to finagle a massive tax cut for oil companies at a time when we've got record deficits and they're experiencing record profits?

If your answer to these questions is no, if the status quo isn't acceptable, then I should be your next congressman. The America of George Bush is not my America. I know a better, a more responsible and more compassionate America. That is the America of the 24th District.

My name is Les Roberts. I'm running for Congress, and I hope you'll give me your support.