A Quote by Tom Vilsack

President Obama's fight for rural America is personal. He was raised by a single mom and grandparents from Kansas. He hails from a farming state, Illinois. — © Tom Vilsack
President Obama's fight for rural America is personal. He was raised by a single mom and grandparents from Kansas. He hails from a farming state, Illinois.
I think the Democrats have - we really have failed to be in rural America, in the sense of having our leaders spending time talking to folks in rural America. The president Barack Obama has been there, but other than the president and vice president, we have had not a whole lot of conversation in rural America.
I was born to a single mom and raised by her and my grandparents.
Were it not for the transformative love of Jesus Christ, I would have been raised by a single mom without my father in the household, this is our fight, and that is why I'm running for president.
Being born in Kansas City, Missouri and raised in the very rural parts of Kansas led me to believe that everything was simple, everything made sense and that anything was possible.
There are some who might say that somebody named Barack Obama can't be elected senator in the state of Illinois. They're probably the same folks who said that a guy named Rod Blagojevich couldn't be elected governor of the state of Illinois.
Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama - his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence - these came from Kansas, not Kenya.
In 1958, my father graduated from secondary school as the highest-achieving student in the state of Kansas, earning a five-year scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He turned it down. For someone raised in a remote farming town, this would have been his opportunity to transform his life, a ticket to a bigger world.
The first thing that always pops into my head regarding our president, is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him... They just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white - very white; American, Kansas, middle of America. There is no argument about who he is, or what he is. America's first black president hasn't arisen yet. He's not America's first black president. He's America's first mixed-race president.
This is the place where anybody - like an African American kid raised by a single mom - can be president.
People don't understand rural America. Sixteen percent of our population is rural, but 40 percent of our military is rural. I don't believe that's because of a lack of opportunity in rural America. I believe that's because if you grow up in rural America, you know you can't just keep taking from the land. You've got to give something back.
I come from a rural state. People drive 50, 100 miles to and from work every single day. That is true all over America.
I grew up in Illinois, went out east to school, and went back to Illinois to teach... Illinois is a great state for ethics.
I watched a ton of TV because I was raised by a single mom and spent a lot of time with my grandmother. Like most grandparents do, she would spend hours and hours in front of the TV box.
As a citizen, I would rather have a President McCain that we fight with 20% of the time, than a President Clinton or a President Obama that we fight with 90% of the time.
Corporate organization in American business and commerce was already well under way by the time Abraham Lincoln became president. But all the evidence from his pre-war lawyering days is that he had little objection to the rise of corporations. As a state legislator, he had strongly favored the creation of an Illinois state bank, as well as sponsoring the chartering of public/private corporations like the Illinois Central Railroad.
As a Democrat from Illinois, as a member of Congress who believes in and admires President Obama, it genuinely pains me to say that the facts show that this president has done no more to solve our immigration crisis than George W. Bush.
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