America is the greatest country on Earth, but we didn’t get here because it was preordained.
We got here because our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents, they were all willing to roll up their sleeves and work, to work on behalf of freedom, to work on behalf of opportunity.
A lot of our parents, grandparents, great grandparents came here from other countries to start a new life because they realized that if they worked hard here in America then there was nothing that could stop them, and that there was a unique legacy in this nation of being able to live out your dreams.
Over the last decade, some of those dreams felt like they were slipping away.
People felt as if the economy was only for those at the very top and that no matter how hard you worked you were treading water, and people were having trouble making ends meet and paying for health care and paying for college educations.
I think a lot of young people started feeling that maybe the 21st century wouldn't be the American Century like the 20th century was.
What our campaign was about in 2008 was reminding everybody that there is nothing we can't do when we join together as citizens from every walk of life, that there is nothing we can't accomplish when we dream big dreams and are willing to work for them.
Over the last two years, as difficult as things have been, as big as the problems that we inherited were, I have been so inspired because I've had the opportunity to make sure that every American has decent health care, to make sure that an economy that was shrinking is growing again, to start putting people back to work, to make sure we've got equal pay for equal work, to make sure that we've got a couple of wonderful women on the Supreme Court, to make sure that young people can afford a college education, to make sure that we brought back 100,000 troops from Iraq, to make sure that we're respected around the world once again, to start investing in research and development so that our economy can thrive, to make sure that we're investing in clean energy, so that we're at the forefront not only of growing our economy but of saving the planet.