From three debates, we have a clear picture of John Kerry's leadership style:
If you were President, would Saddam Hussein be in power today?
How would you deal with terrorism?
What would you do differently?
Under What circumstances would you wage war?
But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.
Wouldn't it be wise to use stem cells obtained without the destruction of an embryo?
But like Nancy Reagan, and so many other people -- you know, I was at a forum with Michael J. Fox the other day in New Hampshire, who's suffering from Parkinson's, and he wants us to do stem cell, embryonic stem cell.
And this fellow stood up, and he was quivering. His whole body was shaking from the nerve disease, the muscular disease that he had.
And he said to me and to the whole hall, he said, "You know, don't take away my hope, because my hope is what keeps me going."
Chris Reeve is a friend of mine. Chris Reeve exercises every single day to keep those muscles alive for the day when he believes he can walk again, and I want him to walk again.
I think we can save lives.
Now, I think we can do ethically guided embryonic stem-cell research.
We have 100,000 to 200,000 embryos that are frozen in nitrogen today from fertility clinics. These weren't taken from abortion or something like that. They're from a fertility clinic. And they're either going to be destroyed or left frozen."
Whuh?
Will federal tax dollars be used to fund abortions?
But I can't take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can't do that.
But I can counsel people. I can talk reasonably about life and about responsibility. I can talk to people, as my wife Teresa does, about making other choices, and about abstinence, and about all these other things that we ought to do as a responsible society.
But as a president, I have to represent all the people in the nation. And I have to make that judgment.
Now, I believe that you can take that position and not be pro- abortion, but you have to afford people their constitutional rights. And that means being smart about allowing people to be fully educated, to know what their options are in life, and making certain that you don't deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can't afford it otherwise.
That's why I think it's important.
You'll help prevent AIDS.
You'll help prevent unwanted children, unwanted pregnancies.
You'll actually do a better job, I think, of passing on the moral responsibility that is expressed in your question. And I truly respect it.
What will you do to help the American Worker?
Now, Alan Greenspan, who I think has done a terrific job in monetary policy, supports the president's tax cut. I don't. I support it for the middle class, not that part of it that goes to people earning more than $200,000 a year.
And when I roll it back and we invest in the things that I have talked about to move our economy, we're going to grow sufficiently, it would begin to cut the deficit in half, and we get back to where we were at the end of the 1990s when we balanced the budget and paid down the debt of this country.
Now, we can do that.
Now, if later on after a period of time we find that Social Security is in trouble, we'll pull together the top experts of the country.
What we need to do is raise the minimum wage.
I served on the Small Business Committee for a long time. I was chairman of it once. Now I'm the senior Democrat on it. We used to -- you know, we have a goal there for minority set-aside programs, to try to encourage ownership in the country.
I think that we have a long way to go, regrettably. If you look at what's happened -- we've made progress, I want to say that at the same time.
During the Clinton years, as you may recall, there was a fight over affirmative action. And there were many people, like myself, who opposed quotas, who felt there were places where it was overreaching.So we had a policy called "Mend it, don't end it." We fixed it.
And we fixed it for a reason: because there are too many people still in this country who feel the stark resistance of racism, and so we have a distance to travel."
Are you for or against gay marriage?
The president and I share the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. I believe that. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman.
But I also believe that because we are the United States of America, we're a country with a great, unbelievable Constitution, with rights that we afford people, that you can't discriminate in the workplace. You can't discriminate in the rights that you afford people.
You can't disallow someone the right to visit their partner in a hospital. You have to allow people to transfer property, which is why I'm for partnership rights and so forth."
Will you place a litmus test on Supreme Court Nominees?
What do you say to charges that you are a millionaire-widow hunter and an opportunist?
So in summary...