Verbatim transcript from tape:

AL FROM: And now, I want to turn this over to Will Marshall to moderate the last panel. Will Marshall is somebody you haven't heard a lot about in the last few days, but I think most of you know has been my partner in crime for 17 years at the DLC and PPI. We used to be young. But, Will is really the brains of this operation. He was first policy director of the DLC when we started, and in 1989 when we decided we needed a think thank to really give this idea or this movement an idea center, Will moved over. And he has turned the Progressive Policy Institute into this terrific center of ideas in the Democratic Party, and in the country.

In 1993, after Bill Clinton ran for president on largely DLC ideas, and PPI ideas, the Washington Post did a story on PPI and called it the Mighty Mouse of American think tanks. But Will's leadership in developing ideas, and driving the policy debate, I think is without parallel in this country, and I just think he's one of these guys who never gets the credit he deserves, but is really responsible, as much as any other single person, for shaping this new Democrat movement. So, I'm delighted to have Will moderate this last panel as we bring this wonderful national conversation to a close.

(Applause.)

WILL MARSHALL: Thanks very much, Al, for that very generous introduction. I see that the really hard core folks are still here, we appreciate your being here, and we want to now give you something completely different. We're going to hear from three local leaders, and three people who are not auditioning for political office yet. And, we want to come back to the theme that I think is really at the heart of this national conversation in New York City, and that's making Americans safer, security, which has come back into the dominant position on the American agenda that it occupied for most of our adult lives, but sort of that slipped in the '90s, security, and those wonderful days migrated to the edge of our consciousness.

But, it's back, and it's back with a difference. In the Cold War, we had national security as kind of a backdrop for our whole political debate. But now security is the top domestic priority of the United States, as well as the top international priority. And that's new. We've been very vulnerable before, however much we may, my generation, have laughed at the duck and cover drills we used to do back in elementary school. There wasn't anything very funny about the threat of nuclear extinction. It seemed real. But it turned out to be a threat that could be deterred.

Unfortunately, the threat that the global terrorism presents can't be deterred, or at least if it can we haven't figured out yet how to do that. A threat that can't be deterred has got to be prevented. This presents our country with an enormous new challenge, preventing attacks on a homeland spans 3-1/2 million square miles of territory, has over 12,000 miles of coastline, and at least 75 major population centers.

So we've discovered that, as David Brooks just said, that the United States has this enormous military advantage. Never in human history has there been such a big gap between number one and all the other countries, but that can't really defend us against this new threat. Unparalleled military might alone just isn't going to do it, so we have to redefine what security means, and redefine the tools by which we make ourselves safer.

It's no longer just the province of our military, or our federal intelligence, or law enforcement, or border agencies. Keeping America safe from terrorism and responding when they elude our defenses has to be the urgent task of state and local law enforcement agencies, and emergency response folks. So the localities, which have long played the primary role in public safety, and civil defense, and public health, not find themselves on the front lines in this battle for homeland defense.

And the challenge we face today is to turn what we used to call our first responders into first preventors against terrorist attacks. This really demands national leadership in direction, we haven't really gotten it yet. But there are just too many potential targets, too many points of vulnerability. We've got to identify those key vulnerabilities. We've got to set real priorities, we can't defend everything. We've got to work out an intelligent division of labor between what Washington does and the states do, and the cities do, and the regions do.

So we're about to embark on a tremendous adventure in federalism, and we're going to have to steer a course between a kind of situation where we have 50 state plans, everybody is going off in different directions on one extreme or the other extreme, which Senator Biden has talked about, which is that of federalizing everything that walks, talks, and moves.

We've made really strikingly little progress on the homeland defense front in the last 10 months. Unlike the fairly competent handling of the war in Afghanistan, the Bush administration I think has not been very surefooted when it comes to how we defend ourselves here at home, and we're running to catch up.

We're very happy the administration has finally embraced the Homeland Security Department after resisting it for all these months. But the real key to the success of this department is going to be how it works with state and local officials, and agencies, and police forces, and responders, and emergency workers. If it doesn't find a way to break down bureaucratic barriers, not only horizontally across all these federal agencies, but also vertically, and really empower local leaders, equip them with the tools and resources and the strategic direction that they need to do their part of this job right, then we're going to fail in this critical new task facing the country.

We have a big agenda here at PPI that we worked on, and John Cowan (sp) who was here yesterday talked about it, and he worked with the folks you see on the stage. I won't go into it now, we're running late. I know that Kwame Kilpatrick has got to get on a plane. But let me just say that what we need to do ??

