20070730 O’Malley speech: DLC National Conversation

Democratic Leadership Council National Conversation

July 30, 2007 - Nashville, Tenn

Speeches by Governor Martin O'Malley

Thank you very, very much. Thank you all. Thank you very much. My Maryland people, thou wilt not cower in the dust. Thank you very much. Jack Markell, thank you very much for your leadership and thank you for that very gracious introduction. And Jack, I just want to make clear for the record, knowing that the Republican Party follows these proceedings very carefully, that that period of time 25 years ago, I actually was legal. In fact, I was 21 for five years while I played in my band.

You know, as we gather here in Music City, I am reminded of the sound advice that every stage mother gives their child. Never follow a dog act, never follow a kid act, and never follow Governor Brian Schweitzer. It is good to be with all of you, it really is. Governor Sebelius, Governor Bredesen, it’s great to return to the DLC’s National Conversation. I took a brief hiatus given the pressures and the time constraints of the campaign, but thank you, Al From, for your vision. Thank you for your untiring leadership and persistence and commitment to Democratic values. And thank you, Harold Ford, for stepping up and being our chairman and leading this important organization at an important time.

You know, I was reflecting a little bit about why I enjoy these things so much, and I think it’s the same reason that you do as well. It’s an opportunity to come together with people who actually believe we can make our government work. And the essence of what we derive from one another in coming together here…I think was summed up beautifully and eloquently, like so many things, by Bobby Kennedy when he captured this synergy between core values and effective programs when he said:

“Idealism, high aspirations and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs. There is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities, no separation between the deepest desires of the heart and of the mind, and the rational application of human effort to human problem.”

That’s what we’re doing here. It is a timeless and important mission, and we’re also reminded as we come together here, of the things that unite us, not only as members of the DLC…not only as Democrats…but we’re reminded of the things that unite us as Americans:

A belief in the dignity of every individual, a belief in our responsibility to advance the common good, and an understanding that at the beginning and the end of our days, there is a unity to spirit and to matter, and that what we do in our own lifetimes does matter.

And because we’re united in those beliefs, we’re also united in the goals that we pursue as a nation, aren’t we? To strengthen and grow our middle class and our family owned businesses, to improve public safety and public education, and to expand opportunity to more people rather than fewer.

I’ve been asked to focus my remarks today on one of three overarching strategies that we’re following in Maryland, in post-9/11 Maryland. One of those strategies is workforce creation, another is sustainability, but the third one is security integration, specifically security integration – how we’re advancing that strategy in the post 9/11 Maryland.

What does it mean? It means protecting our people and our communities through ever-better coordination of effort, ever-more timely sharing of information and intelligence among multiple agencies and offices of government at all levels from local to state to federal and back. It means making that oxymoron known as the criminal justice system actually operate like a system instead of a collection of parallel data sets, intelligence and effort that rarely ever meet and even more rarely ever coordinate.

The integration has to be horizontal as well as vertical. It has to be intra-agency as well as interagency, intra-departmental as well as interdepartmental, intra-state as well as interstate. It means that task forces cross borders and become regional, become the norm of public safety rather than the rare exception.

You get the point, and the question is: Do our police chiefs? Do our fire chiefs? Do they get it? And what does this mean for homeland security? You know the sad thing about speeches about homeland security is that there’s been so little progress over the last six years that the speeches have changed very little. Maybe that’s also a reflection of how much work we need to do and how much more urgently we need to dedicate ourselves to it.

Six years after the attacks of September 11th, the people that all of us have the privilege to serve and to protect still want some basic answers to questions before they can intelligently rise to meet this new challenge of asymmetrical warfare that will be with us for the foreseeable future. And those basic questions are:

What are we trying to accomplish?

Who is responsible for accomplishing it?

And what opportunities might there be – beyond security, what opportunities might we create for our nation, our neighborhoods and our world if we were actually to get this job done? For without a doubt, this is going to call upon us as a nation to change world history by accomplishing great things.

