Kevin Edward White for Congress

· Stronger National Security

Hundreds of our District's best and brightest young people wear our nation’s uniform. On our orders, they stand in harm’s way. To date, some 92 of the 2300 American casualties, from Operation Iraqi Freedom alone, hailed from Illinois. These casualties, though low by any historic measure, nevertheless are a searing and painful reminder that we are a country at war.

The nature of our enemy is a familiar one. The strategies and tactics employed, and the battlefield on which we are engaged, are new.

Our war effort calls for national unity in the face of a determined and often irrational foe, not petty partisanship or hair-splitting arguments by pundits with no expertise on the matter whatever about what our strategies ought to be. We need to present a united and coherent front to the enemy.

This means we need to be taking our politics regarding national security a lot more seriously than we do now. Except for the most serious and heartfelt reasons, national leaders, including in the Congress, ought to avoid trying to gain political points from any temporary setbacks that we or our Iraqis or Afghan allies experience in this war.

We all have ownership of this war. The war was not an unauthorized or a secret one. Through our elected representatives in Congress, we demanded this war, because we believed that it was necessary to preserve our physical safety and well-being. This was also is a war to which, through our elected representatives, and two election cycles we have reaffirmed our commitment.

Since we demanded this war, authorized it, and have ratified that choice repeatedly, when temporary setbacks occur, how can we suddenly say that we “support the troops,” but not the mission that we gave them?

We know the enemy plays to the media. Osama Bin Laden attempted to intervene that directly in our electoral process last year.

Knowing that, if we want to support the troops, but also know that the enemy follows our public debates, then who of sound judgment would criticize our war effort solely to score political points at election time?

Likewise, if we contend, and we do, that ours is the best educated, best trained, most highly motivated and effective fighting force in history, then on what basis can we also contend that our military leaders are incompetent?  Or that our military is pursuing the wrong objectives, or using the wrong strategies, and employing the wrong means?

Any political leaders who really oppose our mission in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, then he or she ought to say so, and present an alternative to our present posture. Let's have a real debate about it.  But when we have that debate, the people vote, and the alternative fails to carry the day, then it's time to re-unite and get behind the course that the majority has determined to take.

We also will not win this war in a defensive crouch.  Withdrawing into a fortified fox hole is not an option.  Said another way, a stronger national security means hunting down, attacking and defeating those who are attempting to do us harm, and in the enemy's homeland, not ours.

“Said another way, a stronger national security means hunting down, attacking and defeating those who are attempting to do us harm, and in the enemy's home land, not ours."

That is not to say that here at home there is not more that we can do. Here at home, our first priority must be to secure our nation's borders. Second, the border secured, we then must then determine who from abroad is in our country, how they got here and what they are doing here. Finally, we must make sure that those who we determine do not belong here leave.

Currently, some argue that we can not secure our border until we decide everything else about our immigration policy. This is nonsense. If we can not yet reach a consensus on all three prongs of such a strategy, then for now we must at least secure our borders and then work out the rest of the program later.  In an age of suitcase-sized nuclear weapons, anything less constitutes reckless indifference to our own safety and security.

While securing our borders must take a higher priority, trying to use border security as a wedge issue for political gain also must stop. Securing our borders is now a national security issue, not just a piece of our immigration program.

Securing our borders does not mean targeting any one nationality, or persons of particular origins; it means targeting people determined to attack us.

Why should we ignore the fact that the only attack against us to date that has succeeded, and others that have been detected and prevented, all have one common element: the first part of the plan was to get into the United States illegally, and without the government knowing it?

America’s borders, on the north and the south, at sea and on shore, need to be secured. We need to know who is here, how they got here and why.

· A More Robust and Innovative Economy

Hand in glove with a stronger national security --in a time of war but at any time-- is a robust, innovative and nimble economy. America was attacked on 9/11 by enemies who knew exactly what to target.

The World Trade Center in Manhattan and the other government targets chosen were symbols of our strength, economic, political and military. These targets were chosen to wreak the maximum havoc on America. The attacks served their intended purpose.