[TAPE CHANGE.]

WILL MARSHALL: -- So with that, let me introduce the front line commanders in this new battle for homeland defense that are with us here today.

Kwame Kilpatrick is the youngest mayor in Detroit's history. Before his election he was the Democratic leader of the Michigan House of Representatives, the first African American to ever lead his party in that body in the legislature. Politics is in his family's blood, he's the son of Representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, and he's a next generation leader. He's the chair of the DLC's local elected officials network, and in which capacity he's been charged with seeking out and engaging the next generation of new Democratic leaders who are here in force at this national conversation. He's been a strong voice for new Democratic ideas, like charter schools and brownfield development, but also on homeland security, where he's worked out a comprehensive plan that he will talk about shortly.

I'm just going to go ahead and introduce Mayor O'Malley, and county executive Ron Sims, then I'll turn it over to you, Mr. Mayor.

Martin O'Malley was elected in 1999 as the youngest mayor in Baltimore's history, with 91 percent of the votes. We haven't seen majorities like that since the death of the old Soviet Union. He's a former assistant states attorney, and a Baltimore City councilman who oversaw the city's police department there. He ran on a strong anti-crime platform, rooted in New Democrat innovations. And one of the great things that's happened under his tenure is a 30 percent reduction in violent crime in Baltimore. He imported the Comstat model that was invented here in New York, or first applied here for using computer mapping and decentralizing decision making and accountability to fight crime. He took that model and in a brilliant insight applied it across the gamut of what city services are provided in Baltimore. And in the U.S. Conference of Mayors he's also been a great leader on this question of homeland defense and emergency preparedness in general.

And Ron Sims is the county executive for King County, which is Washington State's largest county. And he typifies the new breed of county executive, the most important new leaders in American politics, in this era of metro politics, the phenomenon that David Brooks was just talking about. I guess you represent lots of sprawl people, Ron. But, really the rise of the county executives to be regional political leaders is one of the most interesting phenomenon in American politics in the last 20 years. Prior to his election Ron served 11 years on the King County Council, he was first elected executive in 1997. He's won regional praise and national recognition for leadership in a three county effort to restore runs of king salmon, which he was just explaining to me, the great game fish of the Northwest. He's also a leader in managing growth in King County, he's made curbing sprawl the top priority over his last five years, and is one of the most innovative thinkers in America on moving people, on trying to untangle congestion in this high growth area.

So thank you all for being with us, and Mayor Kilpatrick, I'll yield to you.

(Applause.)

MAYOR KWAME KILPATRICK: Thanks, Will. And most of you know, especially since you're still here you have to be die-hards, the type of information that Will puts out every day and how it's used. And I was just sitting there talking to Mayor O'Malley about someone actually compiling all the things this organization talks about, and new ideas that we talk about, and you kind of read them and say, hey, I'm all right, I'm doing some of that stuff. So it feels good, and thank you, Will.

Let me just say that I'll be very brief, and I'm going to rush a little bit, because I have a 1:45 flight, and this is New York, and I know it's hard to get around. Even though we have police lights and sirens and all that stuff, people here don't care. As a matter of fact, a couple of people waved as us yesterday with less than five fingers. So we wanted t make sure that we got out of here early enough to make it back to the airport.

When I ran for mayor, we ran on a quality of life agenda, talking about kids, cops, a clean city. It was a great campaign. We were down, we only had about 12 percent when we started out. My opponent was well over 50 percent. He was going to win, he was the winner, forget about it, no one give the young guy any money, he can't win, it's done. And the quality of life message was really working. As a matter of fact, when we went into the primary, which oddly was held on September 11th, we won the primary. It astounded most people. September 11th, the race didn't only -- it changed, of course, but America and the world changed, and that had a tremendous impact on the race. People no longer cared about education, they really didn't care about healthcare, they didn't care about any of the issues of cleaning up and planting trees. They just wanted to know about terrorism and about was Detroit prepared for that.

The person I ran against was a 30-year police officer. He was a person who led on homicide cases in the city of Detroit, actually led and was the commander of the major crimes unit. So from that moment forward he started to win the race again. But, we had to come back with a message of information sharing, and not using 1960s police tactics to engage the whole issue of homeland defense, or the whole issue of anti-terrorism, or protecting our homeland, or protecting citizens in the City of Detroit. We face unique challenges in Detroit. I'm a northern border city, one of the busiest points of entry in the United States of America, about $1.4 billion in trade that comes across our river every single day from Canada. The former secretary, Rodney Slater, I see him out there, he understands the transportation problems we have, and the backups on our border. When that border doesn't work the entire economy, especially of the manufacturing industry in this country, can very well stop. So we had some unique challenges, some unique issues to work out, and we had to deal with before we engaged this whole issue of security.