In Washington, New York, Madrid and London, the ability to take human lives is part of the terrorist equation, but with 80 percent of our Gross National Product emanating from our metropolitan economies, disruption and economic costs are also what make our cities prime targets. So how do we make our metropolitan areas safer and thereby make our country safer? What are the security capabilities? What are the security deliverables, if you will, that we’re actually trying to create? In other words, if we actually improve security and preparedness, what would it look like?

First, every major metropolitan area would actually have complete vulnerability assessments.

Second, every major metropolitan area would have adequate personal protective equipment for their first responders, including HAZMAT teams and also the ability to diffuse bombs.

Third, every major metropolitan area would have interoperable communications – something we’ve all been saying for six years, and something very few of us have done.

Fourth, every metropolitan area would have real-time biosurveillance systems that monitor the various symptoms being displayed or presented to your emergency rooms, your paramedics, so that we can get that 48-hour jump if, God forbid, there’s a biological attack.

Fifth, every major metropolitan area should have a much more highly developed intelligence sharing capacity that allows data to go from the central office to the field instantaneously. If you can’t do that with your own Departments of Parole and Probation to your own county police department, then you’re not ready to do it with the federal government to prevent a strike by al Qaeda.

Six – every metropolitan area should conduct training and preparedness exercises, and you should plan for them and you should fund them, and you shouldn’t wait for manna to fall out of Washington in order to do it.

Seven – every major metropolitan area should be investing in closed circuit television camera systems, as we’ve seen London use to great effect. That is much more cost effective to protect infrastructure and can also be used to combat narcotics.

Eighth, transportation security – we need to make progress in securing our vulnerabilities in a very open transportation system. Not every state or even every city has a port, but you know what, cargo from those ports go through every city on rail or on trucks And the fact that we can’t inspect each and every one should not be license and excuse not to try to inspect more than we’re currently inspecting.

And ninth, we need to invest in hospital surge capacity, something that I think none of us have done.

So there it is. Something you will never, ever hear from George Bush: clearly articulated national security goals. So where’s the responsibility for getting these things done?

You know, mayors point to the president, the president points to governors, governors point to Congress, the senior statesmen declare solemnly you can’t possible protect every square inch of this vast continent, someone calls a break for lunch and we all go home, right? Why is that? I think it’s because what should be a flexible federal system that should allow us to adapt and to rise to this challenge has been tangled and jumbled up. It’s also been undermined by something which I believe, and I think you believe as well, is a belief not in keeping with the great traditions of our country.

Cities are central to improving homeland security. Command and control in the event of an emergency is a local function. You’ve heard it said time and again when people call 911, the phone does not ring at the White House and it does not ring at the State House. Command, control, maintenance, recruitment, training and coordination – these deliverables, deliverables like interoperable communications, biosurveillance, intelligence sharing, even vaccine distributions in the event of an emergency – they’re all local functions and we need to support them and not cut funding to them.

What is not paid for – what is not paid for even while local governments pay for the vast majority of those things – is the additional investment required for local governments to rise to the homeland security threat. States have an important role to play – important but different, but an important role to play in prioritizing, in regionalizing and actualizing: conducting after-action evaluations, evaluating levels of preparedness, setting standards and forcing timely updates of vulnerability assessments assuring that available dollars are actually used effectively instead of reverting to what I have called the Sharper Image catalogue-style of purchasing homeland security equipment, right?

You’ve all seen this happen in your own areas. Instead of investing in one of those nine core capacities, we all get together in a room and try to figure out what is it that we’re sure nobody has, and let’s buy one of those for everybody. That’s not how we meet those core capacities, and our states need to do a better job of reminding us of that.

But what of our federal government – you know, I want to share with you a wonderful article. Of course it was on page A2, as all good news is reported about working government, but you know, for the first time in five years, our federal government is actually set to invest more in those primary streams of funding for homeland security that comes to your states and your cities and your counties rather than cutting it again year after year as George Bush and the Republican Congress have done.

