You know, America’s greatest generation had its rendezvous with destiny and Alaska’s greatest generation had a rendezvous with destiny and the challenge for this generation is to keep that promise. And that’s what campaigns are all about, is maintaining the principles of those who came before us with the programs that are going to serve as legacies for our children. And the issues that the people have raised today are going to be issues that we’ve talked about in Juneau, the issues that we have talked about across the state, they are issues that people talk about at their dinner tables all the time.

Friends, kindred spirits, fellow dreamers, the American dream is also an American promise and an American responsibility. It’s a dream of prosperity and justice, a simple dream that our children will lead better lives than we do today — safer, healthier, materially more secure, intellectually more enriching and spiritually more fulfilling. It’s Dr. King’s dream that one day we’ll judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

Welcome to Alaska, the Last Frontier… where moose are a road hazard, fish are a way of life, and where people know not only the bus schedules, but the train schedules, the ferry schedules and the plane schedules. Transportation matters to us and on behalf of Alaska, thank you for moving our freight and our people. We don’t know where we would be without you, but it certainly would be somewhere else.

I figured I’d get Noah started the same way the rest of us grew up in the family, which is with education all around us. I come from a line of teachers. My grandmother taught for a long time. She told me many times that if it hadn’t been for the NEA she’d have never gotten a job. And my sister-in-law teaches here at Bartlett. My mother-in-law teaches. So for me this is a little bit like a family dinner, except there is a lot more people here, and I don’t have to clean dishes afterwards.