Representative Mark Sanford
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Thank you. In doing so I would just make the observation that I've been told, I think we've all been told that politics is the art of the possible. And if you think about it, with each of the different congressional offices that you all might represent, each of us has seen a whole host of ideas, great ideas, wonderful ideas go down in smoke because it was just too far out there. It was just not in the realm of possibility. And for a long time that's what's been thought of on the word Social Security, that Social Security was the third rail of politics, touch it and you die, and that it was one of those fringe subjects that if you talked about it you were really jeopardizing either your own congressional district or the congressional district of the person you worked for.
And what I would like to suggest is that is absolutely, positively not the case because for the last year and a half in our congressional district we talked about Social Security but we talked about shifting from a system wherein you send your money to Washington and then you hope it comes back 30 or 40 years later, to instead a series of personal savings accounts. And I know that Nick Smith, or Jim Kolbe in their respective districts were talking about this. I know that Steve Forbes was talking about it in the presidential race. I know the governor talked about it years ago.
And what's happened with this issue is that we won with 97 percent of the vote, that if this was truly the third rail of politics, despite the fact that we talked about it in literally hundreds of town meetings, hundreds of office hours, multiple op-ed visits, editorial board visits, radio talk shows, if this had truly been the third rail of politics, we wouldn't have been able to talk about it to the extent that we did. And I think that what probably sums up that thought best was the town meeting that we held on the Saturday before the elections in November.
Jose Pinera, who had been the Labor Minister in Chile at the time that they changed their system, had come down and was doing a series of town hall meetings in our district. And we were finishing the day -- again, Saturday before the elections in November, with a meeting in an old folks home at a place called the Canterbury House. And what was interesting about this meeting was that two agitators stood up trying to sort of throw darts at the idea of making changes in Social Security and it was not Jose who responded, it was not me who responded, but it was an 83 year old gray haired woman who stands up and essentially turns to the folks and says, "Look, if you've got something meaningful to say, say it. But if not, sit down and shut up."
And I think that what she said made a lot of sense back then. I think what she said makes just as much sense right now, so I will sit down and shut up because these folks have a lot of very meaningful things to say.
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