Get this – look at this wonderful headline fellow Democrats: “Congress approves homeland security bill in two strong votes.” What a wonderful thing. Let me read it again, it felt good. Congress approves homeland security bill in two strong votes. Elections do make a difference; it’s a big turnaround.

And the other thing that it gives to us is an opportunity to slip out of that false but very effective frame that’s been set up in the past by people like Mr. Norquist, that governing in America today is a choice between whether we have a small government or a big government. Not that any of us can ever remember or even conceive of Andrew Jackson pulling people together in that room not far from here to found the Democratic Party and saying: By gosh guys, we need to have a big government.

The choice isn’t between a big government and a small government. The choice is between a weak government and a strong government. It’s between a weak government and a strong government. And you know, were it not so tragic, it might remind us of Johnny Carson, right? How weak do you want it? You know, how weak is it?

How weak do you want your government? Do you want it so weak that our soldiers, when they’re deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, don’t have bulletproof vests and body armor?

Do you want it so weak that when they go there, they drag equipment from home that doesn’t have proper armor to defend them against the landmines?

How weak do you want it? Do you want it so weak that women, children, the elderly and babies die of dehydration in the heart of a great American city while they wait one, two, three, four, five days for their federal government to drop a pallet of bottled water on them? How weak do you want it?

It is not between small and big government. To govern is to choose, and our choice is between whether we want a strong government or whether we want a weak government.
And why shouldn’t the constitutional mandate of providing for the common defense extend to the currently uncovered margin that exists between what local governments can spend on public safety and what these new war exigencies demand?

Yes, to govern is to choose, my friends, and a free and informed people can make changes, and a happy optimistic point of history: they usually do make the right choices. Changes that can turn our challenges into opportunities, opportunities beyond terror or defense. Stated more boldly, we can create opportunities if we dare to accomplish great things in the face of this unprecedented threat.

Imagine if each of our metropolitan areas actually had watch centers to monitor hundreds of cameras protecting our critical infrastructure, and imagine what they might also be able to do to be a force multiplier for understaffed police departments. With the backbone of CCTV systems in place, cities could branch their networks out to free poor neighborhoods from the 24/7 occupation of drug dealers and the death grip that comes from the foreign chemical attacks of cocaine and heroine.

Imagine if every metropolitan area actually did share intelligence in a timely fashion – the lives that we could actually save. Imagine if we actually improved port and border security and were able to cut in half the supplies of illegal drugs that are coming into our country. Imagine the economic possibilities if our nation were actually to significantly invest in bio-defensive research and the development of vaccines, inoculations and cures.

Imagine the economic opportunities that would roll from that, and imagine something else as well, and that is to be able to unleash, in the words of Jeffrey Sachs, “the weapons of mass salvation” – to be able to prevent tuberculosis and malaria, dysentery, the things that are killing thousands of people around this planet, not to mention HIV/AIDS which is threatening to wipe out an entire continent.

We are a great country. We are still a great country. And while it is true that most of these things will not happen overnight, it’s also true that none of them will ever happen until we make a conscious decision to invest in our security.

As Americans, we have the opportunity to correct our course. The United States is capable of accomplishing great things, but fear alone has never been a sufficient fuel for our most noble ambitions as a people. When facing enormous challenges, when facing war and grave threats to our country’s survival, Americans find their motivation for greatness and their cause for sacrifice in higher things. Freedom, justice, the rights of man, liberation from the many faces of slavery and oppression – these are the values of our republic, what former Senator Gary Hart called the fourth power, that moral exponent of our military, economic and diplomatic powers. They are the ideas that appeal to a universal concept of a humanity loved by God and made in his image.

The struggle to secure our homeland security will be determined at the end of our days by whether the United States chooses not just to be a military or economic, but rather a moral leader among nations. And that leadership in this troubled and rapidly changing world will depend very much not on how many smart bombs we’re able to rain down on our enemies, but on how many strong, compassionate, educated, trained American hands we can extend to the most fragile of our neighbors around this globe. I dream not of utopia but of continuing the American Revolution. This is America’s challenge…this is America’s choice…and this is America’s opportunity. Thank you all.