We also had to be very mindful that in our city we have the largest Arab population anywhere in the world, besides the Middle East, which is a huge issue also to deal with when you're talking about civil liberties, civil rights, human rights, and making sure that people are being treated with dignity. So you can't just go in and kick in the door and arrest everybody. And that was not the tactic that we had to use. So we wanted to make sure that we had a plan that dealt with all of those different issues of information sharing, a regional approach, to make sure that we brought in the hospital systems that were around the City of Detroit, the law enforcement units that were around the City of Detroit. And we also had a huge issue also with law enforcement, in that our local police department was forced not into providing national security at the border. We were spending -- we spent, as a matter of fact, the City of Detroit, between September 11th and December 31st of last year, we spent $3 million just on overtime on border security, which was an expense that was never before in our budget. This year we're going to spend about $11 million on border security, I have to spend out of my general fund, which is something that was not contemplated in any budget. You have local beat police officers now providing national security. So in that unique problem how do we fill that void, and fill that gap?

We went out and got John Cohen and P.S. Cahm, who work with the PPI and all these different entities, to come together and figure out a way that we can start to work on a plan for homeland security in our city. And they actually did a dynamic job for us. As a matter of fact, we boast as being the first city to deliver our plan to Governor Ridge, and to the president, and actually going out and meeting with him about this plan, and why we had to do it. And it basically surrounded two very important issues.

One is that, to protect the city, those that live, work, and visit the City of Detroit, you do not have to deny the opportunity to have basic, quality city services. You can have both of these things happening all at once, and you actually must have them, which is another reason why I called the Mayor of Baltimore, and I said, I'm going to steal your City Stat program, then he offered it to me, so I couldn't steal it. So we are actually now in touch with his organization as a part of doing this homeland security, because the basic way that you provide protection for your citizens is to have the opportunity where everyone is being held accountable, and everyone knows what everyone else is doing. And you have the technology in place to be able to run these different programs.

And two that the city would not compromise its commitment to uphold civil liberties, and to sustain and systematically strengthen the city's proactive, and positive partnership with the increasingly diverse communities throughout the city, the region, and the state. One of our huge partners in this is the Arab and Caldean community in the City of Detroit. But, another huge partner is Canada. There's no way that we can provide the type of homeland security that our citizens would be proud of if we didn't invite Canada to the table. So one of the things we did initially is start to meet with Mayor Hertz and Windsor, and also the entire government in the province of Ontario, to talk about how do we provide border security better. And they put us on the international screen. So you have this mayor in the City of Detroit now doing international work. But , it invited Governor Ridge and President Bush to a lot of the summits that we've held in the City of Detroit. As a matter of fact, later this year we're having a huge border summit in Detroit, because we don't want the northern border to be forgotten, and particularly the City of Detroit.

Our police officers, our firefighters, as we've mentioned several times in this conference, are our first responders. They're on the front line of homeland security. And it's important that that's recognized federally, and on the state level. And since I know there are a few state representatives and Senators here, I see a couple that I know, we need to make sure that the dollars go to the places where they can impact this the most. And I'm a former legislator, and former Democratic leader of the Michigan House of Representatives, and probably last year I wouldn't have this same opinion, but we really need to get the dollars away from the federal government and directly to cities where they can make the most impact on this issue. It's important for us that you allow us to make our case on that notion. The only way we provide adequate security -- we did a test run the other day in our tunnel, where we had -- we actually performed a test where there was a terrorist threat in the tunnel. And we found out that we didn't have adequate communications for our fire department to talk to our police department, or adequate communications to even get messages outside of the tunnel. So therefore, our city was unsafe in the event of an emergency. But, we didn't know that until we did the test run. Now we know what type of technology we need to cure that particular problem, but it has to go from the federal government to the state government, and then we have to prove our case to the state government, which we should, but we need the dollars to flow from that point, because that protection of that tunnel protects the country, it protects the state, and it protects the citizens in the region of Metropolitan Detroit.

