 Well, thank you. Thank you very much. And a special thank you to Larry Bathgate and Bob Mossbacker and Alec Cortellus. It's good to see so many old friends here, and it's good to see that you're carrying on the fight and with reinforcements. To those of you who are new, welcome aboard. It's a pleasure to welcome all of you not to our home, but to America's home. Nancy stopped me from referring to it as public housing. And I can't think of a better group to have here, because by making our party work, you're doing so much to make our democracy work. You're giving our party the ability to go to the voters directly, to put the case of the party as a whole directly, and to register and get out the vote directly. And oh my, how important that last one is. When you stop to think in recent elections, not too many more than half of the registered voters have been voting. And this just, we can't stand this. We've got to get our people out there and voting. I believe that means that a certain vice president will be moving in here, as they say in England, directly. I'm confident that when the American people sort things out, they'll vote in unprecedented numbers on all levels for our candidates this year. It's just this simple, we have the case for a future of peace and prosperity, and the liberals don't. And it looks to me as if the liberals know it. The way they're campaigning this year reminds me of what someone once said, that politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. But think of America and where it's been and where it is today. Start with America's families. Between 1977 and 1981, I don't know why I picked those years. The after-inflation income of the typical American family fell by almost 7%. Since then, it's risen by more than 10%. Some say, well, yes, but the average hides that many are falling and a few are rising, not so. More than 2 thirds of the jobs created in our expansion, which is 18 million, are high-paying technical and managerial jobs. Job for job, the jobs we've created in our expansion pay better than those that existed before our expansion began. And yes, the American middle class may be disappearing, as a certain candidate has been saying, but not because more Americans are slipping behind. No, because more are better off than ever before and no longer called middle class. They have slipped up into an upper bracket. Yes, since our recovery began, America's created more jobs than Europe and Japan combined. And in this country, more of us are at work today. And a greater proportionate work than ever before in the history of the United States of America. In no area does America's new prosperity shine more brightly for families than in the area of affordable housing. According to real estate industry economists, in 1980, the average family made only 3 fourths of what it needed to buy a home. And that was because of what I said earlier, real incomes were plunging, even as housing prices and interest rates soared together. One of the few times in history that's happened. The top housing official in the previous administration finally threw up his hands in despair. If the liberals are good at anything, it's throwing up their hands in despair. And said for many, hardworking families, housing is growing beyond their reach. Well, today all that's changed. And the average family makes a little over 110% of what it needs to buy a home. And things aren't better only for home buyers. The availability of affordable rental apartments has increased significantly. For low and medium income families who rent the national vacancy rates today averaged just under 8%, up from 5% when we took office, with even more progress for low income units. And it's taking much longer for landlords to rent vacant apartments. And this, add this all up, and what you have is that there's more, much more affordable housing for all Americans today than there was eight years ago. Now, you may have heard a certain debater say something else the other day. But when it comes to housing, it's his facts that are homeless. And in the face of all this, higher incomes, less inflation, better housing, as well as a nation at peace in a world in which freedom is once more on the march, the liberals have made the American people a solemn promise that in January, the Reagan era will be over. You know, they could be right. Yes, it's true. Everything that you and I and our party have worked for on all levels these past eight years, everything could be lost faster than you can say the Pledge of Allegiance. For eight years, much as the liberals have hated it, we've had the old special interests who used to run this town locked up, and the liberals can't wait to let them out on furlough. Best example for this is what the liberals and the other party call their pro-family agenda. It's just more money for more bureaucracy. Recently, I told an audience here in Washington that under the liberal proposal, if you want assistance and you also want to leave your child with his or her grandmother, the grandmother will have to be licensed by the federal government. After I spoke, said that, a reporter called one of the liberal congressional staffers behind that bill and asked if it was true that grandmothers would have to get a federal license to take care of their own grandchildren. And the reply came, yes, of course it was true. After all, and here's the quote, how else can you design a program that receives federal funds? Well, by the way, our party has proposed an innovative plan to help families in need of child care assistance. For every child under four, a working family's taxes would go down by up to $1,000. Plain and simple, this will allow parents to choose among a variety of options for child care assistance, including what many experts as well as Common Sense tells us is the best option of all by making it easier for the mother to stay home. Isn't that all the difference between our party and theirs? When the liberals say family, they mean big brother in Washington. When we say family, we mean honor their father and mother. On every level of government, it's essential that we win this November. In this last Congress, we lost on a number of critical issues by 10 votes or fewer. If we pick up even a handful of votes in the House, we could win on those issues next time. And the same is true in the Senate. And in the state legislatures across our nation, a switch to us of 70 legislative seats could give us control of over half of the legislative chambers across the nation. Our nation will be reapportioned after the 1990 census. And many of these legislatures will do the reapportioning. Few things are more important to our party's future and our nation's than that this time it is done fairly. So yes, every race is critical this year. Your help is critical to our chances and how we do is critical for the future of our nation and the world and for the future of peace, prosperity, and freedom. I've said a couple of things here I think you probably know, but anyway, let me remind you. 58 years, 1931 through 1988, 58 years, the Democrats have controlled the House of Representatives, 54 of those 58 years. That means every 10 years when the reapportioning is done, they've been in the saddle. We're just the victims of gerrymandering. In the last election in California, more voters voted for Republican congressional candidates than Democrats voted for Democrats. But they elected 60% of the Democratic congressmen or of our congressional representation because all our Republicans are huddled up in as few districts as they can map out for them. And the votes just go down the drain. That's one. And the other, when I was talking about employment, I'm only doing this now because the figure was so astounding to me sitting here that I thought, if I didn't know this, I wonder if anyone else knew it. Statisticians, you know what Disraeli said about statistics. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. But this one particular figure, the potential employment pool in the United States, is everyone, male and female, 16 years of age and up, all the way to including all of those who are out in the golf course retired now. That is the potential employment pool. All of those kids still going to high school and college. 62.7% of that pool today is employed in the United States. That's why last Sunday the Washington Post had 67 pages, full pages of Help Wanted ads. But you look and you say, how much better can you do than that? Well, the one thing you can do better is maybe the people that are still unemployed maybe just don't have the training for the jobs around. So our job should be to help in getting them trained so they can go to work. But I don't see how we could ask for almost 2 thirds of everybody in the United States, 16 years of age and up, has a job and is employed. So again, let me just say I know what you have done and what you're doing for this cause. You know our opponents, the Democrats, they call you fat cats. And of course, they call their own contributors public-spirited philanthropists. Well, I'll take you cats just any time in the world. And God bless you for what you're doing and thank you for all you're doing. And now I've got to get back to work.