Political Quotes

“I rise tonight to speak of what I believe is the central concern of the American people right now, and that is the issue of jobs or in many cases the lack of a job. We have seen it in so many ways. We have seen it in our own communities. Many people have seen it in their own families. These are not statistics on a business page. When they see an unemployment rate or the number of people who are out of work, it is real life for far too many American families. As long as the unemployment rate in America is 10 percent, the American people want us to focus, as we never have before, on the issue of job creation. In Pennsylvania we have now 560,000 people out of work as of the last month it was calculated, the month of December. That is a huge number. If you look at it by percentage it looks like it is lower than a lot of States, 8.9 percent, but it is 560,000 people in Pennsylvania, and it spiked upwards toward the end of the year. I had a chance, now just about a week ago, to sit down with 8 of those 560,000 people, 8 people out of work. I will not give you their names because that was the agreement. I wanted to spend some time listening, mostly, to folks who had been laid off, who lost their job in one way or another, through no fault of their own, victims of this horrific recession that so many families have lived through.”