In closing I just want to say that, in this whole notion of information sharing, when I took over as mayor in the City of Detroit we had little more than desktops, as far as the technology infrastructure in the City of Detroit. It was non-existent. That word was just a word that people said. There was no technology there. And we've been able to start to slowly, in six and a half months, build technology infrastructure. As a matter of fact, we've just broken ground on a new facility, we've partnered with agencies around us, particularly Oakland County, which has been spending the last 20 years, one of the wealthiest counties in the country, building a technology infrastructure, and now opening up ourselves to more coordination with them, so we don't have to do the same thing that they did 20 years ago. We're now sharing information with counties around this, sharing our information with them, they're sharing information with us, but also sharing their technology. And in cities, especially large cities, for years we've wanted to keep everything closed, and to ourselves. But, just opening up ourselves to the rest of our region, we found that there are more resources right at home, in the region that we live in, than we could ever imagine. And that's speeding up the process in protecting our citizens.

So in closing, what I wanted to say was, I believe that the biggest thing in this homeland defense, in this homeland security, in this notion of homeland security, that we all do as local communities, and local elected officials, is to open ourselves up to the region around us, really bring in the ideas and the resources that you have immediately around your locality, and really bring those to the table, and you will find that there are a lot of things you can do right at home that will strengthen whatever you have there, as far as your defense, or anti-terrorism, or anything against weapons of mass destruction. And what has happened in Detroit is that has bloomed a tremendous partnership, not only between the counties around us, but with the country of Canada, and with the province of Ontario, which now makes us international and global entities in this whole war against terrorism.

Thank you very much. And I wish I had the opportunity to hear everyone else.

MAYOR MARTIN O'MALLEY: That's a good segue. Openness, transparency, and accountability, it's an honor to be on a platform with progressive leaders like Ron Sims, and also Kwame Kilpatrick, who understand that the survival of cities is very much like the survival of our nation, it really depends on new relationships, and on a much higher degree of openness, transparency, and accountability.

This is a great time in our country's history. You know, there's -- Arnold Toynbee's Theory of the Progress of man says that man progresses, I think we can also assume from that nations progress, in response to adversity. And we certainly have our share of adversity as a nation today. And in that adversity also comes tremendous opportunities. If we have the guts, if we have the courage, if we have the imagination to live up to our primary responsibilities as public servants, which is to provide for the security of this nation, and the citizens we serve, there are tremendous opportunities for this country in the next century. Homeland security and crime should not be an either-or proposition, 3,000 of our fellow citizens were killed in this country, many of them right down the street from us. And over the last ten years in the City of Baltimore 6,000 of my fellow citizens have been killed. Not by airplanes, not by necessarily the sort of bombs that terrorists make, but by the foreign chemical attacks of cocaine and heroin, much of which comes through America's ports, much of which comes through America's airports. And homeland security can and will make this a safer, and more secure nation in each and every one or our neighborhoods.

For the last 322 days, since September 11th, I've been beginning remarks on homeland security with a throwaway introductory sentence that says, we need a new paradigm. For 322 days I've been saying that we need a new paradigm. I'm not going to say that anymore. We don't need a new paradigm, what we need is some new action, 322 days that our firefighters and police have been vulnerable for lack of protective equipment, 322 days that our healthcare workers have been vulnerable for lack of proper inoculations, an proper protective equipment, 322 days that our 650,000 local police have been unable to properly access a federal watch list, because there's 58 of them, and they don't talk to each other, 322 days. We don't need a new paradigm, we need a new sense of urgency, we need to for new federal relationships, and we need new action. And we needed it 322 days ago.

About three weeks ago I had one of the most encouraging meetings of the last 322 days, with some leading managers and members of an agency in our national and international intelligence community, which is kind of an oxymoron. But, these leaders said that they end every single meeting, as they struggle as the dedicated public servants that they are also, as they struggle to share information, to share databases, to make sure the intelligence is properly collected, properly analyzed, and properly disseminated, they close every meeting with these words, and this should give all of you heart, who have been worried about this problem, as well you should be. They end every meeting with, remember, meanwhile, they're here, and they're trying to kill us.

And I felt so good to hear members of the top level of the federal government act like that, because a lot of times you watch the debate and it puts you in mind of that great song from 1776, the musical, where they piddle, twiddle, and resolve, but not one damn thing is ever solved. It was good to know that there's a certain urgency in our intelligence community that understands they're here, and in the meantime, they're trying to kill us. Shortly after September 11th, in fact, the very next day, the only person I could get to give me any good advice and return my call was former Senator Gary Hart, who I really wish were president now, because he had some terrific advice. He said, do not wait for the federal government, Mr. Mayor, to do what you need to do right now for the people of your city. The federal government will be years, and years, and years catching up with this new reality, and your people need you now. Surround yourself with the smartest folks you have from Johns Hopkins, Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and wherever else you can find them, and put together your own plan, and do it now. And I can tell you that in the City of Baltimore we pride ourselves on not waiting for help from the federal government. In fact, back in the War of 1812, when Congress was scattered all throughout the woods around Washington, D.C., the British government was turned back in Baltimore by a fort that was built by privately funded dollars. So we don't wait for the federal government, if we did all of us would still be singing God Save the Queen today.

