Adjustment Team
This is not going to be easy getting here.
I have some real opposition, and what they’re saying about me is that I’m too young to hold this office.
But that’s okay because these are the same people who say that young people don’t vote, young people don’t care about politics, but I’m here to tell you, your future is about your choices, not theirs.
So, today I’d like to put them on notice because come November , I want them to know that it was young people like you, who kicked their asses.
I grew up not far away from here, in Red Hook.
But we had a rule in my neighborhood.
When you got in a fight, it wasn’t whether or not you got knocked down, it’s what you do when you get back up.
And I came here to tell you tonight, that I will get back up.
It’s bullshit.
We didn’t have that saying in my neighborhood.
It’s just one of those phrases that had some traction with the focus group and so we kept using it, but it’s not true.
In 1998, I did a cover story for GQ.
The title was “youngest congressman ever.”
And since then, every story has tried to explain how I got here so fast.
And the word that people kept using was “authentic”.
But here’s the problem.
This isn’t even my tie.
This tie was selected for me by a group of specialists in Tenafly, New Jersey who chose it over 56 other ties we tested.
In fact, our data suggests that I have to stick to either a tie that is red or a tie that is blue.
A yellow tie made it look as if I was taking my situation lightly, and I may in fact, pull my pants down again at any moment.
A silver tie meant that I’d forgotten my roots.
My shoes, you know, shiny shoes, we associate with high-priced lawyers and bankers.
If you want to get a working man’s vote, you need to scuff up your shoes a little bit.
But you can’t scuff them up so much that you alienate the lawyers and the bankers because you need them to pay for the specialists back in Tenafly.
So, what is the proper scuffing amount?
Do you know we actually paid a consultant $7,300.
Was it &7,300, Chrlie?
$7,300, for a consultant to tell us that this is the perfect amount of scuffing.