But for a split second only. Remarkably, America absorbed the blow. Our predominantly private, free market economy immediately re-prioritized and adjusted itself, and as a country we quickly got back on our feet. We were "bloodied but unbowed." Our performance was a marvel to our friends, and a confounding frustration to our enemies.

That we were able to mobilize into what is in effect a war economy, without raising taxes, without imposing rationing, without suffering jolting unemployment or triggering runaway inflation is proof of the inherent strength of the American economy. This is a lesson worth remembering

“. . . America absorbed the blow, our private, free market economy re-prioritized and adjusted itself, and as a country we quickly got back on our feet, "bloodied but unbowed." Our performance was a marvel to our friends, and a confounding frustration to our enemies.”

Our ability of our predominantly private, predominantly free market economy to adjust, to absorb, and still to excel and innovate is the direct result of the remarkable degree to which ours is a private and not a state run economy.

Though perilously close to surrendering that advantage, to date we continue to enjoy lower levels of taxation and other governmental intervention in our economy than any other western nation. We also enjoy the highest standard of living, the lowest levels of unemployment, and the best health care in the world. Whatever our faults, by the millions people overseas seek to immigrate here. There is a reason, and we all know it.

It would be madness to give up that advantage. Only an economy like ours is capable of producing the wealth required to fund our military defenses. And only that military strength allows us to protect ourselves, and protect our allies, against those who would destroy us.

Maintaining that kind of an economy means keeping taxes both low and logical. Taxing anything that moves, breaths, eats, sleeps or dies must end. Our elected representatives must spend more time figuring out how to spend less, and less time figuring out how to tax us more.

This means the end to spending for spending's sake. Among other things, this also means getting control over entitlement spending, reforming social security and our pension system-now, while there is still a cushion of time left to do so.

Maintaining that kind of an economy also means that we continue to foster unfettered entrepreneurship, and to advocate for innovation. Government at all levels has a vital though limited role to play in nurturing the kind of free economic system we need to maintain.

Russia and China are demonstrating that no economy can long function well without the rule of law. But it can never be our government’s role to lead the economy, or to attempt to micro-manage it. That is, it is not the role of government, at any level, to try to supplant the private sector as the primary source of innovation, creativity and growth in the economy.

After all, was that not the lesson of the 20th Century, so painfully learned? Is this not why “new Europe” is the home of our strongest allies? We would be foolish not to heed the lessons those emerging democracies learned so painfully over the last 60 years. .

· Continued Education Reform

Getting education right has to be a higher priority than we say that it is today. “For the children” has become a mindless mantra of our time.

But still, too many of us are forced to rely on private schools, or are now home-schooling our children, because the public schools have yet to regain our confidence that they know how to educate our children for a rich, productive, economically secure and satisfying life.

Our children need to be well-educated, right now, because by tomorrow they will be fully grown and unequipped to participate fully in the life of the nation.

We can not afford to lose another moment in getting it right. Our schools are not research incubators; they are where our children are being equipped, right now, to succeed or to fail for the rest of their lives.

This means that we must stop doing anything further in the way of "reform" that is not already proven, and to begin to undo those "reforms" already in place but that are emphatically failing.

Education also has to be simpler, less bureaucratic and provided for in such a way that our teachers and administrators will be held more accountable when they fail. But like physicians, in the first instance, our controlling purpose must be, first, to "do no harm."

Not only must we jettison, quickly, the reforms that have failed to make a difference; we also need to end the ceaseless debates about which reform to try next.

What Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, addressing the devastation of the Great Depression, applies with equal force here. Said Roosevelt:

"The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach."

What Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, addressing the devastation of the Great Depression, applies with equal force here . . .:

"The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.

But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach."

The means of reforming our broken system of public educations that seems to be "within easy reach" to many of us is a more traditional model of education, where basics are taught because social and curricular discipline is imposed and essential fundamental knowledge is conveyed in a readily demonstrable and accountable way.