Now, from the smart people I have been able to learn a few things. And when I was at a Senate Appropriations Committee a member of the Senate said, well, how will know we get there? We have so many millions of acres, and square miles of land in this vast country of ours, how will we know, we can't protect every inch, how will we know when we've gotten to a place when we're actually doing what we need to do on homeland defense? So ladies and gentlemen, the next time a U.S. Senator asks you that, get out your pens, I now have the seven points that will tell us we have arrived. Point number one, every metropolitan area has a local intelligence network, where the local police of all the jurisdictions share information just like we do now around fugitive task forces, just like we do now, around car theft task force, every region should have an intelligence gathering capacity that covers the entire region, where local law enforcement shares information daily, instantly, routinely, ideally, when the federal government catches up with us, with the federal government, as well.

Point number two, there should be, when we arrive at a proper homeland defense, one federal watch list, and not 58 that don't talk to each other. And it should be as easily accessed by an officer on the beat in a car stop as it is by the head of the CIA. Point number three, every metropolitan area should have a bio-surveillance system with their hospitals, where they share in real time, the respiratory symptoms, the symptoms that are encountered by paramedics, by emergency rooms, those sorts of streams of information that can be shared readily, that we put together in Baltimore within three weeks, without a single dime of federal help. Every region should have one.

Point number four, every metropolitan area should have vulnerability assessments done of their infrastructure and likely targets. And point number five, related to point number four, is that emergency response plans should be graded to the levels of response, given the nature of the threat nationally, and also keyed the vulnerability plans, a simple concept, one we don't do yet.

Point number six, first responders, firefighters, police, healthcare workers should be properly equipped and properly inoculated. Point number seven, all emergency communications systems should have interoperability, and redundancy. Those are the seven points. That's what you can tell the U.S. senators that it will look like when we get there. And in the meantime, they're here, and they're trying to kill us.

And we can do this, folks, we can absolutely do this. Ron Sims does this every day. Mayor Kilpatrick does this every day. I do this every day. Metropolitan government leaders every day join forces, combine resources, share information across archaic, city-county borders, and we get the job done on a lot of levels. We can do this, and we can tell you now exactly what it costs. We can tell you how much it costs in the City of Baltimore to buy dosimeters so we could detect radiation for all of our emergency personnel. We can tell you how much it costs, because we couldn't wait any more for the federal government to buy them. We can tell you that it's going to cost $24 million to covert from chlorine to bleach in our treatment facilities in our water and waste water plants. We can tell you that it cost $3,369,719 for police overtime related to national security, homeland defense over this last year, and we can tell you that it cost $227,239 for our health department to help respond to the anthrax scares that reached the Baltimore area from the Post Office, and also to set up the bio-surveillance network. What we can't tell you is when a single dollar will arrive from the federal government to help us with any of this. We can't tell you that. We can't tell you that.

I ask you, and I think that the question we all have to ask ourselves, as we exert the Democratic Party's leadership in this area, and lord knows this country needs leadership in this area, with some urgency, do you think the American people would ever countenance sending the Rangers into Afghanistan without proper equipment? Then why does our president, 322 days later, have our firefighters and police in all our population centers sitting there vulnerable, without proper protective equipment?

Do you think that the American people would ever send our soldiers into Operation Anaconda without giving them the ability to communicate with one another, to communicate with their commanders, to communicate with the surveillance satellites? Do you think they would ever do that? And yet, why is it that when we read in the New York Times that firefighters died here in the City of New York because they could not communicate in a timely way with the police department, why is it that we have such a difficult time getting one federal dime into upgrading communications apparatus in all of our major metropolitan areas? I think the American people would never send our troops abroad to win a war, and tell them not to rack up any overtime while they're doing it. And yet, 322 days later, the president of the United States is allowing the poorest people in this country to shoulder all of the cost related to police overtime for homeland defense. Could you imagine the American people telling the U.S. Marines that we can't pay or equip you because a trillion dollar tax cut was just too important to this country's future?

We have a crisis in our country right now. It's a crisis of political will. It's a crisis that's running from security, running from responsibility, and running form opportunity. And we have also a crisis in our traditional federal, state, and local relationships, ladies and gentlemen, they're failing us, they're failing us badly, and there is going to be recrimination from all quarters when the second attack comes and the American people ask, who was trying to do something to prevent this.

