I know the moment we’re in; you know the moment we are in. I know the stakes; you know the stakes. This is far from over. And finally, we’re confront… - Joe Biden

I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?
Why is it that my wife, who is sitting out there in the audience, is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?
[Of his Irish ancestors] Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours? No, it's not because they weren't as smart. It’s not because they didn’t work as hard. It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon which to stand.

In spite of the president's phone call, I remained a vocal critic of the Bush administration's foreign policy priorities through that summer because I didn't trust most of the people he had around him. The civilians in the Department of Defense were unlike any I'd ever seen. They seemed to think our nation was so powerful that we could simply impose our will on the rest of the world with almost no ill consequence. It seemed to me that Rumsfeld and his chief deputy at Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, were so totally in thrall to that conservative think-tank-generated ideology that they were steering the president down a dangerous path. And they were so intent on overturning President Clinton's foreign policy initiatives that they were losing sight of the bigger goal, which was keeping America safe at home and engaged in doing good in the world.

I’ve never seen a time when working folks did well that the wealthy didn’t do very well. Look, it’s the core of our administration’s economic vision, and it’s a fundamental paradigm shift for this nation. For the first time in a couple generations, we’re going to be investing in working families — putting them first and helping them get ahead, rather than the wealthy and the biggest and most powerful people out there.