“Bold and persistent experimentation” will only occur if education remains a state and local, not federal function. The federal government has every right to impose standards on us when we agree to accept federal funding to supplement our own local expenditures, so long as the standards insisted upon are those agreed to by the states and made meaningful by consistent application.

To date, by imposing such standards, we are beginning to document what we all have known, namely that for whole swaths of us, mostly poor and minority, public education is not succeeding.

Those standards should not be watered down just because states are not meeting them, any more than a student should be given an easier test because he or she has failed to pass an appropriate one. The answer is not to make the tests easier or to make them less frequent; the answer is to learn how to teach so that our children routinely can pass them.

More spending alone can not now be the answer. Our most successful schools often make due with far lower expenditures per pupil than do our failing ones. And demanding more dollars from the federal government is not the answer either. To rely on more federal funding for education is to assume that we really can "rob Peter to pay Paul."

· Smarter Investment, and Reinvestment, in Transportation and the Environment

Transportation infrastructure in the Fifth District is vital to everything that we do here. Without well built and up to date "trains, planes and automobiles," our local economy will grind to a halt.

The Fifth District is abutted to the West by O’Hare Airport and to the East by Lake Michigan. Our District is criss-crossed by great bands of highways and by man-made and natural waterways, gas and oil pipelines and electrical transmission wires on which flow an unending stream of commerce. Based on plain geography, if nothing else, we sit at the hub of one of the grandest and the most complex economics and transportation networks that the world has ever seen.

Since the time of Abraham Lincoln, we understand and accept that because this transportation hub greatly benefits the whole national economy, it is not unreasonable to make maintaining that system a national responsibility. That means that substantial federal dollars must continue to supplement state and local funds for the maintenance and expansion of this transportation network.

“Since the time of Abraham Lincoln, we . . . have come to understand and to accept that because this transportation hub greatly benefits the whole national economy, it is not unreasonable to make maintaining that system a national responsibility. That means that substantial federal dollars must continue to supplement state and local funds for the maintenance and expansion of this transportation network.”

Dependent as we are in the Fifth District on federal funding for such essential infrastructure, we MUST get our fair share of federal dollars to maintain it.

But we will never get our fair share, or anything close to it, if we don’t send to Washington Congressman who will work full time in Washington, monitoring the federal budget as it is developing and working hand in glove, and harmoniously, with other legislators to hammer out real deals for the District.

This is not fit work for belligerents, bullies or politicians not willing to work at it. Getting our fair share of infrastructure dollars is what comes of efforts by people who can work with others, share the credit and celebrate mutual success.

Getting federal dollars is hard, grubby, roll-up-your-sleeves and concentrated legislative work. Dan Rostenkowski used to do that kind of work for us. Has anyone who has represented us since been as willing to work so hard, for us?

Many of the projects that now require federal funding, like mass transit projects, affect the environment in which we live. Mass transit is an easy example. Others are not so obvious but just as critical. Did you know our Chicago Congressional delegation, including my opponent, have been unable to get a measley $40 million in federal funding to repair the lock that joins lake Michigan with the Chicago River? Or that if that lock broke down in the middle of a major storm, the backed up water could flood the loop? This kind of shoddy legislative effort hurst everyone in the area.

· Engaged, Vigorous and Constructive Representation for our District

Finally, we are entitled to vigorous, constructive and engaged representation in Washington. For too long this District has been represented by politicians using our District as a spring board for their own political ambitions and not to advance our interests.

Becoming an effective legislator in Washington is not measured by the number of appearances one cadges on national talk shows, or mentions in the New York Times. And it certainly isn’t measured by the number of bills one "sponsors," or introduces but then does nothing to shepherd through to passage.

“Being an effective legislator in Washington is not measured by the number of appearances one cadges on national talk shows, or mentions in the New York Times. And it certainly isn’t measured by the number of bills one "sponsors," or introduces but then does nothing to shepherd through to passage.”

That’s "inside the beltway" politics. It results in nothing constructive for those of us back at home who every day are trying to stitch together a decent life for ourselves, for our loved ones and for those who must depend on us.