Our federal-state-local relationship is failing us miserably on welfare reform, and this is a bipartisan failure, ladies and gentlemen. Democratic and Republican governors alike have taken the hundreds of millions of dollars in welfare reform in the savings, they've let them drop through supplanting to their bottom line, and rather than investing them in the skills of our people, and in the top quality workforce that we can create in this country in the 21st Century, they spread them all around suburban areas like it's reparations, suburban reparations for a failed welfare system, rather than investing them where there's the political will, where there's the political responsibility, where there's the accountability, the openness, and the transparency to bring about some return on that investment in our most important capital, our human capital. And it's failing us miserably in our national security. The federal, state and local relationship is failing us in homeland defense, and we've got to change it.

I'm going to leave you with one example. On September 12th, the day after the September 11th attacks, 46 out of 50 states had failed to submit emergency management plans to access new federal dollars for new equipment for their firefighters. They had failed to file the plans, 46 out of 50 on September 12th. And, therefore, appropriations from FY '99 were untouched; FY 2000, untouched; FY 2001, untouched. Now, in each of those three years, the City of Baltimore, an early beneficiary in 1998, as you might have seen from the tunnel fire, benefited from new equipment. But then the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Act was changed, so everything had to go to the state house. And as a result, for three years, while we filed our plans with our state emergency management agency, for three years it sat. For three years, the equipment and the appropriations that were there to buy that equipment sat, and never reached us. It still hasn't reached us. Not that we haven't dutifully turned it in, sent it down to Annapolis, postage prepaid. We have yet to see a single dime of those federal dollars appropriated piling up for three years.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is no way to win a war. This is no way to win a war. And in the meanwhile, they're here, and they're trying to kill us.

We have a responsibility right now, and it's probably the most weighty responsibility that we can ever have as public servants, and that is to safeguard the lives of our citizens, to preserve, defend, and protect the future of the United States. And if we rise to this challenge, and if we rise to this responsibility, as we've risen in the past and other times in our history, we will not only meet America's security needs in the 21st Century, but we can open up tremendous new opportunities, not just for ourselves, but for the world that we share. Opportunities in health sciences, opportunities in human development, opportunities in transportation, opportunities in new technologies, but that opportunity can only come about if we have the courage to urgently reshape what has become a dysfunctional federal, state and local relationship. We need to serve the critical needs of this new democracy, and there is no return without investment. And there is no victory, especially no victory in war, without sacrifice. We have a responsibility to reshape that dysfunctional federal, state and local relationship. It's not serving us well, it's failing us. And in the meantime, they're here, and they're trying to kill us.

Thanks.

(Applause.)

RON SIMS: Mayor O'Malley, as always, hits the nail on the head. He provided a rather comprehensive position, and we, too, are borrowing our stat system, and incorporating it in our government. I also wanted to acknowledge the Mayor of Detroit, who is also an incredible rising star.

I have to thank some people. I'm from an old school. This is New Democrats. I'm from old traditions. First, I want to thank the Microsoft Corporation, one of the leading employers in our region, Fred Humphries in particular, for sponsoring last night's dinner and reception. It is a great corporation who, as a result of everybody who has put their products on the computers, has now created the greatest philanthropist in the history of this country and of the world. A person who is committed, through the Gates Foundation, to doing remarkable things.

I also see, I believe, I know I see Representative Ellen Summers, who was a New Democrat before the term was coined, and she is the Ways and Means Chair of the Washington State legislature, an incredible talent. Like I said, she was a New Democrat before there was a term New Democrat, and she is here.

Also sitting next to her, I believe, is Representative Ruth Keagey (sp), who is also a remarkable talent and who understands the need to be innovative and imaginative as well. So, I did want to acknowledge them and their work.

I have three kids, they're really wonderful. I have a son who is 24, I thought was allergic to books, and is now a librarian. I have a son who is going to graduate this fall from Washington State University who came back on an internship, and came to dinner and started talking about all the world's problems, I was incredibly impressed. He talked about the world, and local problems, national problems, I was also impressed. And local problems, encyclopedic knowledge of local challenges and failures.

And then proceeded to tell me that, daddy, it's time for you to step aside and let young people with vigor and vision and backbone take over. And I said to him, Daniel, I did that to my dad. When I was in college, I had a 'fro, I could actually grow one. I had a dashiki, my sunglasses, and a beard. I had my jeans, my army boots and jacket, went home and told my father how his generation had failed us. But I said to my son Daniel, I said that after I had the tuition check in my hand, not before.

