In sum, I believe that the basic constitutional arguments supporting the power of Congress to change voting qualifications by statute are the same in… - Ted Kennedy

That experience with Teddy made it clear to me, as never before, that health care must be affordable and available for every mother or father who hears a sick child cry in the night and worries about the deductibles and copays if they go to the doctor. But that was just one medical crisis. My family, like every other, has faced many—at every stage of life. I think of my parents and the medical care they needed after their strokes. I think of my son Patrick, who suffered serious asthma as a child and sometimes had to be rushed to the hospital for treatment. (For this reason, we had no dogs in the house when Patrick was young.) I think of my daughter, Kara, diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002. Few doctors were willing to try an operation. One did—and after that surgery and arduous rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, she's alive and healthy today. My family has had the care it needed. Other families have not, simply because they could not afford it.

Our first priority is to stand with the President and our armed forces on the frontlines overseas, and to do all we can to protect the homefront against possible new acts of terrorism. But there is another challenge which also demands the best of all of us, and which I hope we can approach with a new bipartisanship. We must reinforce the nation on the homefront by meeting the great domestic challenges here with the same determination that we all have brought to the great challenge from abroad. Despite all the dangers and difficulties, we enter this period with extraordinary possibilities for progress.

Success in this effort will be achieved if we meet three core objectives. First, we must demand value from our investments. In early education, value is reflected in the quality of a range of important services. The most significant factors are the knowledge and skills of the service providers, and their capacity to form strong relationships with children and their families. These personal characteristics are influenced by training and compensation. Yet thirty states have no training requirements for preschool teachers before they begin to teach. Parking lot attendants are generally paid more to watch our cars than early education professionals are paid to teach our youngest children. On average, early education providers earn 15,430 dollars a year. It can and must become a national priority to change this -- to improve the skills, the pay, and the retention of the professionals who teach our children at the dawn of life.