Political Quotes

“I am going to be brief. The truth is that the Senator we are honoring right now, Tom Harkin, will go down in history as one of the great Senators of this particular period in American history. Not many Senators, if any, have a list of enormous accomplishments anywhere close to what Senator Harkin has accomplished. I would like to tell my colleagues a little story. It turns out that coincidentally, really, I have traveled with Senator Harkin to a number of places around the world as part of congressional delegations. Like most congressional delegations, we meet with the leadership of the country, the President and so forth. But what was interesting in traveling with Senator Harkin is wherever you go, he gets honored by ordinary people in those countries. We went to Vietnam a number of years ago. Many people will not remember, but the truth is that one of the very first people ever to expose the terrible prison conditions that the South Vietnam Government had established was Tom Harkin. So we go there and we meet people who had been imprisoned in tiger cages, and they said: Senator Harkin, thank you very much for exposing those conditions and improving our lives. There was a very emotional response. Then I go with him to Ghana, and it turns out that in Ghana and in countries in Africa, Tom Harkin had been a leader in fighting against child labor. There were kids 8 or 9 years of age who should be in school who were out picking crops.…”