And then I have a son Aaron, Aaron is 14. Every single cell is 14.

I want to talk about Daniel's indictment. Daniel's indictment, I have a son 24 and 22. They're moving aggressively into adulthood. The world I promised them at their birth was not a world where I encourage people to spy on their neighbors. I didn't ask the Postal Service, I didn't ask UPS, I didn't ask Federal Express. I didn't ask them to spy on their neighbor.

I'm in a neighborhood where we have people who are Jewish, people who are Muslim, people who are Sheik, people who are -- you name the faith, Baptist, Catholic. A neighborhood that is strong because everybody believes in the value of everyone, and how integral they are. And I have found great offense to a debate that has gone on in this country that has encouraged us to spy on each other. That is not national security.

I grew up in Spokane, Washington. And I grew up in a neighborhood where there were a lot of Japanese. Spokane is 300 miles east of Seattle. I don't even know how people got to Spokane. My parents came there in World War II. How everybody else got there is beyond me. A neighborhood full of Japanese who were repatriated in World War II because people thought the Japanese were going to war against this country. And yet now I'm in a neighborhood full of Sudanese, Eritreans, Ethiopians, and Middle Easterners, and we have remained silent over the greatest single racial profiling in the name of terrorism that has disturbed their civil liberties and their civil rights. That's not what I promised my kids.

I promised my kids we would be a great country, and their quality of life would be greater than my own. That we wouldn't infringe upon that. That government's job is to provide an infrastructure, whether it's transportation, whether it is Internet, whether or not it's social services, to provide an infrastructure so that entrepreneurs could create the wealth that has made this the most extraordinary country in the history of humankind. That's what I promised them.

Homeland security means that we have a commitment by the federal government not to continue to give us categories of funding, but to recognize regions, metropolitan areas. In this country today, the top 20 metropolitan areas of the United States produce 37 percent of the nation's payroll, and 43 percent of its GNP. If you take the top 30 metropolitan areas in the United States, it's over half the nation's population, and over 60 percent of its GNP.

So, when Mayor O'Malley talks about the fact that we don't have a federal partner, we don't have a federal partner. We've embarked on homeland security on our own, our own plans, our own health departments, our own police departments, our own fire departments, because we have not had -- we've had a lot of rhetoric, and a heck of a lot of speeches, but we haven't had the activity and the partnership. It's like being, as my wife says to me, we may be married, and we may be in love, but it must manifest itself in acts. She calls them chores, or honeydews. Well, we're waiting today, because we've given the federal government a lot of honeydews, and they continue to talk like they're going to do something, but we have not seen a single dime.

But we're in a metropolitan century today. You don't fund cities, you don't fund counties. You must fund metropolitan areas. If a terrorist acts today in the City of Baltimore, it will affect Baltimore County. If a terrorist acts today in the City of Bellevue in my county, it will impact all of King County. It is metropolitan areas now that must be the focus. We're in a metropolitan century.

I heard people talk about cities and suburbs ad nauseam. We don't even function that way anymore. It's a term whose art should be lost. Cities and suburbs are what we did in the '90s, and the '80s, and the '70s. The world is growing by metropolitan areas. And most other nations have embraced that concept, except this one that continues to talk about cities, and suburbs, as if somehow or other that distinction is meaningful when it is not. It is not demographically. We've seen the colorization and the increased poverty in suburbs. We find common themes. If a person is held up in traffic in a metropolitan area, they don't care whether they're in a suburb or a core city, they want traffic relief.

Pollution affects an entire metropolitan area. No single city in a metropolitan area can afford to fail. We're in a metropolitan age, the 21st Century, and we need to abandon 20th Century terms defining ourselves politically or operationally. Organisms, that's what metropolitan areas are. That's why I'm so glad to see Secretary Slater, because he gets it. When he was the head of the U.S. Department of Transportation, he talked about metropolitan areas, the need to fund metropolitan transportation systems, whether that was rail, and I'm talking about rail corridors, fast track, to be able to move cargo, whether it was commuter rail, or light rail, or road expansion, or bicycle pathways, metropolitan areas is what he talked about.

The ability to create them, allow them to function as a single economic unit, metropolitan. I hope one day we have a conference on metropolitan needs, and metropolitan growth, and metropolitan strategies. We find the person in my neighborhood, which is an affluent neighborhood in Seattle, who thinks the same way as we've found suburban neighborhoods. I don't care whether you go and call them Home Depots, whether you go to Home Depot in one part of the county or the other, the people who go there have the same values, whether they're in our traditional urban neighborhoods, or our suburban neighborhoods.

