On the recordFebruary 16, 2012
One of the themes that the President has underscored over and over again is that everybody should get a fair shot and everybody pay their fair share and everybody play by the same rules. When we talk about where should the money come from for important things like transportation--of course there are many flaws in that bill. They take mass transportation, mass transit, out of the funding stream. Transportation, I think, has always before been a bipartisan issue, and, of course, we want to be able to pay for that. It creates a lot of jobs. Everybody uses the roads. They use the transit system. They benefit. Everybody needs to pay their fair share, what they are able to pay to contribute to the common good. The President has talked about having each other's back as kind of a basic philosophy, that we're all in this together, not we're all in this alone. That's one of the early ideas in America. Picture, now, the covered wagons and the rugged individualism of those people crossing. They were together in a row, each one a rugged individual, but all of them were making sure that they helped to take care of each other so that they could get across safely. I think that's the vision, that we're a combination of individual freedoms, strong individualism, but we also understand that we all do better when we all do better.
