You know very well the impact of what has happened right there in Anderson. And I believe if the government were a real partner for the auto companies and for the UAW, we could turn around American auto manufacturing. We could be the leaders again. We could be exporting around the world.

Imagine: Right here in Indiana, we could have flex-fuel cars being made, coming off the assembly line, going to a gas station, being filled up part with gas and part with ethanol from Indiana products. That should be the future we are trying to achieve. I am confident we can. We’re not going to do it if we continue to just listen to the same voices and get upset and frustrated, but nothing ever changes. If we don’t take back the White House, I will guarantee you in four years and eight years and 12 years we’ll still be complaining about the same things.

If we take back the White House, if I’m fortunate enough to be your president, one thing anybody who knows me will tell you, I will get up everyday and work my heart out until we make these changes and increase this economy and put new jobs on the future agenda of America.

It’s important that the public and the press far beyond Anderson understand this. I want to ask two of your fellow citizens to come here and join the Mayor and the Senator and me. Because I want you to hear first hand, many of you know this, but some of the folks traveling with us from the national and the international press may not really understand what it means to have worked hard and have the rug pulled out from under you.

You’ve done everything you were supposed to do and all of a sudden the future looks kind of dark. People in Indiana, just like most Americans, they don’t ask for much, but they sure would like to have a president who paid attention to them and understood what the problems were. So I want to ask Steven and Robin to join me up here and I want them to tell their stories because I think the best way to illustrate what we’re going to have to do is to get specific and put a human face on it. It’s not some abstraction — I could probably get a story from every one of you if we had time. But I want first to hear from Steven. Steven, will you introduce yourself and explain what’s going on?

STEVE LEWIS: Well, my name is Steve Lewis. I’m the President of UAW Local 663 here in Anderson Guide workers. It is wonderful to see so many union brothers and sisters here today. Thank you everybody for coming. As most of you know, Guide Corporation went from approximately 5-6,000 workers in the ’70s and ’80s down to a whopping zero workers today.

We’ve seen it happen all over the country. We’ve seen it happen time and time again. I cannot tell you unless you’ve lived through it how devastating of an experience this is. It doesn’t matter whether you’re single or have a family, and I have my family here with me here today — my beautiful wife and boys and sister and dad and the whole nine yards. It’s amazing how many people you know when you’re going to get to come upstage, isn’t it?

But honestly, this is a very serious issue and we are so thankful to Hillary for coming here and telling us that she is going to make a change for Anderson, Indiana and for workers like myself and for workers like Robin. Thank you so much Hillary.

CLINTON: Robin, I’m going to hand you that microphone.

ROBIN DEREXSON: First of all, I want to say thank you for being here, Hillary, and I hope you get elected. I just want to say that I’ve lived in my house for almost 30 years. I’ve never been late on a payment — never been late on a payment on my house — never late on any of my bills. When I lost my job at Guide, there’s everybody on option five might struggle, like everybody else that’s, you know, their houses are in foreclosure, well, I’m taking a chance that that might happen to me as well. So you know I got two kids and hopefully I want to set an example for them as well as everybody else. So hopefully we’ll get picked up and everybody will be OK. Unless somebody like you gets elected I don’t know what’s going to happen.

CLINTON: Thank you, Robin. I know that Steve has been fighting hard to help people get placed elsewhere, get a job somewhere. That’s got to be a real burden on you.

STEVE: Well, I go back to something that you said in one of your debates that it’s not really about me — it’s about them. I see it every day. People coming into the union hall, their houses are getting foreclosed on, they’re losing their cars, the stress that’s related with losing a job. Unfortunately, we’re seeing a lot of divorces, a lot of things like that. Daily struggle, day in and day out. I can’t tell you — not knowing what the future will bring is a horrendous feeling. Not knowing whether you will have the money to pay your house payment next month or your car payment or whether the stress is going to tear your family apart is extremely stressful to those, what ended up being, 1,400 people who lost their jobs in April. And it wasn’t just Guide. We had Delphi workers — go Delphi workers – you know, Hillary, we went from approximately 30,000 manufacturing jobs just in Anderson alone, to zero jobs. None of those jobs are left. We really hope and pray from the bottom of our hearts that you will be our next president and you will do something to bring those jobs back.

CLINTON: When you listen to Steve and Robin, I bet every one of you knows somebody who could tell a similar story because the ripple effects from these job losses are so extensive. You have all the pressures on a family. Earlier today in Terre Haute, Evan and I were talking to a couple, they both have good jobs but you can tell the wife is worried because the company she works for is laying off people and she’s not sure how far those layoffs are going to come, whether it’s going to include her. The stress on the family is really intense. Then you’ve got problems like what Robin’s talking about. If no money’s coming in, it’s pretty hard to keep up those payments on your house. We know that Indiana has been hard hit by the mortgage crisis. A lot of people losing their homes because they lose their jobs or because they were pulled into these subprime mortgages and frankly were kind of taken advantage of. They were given a mortgage they either couldn’t afford or it had all these hidden problems to it and it’s all coming back to haunt them so they’re at risk of losing their homes.

When somebody in a neighborhood gets foreclosed on, that affects everybody in the neighborhood. You could have a totally paid off mortgage but if the house down the block is vacant that’s going to affect your home value. Pretty soon it’s going to attract crime and then the property taxes go down and then you’ve got to lay off police officers. So you see, all of this is interconnected. That’s what’s been missing in Washington under George Bush. It’s that he doesn’t see how we are all in this together and we’ve got to work to help each other and support each other to make the best possible future.

One of the other big problems is that when you lose your job, you’re likely to lose your health care, aren’t you? We’ve got more and more people who are uninsured. And we’ve got many people who just can’t afford what they do have when it comes to insurance because they can’t afford the deductible, they can’t afford the co-pay. I don’t believe we’ll bring back our economy until we finally figure a way to provide qualify, affordable health care for everybody, whether or not they lose their job so their health care can continue.