We need to think metropolitan, which is why Mayor O'Malley, John Stroger, Cook County Chair, why Mayor Hahn of Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Commissioners, all of us have signed a letter, because we're going to have our metropolitan conference, where we're going to talk about metropolitan transportation needs, and security needs. We're not waiting anymore of using 19th and 20th Century rhetoric to talk about the future. We know we've got to get moving again.

We'd like to be able to believe that the federal government is going to be partner, but it has categories upon categories of function. So whether it is security, or transportation, we're going to be unable to do anything in the metropolitan areas unless we redefine the debate. We're not going to wait for it to be redefined by anybody but ourselves. So, we're going to have our meeting. And we're going to have our strategies with Congress as metropolitan communities.

No nation, no nation would allow those central areas that are important to its GNP to remain vulnerable. But we have. You know, when we do our terrorism planning, you know what Mayor O'Malley and Mayor Kilpatrick and I do? We talk about containment. See if a radiated bomb goes off, we'll say containment. If we have a biological agent, we say, if it's aerosol, containment. If we have gas bombs, we say containment. Do you know why we say containment? Because we are so congested in every one of those communities we can't move people.

In Washington, D.C., when the plane hit the Pentagon, there was a five-hour traffic jam, couldn't get out. Five hours. The system that seems most logical to use is the most vulnerable to terrorist attack. People will use it to flee and remain part. So we talk about containment because our transportation system is broken, because it's never been a priority in terrorism, and it's never been made a priority in the economic welfare of this country.

Metropolitan systems. So we're going to have our meeting and talk about the needs of the federal government to be a partner, to move away from the categories, to look at metropolitan systems, who now are functioning very well politically, who are functioning that way socially, and the demographics and the trends in those areas are not going to change. People are moving into metropolitan areas, that's where the jobs are. So, we're going to move ahead of the curve. And yet, one day, we may see a federal dollar. We may see a federal dollar. But we're not going to wait for the federal dollars. Our economy and our future depends on us moving boldly ahead. And we're going to move boldly ahead.

And in closing, my son when he was 14, the school sent me a letter. It said: Dear Mr. Sims, thank you for volunteering to be the parent chaperone on the Mount Rainier Climb. Mount Rainier is 14,539 feet. You're taking in one-third less oxygen on the top than you are on the bottom. So, I said to my wife, look what this sadist did this time. I managed through a series of psychological processes to convince myself that I was going to be the base camp cook. I was going to bring my binoculars and watch them ascend the mountain.

I went to the first parent meeting. They said, Mr. Sims, you're on rope team number four. I went to my doctor the next day unscheduled. He's been my doctor for 21 years, sat there until he saw me. Walked in and said, doc, this is going to be the most important decision you've ever made for me, I want to know right now, are we doctor-patient or Mike and Ron? He said, well, after 21 years I hope we're Mike and Ron. I said, Mike, I need a medical reason not to climb Mount Rainier.

It was an interesting group, young women did not want to climb with young men. Young women found young men to be obnoxious, careless, oblivious to planning, and oblivious to making good strategic or tactical decisions. Young men said young women were too weak, and where would they go to the bathroom. And young people voted unanimously, much to my delight, that people my age shouldn't be on a rope team at all.

Mount Rainier is not going to be captured by diary, by photograph, by painting, by poem, or story. God leaves some things unquantifiable because they are so magnificent. Clouds dance below your feet, you can touch the stars, and you can see forever.

I was on a rope team with three other young women. They said, Mr. Sims, are you ready? I said, yes. And they pulled me right up the mountain, because everybody knows that young women don't climb mountains, they fly up mountains.

Young men can handle heavier weights, and people my age know that mountains literally and figuratively in life are conquered one step at a time. But what I learned from that mountain is that everybody counts on a rope team. You move as strong as the weakest member, and you're as fast as the slowest member. Everybody counts on a rope team.

In our communities, whether you're rich or poor, whether you're business or labor, whether you're environmentalist or developer, everybody counts. We're the world's grand experiment. No other country, no other country lacks a common gene pool but this one, the world's grand experiment. So may we touch our stars, may we see forever, and may we summit the great expectations of this country. May we have grand and robust metropolitan ??

[TAPE CHANGE.]

WILL MARSHALL: -- two really powerful statements, I wish some of the federal officers who spoke earlier had been here to hear them. But we'll have to find ways to help you get that message of a dysfunctional federal, state, local relationship out. And thank you for staying.

Blueprint Keywords: Extra Security