Nearly all the candidates have agreed to write. Here’s what they had to say.
While our girls were sick, my wife Susan and I spent every second focused on their recovery. After all, there is almost nothing more alarming to a parent than a sick or injured child.
Too many parents have the added fear of knowing their family is a sickness away from bankruptcy or that a loved one may have to go without the care they need. Today, 28 million Americans have no health insurance. Forty percent of Americans say they don’t have the money to cover a $400 emergency. In the most affluent country in history, this is a disgrace.
Michael Bennet is the senior US Senator for Colorado.
Like those Americans fortunate enough to go to college, the student debt problem is personal for me. I wasn’t in a position to foot the bill up front. College visits were beyond my family’s financial means, so I showed up to classes without having ever visited campus.
I worked my way through every semester clearing tables, filling pop machines and doing whatever else I could to help ease the burden. In law school, I showed up with a credit card and borrowed my way to a degree. When I graduated, I had over $100,000 in loans — more than $175,000 in today’s dollars.
I will never forget the day my wife, Lisa, and I finally paid off our student debt.
On each one of the 119 trips I took outside the wire — be it driving or guarding a vehicle — I learned what it meant to trust someone else with my life, and vice versa. The men and women who got in my vehicle didn’t care whether I was a Democrat or a Republican, or whether my father did or didn’t have papers when he immigrated here. They cared about whether my M4 was locked and loaded, and whether I had selected the route with the fewest improvised explosive device threats. They just wanted to get home safe, like I did.
It was a life-changing sense of trust in others — and one I wish more Americans had. But I don’t believe you should have to go to war in order to build that kind of trust and understanding, which is why I’m determined to knit together our social fabric through a new call to service.
Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
“Look around,” the school official said in a stern voice, almost daring the assembled crowd of incoming sixth-grade students and parents. It was the summer of 1986, and I was sitting in a hot auditorium with my mother and my brother, Joaquin, nervously waiting to start the new school year. “Statistically, the chances are that up to half of you won’t be here when it’s time to graduate from the eighth grade.” Those were infamous last words.
Mom announced the next morning that we would attend another school, a foreign-language magnet program two miles away. My mom, a Chicana activist and hell-raiser, had higher aspirations for us.
Later I reflected on how profound this lesson was; low expectations were a tragic reality in the segregated schools on the west side of San Antonio where Joaquin and I grew up. At our new school, the teachers were supportive, mom encouraged us, and we excelled. But I kept thinking about our friends who stayed behind. I remembered that statistic that eventually proved true for too many of our former classmates.
Julián Castro is the former secretary of housing and urban development under President Obama and mayor of San Antonio, Texas.
Back in the 1990s, New York City was a great deal more divided than it is now. We knew our multi-racial family would bring stares and insults in some places. So, we invested in our own oasis in Brooklyn, where we could feel at home and be comfortable raising our children.
Like most other parents, we wanted our kids to grow up in an atmosphere of respect and acceptance. We also wanted them to realize their potential from an early age. The best way for them to do that and have the same opportunities as kids from wealthier families who could afford early education classes was to enroll in a quality public pre-K program. At the time, admission to these programs was decided through a lottery, and only a few families got it, so we prayed and prayed — and we lucked out. Access to quality pre-K made a huge difference for our kids, and ultimately changed the lives of our family.
Bill de Blasio is the mayor of New York City.
A sense of compassion and shared humanity created opportunity for him, and he made the best of it by working in a pencil factory his whole life. His daughter, my mom, married my dad — a union electrician who had served in the Army between Korea and Vietnam. We grew up a blue-collar family in a blue-collar neighborhood. Our family had health care because of my dad’s union, and a scholarship from the International Brotherhood of Election Workers helped me go to college — something my grandparents and parents never had the opportunity to do. It allowed me to become an entrepreneur, a CEO and then a member of Congress.
I’ve thought about my grandfather’s story a lot in the last few weeks, because we have a White House that isn’t showing compassion or shared humanity — particularly on the issue of immigration.
John Delaney is the former US representative for Maryland’s 6th district and an entrepreneur.
In Colorado, we passed the kind of gun-safety laws that other progressive politicians merely talk about. My sixth-grade son showed me the way. Shortly after he asked me about the difficulties of my job, he said, “Dad, just get the facts and make a decision, check, next.”
It turns out he was right.
Thanks to the nudge, I asked the Colorado Office of Public Safety to give me some numbers showing the effect of the limited background checks under Colorado law at the time. Among our state’s population of about 5.5 million, those checks stopped over 3,000 people who had been arrested or convicted of serious crimes from buying guns in 2012, including 38 people for homicide, 133 people for sexual assault, 618 burglars, and 1,380 people for felony assault.
John Hickenlooper is the former governor of Colorado.
In early July, my wife, Amy, and I rode the ferry from the bottom of Manhattan to Ellis Island. We visited the Great Hall, where waves of huddled masses, recently disembarked from long, transatlantic voyages, finally began to breathe a little more freely. On The American Immigrant Wall of Honor, we found the name of James Francis O’Rourke, who very well could have been one of my ancestors. And looking out at the Statue of Liberty, we were reminded that America always has been, and always will be, a nation of immigrants.
One reason we were so moved by our visit is because, in many ways, my hometown of El Paso is the Ellis Island of today. We are the largest binational community in the Western Hemisphere, the place where millions of people who become Americans first set foot in our country. A quarter of our neighbors were born in another country. Every day, we are made stronger — and yes, safer — by the immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers who make us so proud to call El Paso our home.
Beto O’Rourke is a former US Representative from Texas.
A few years ago, I received a call from my cousin Donnie, a proud Ohioan, Vietnam veteran and seasoned steelworker. Throughout his life, Donnie bounced between jobs in steel mills across our state, earning a living wage. Donnie told me on the phone that it was his last day at Delphi Automotive, a General Motors supplier, and that his job and the entire company were getting outsourced to cut costs. Donnie spent his last few hours on the job unbolting his machine from the floor, boxing it up and shipping it to China.
Unfortunately, Donnie’s story is one that hits home to a lot of folks who grew up, like I did, in the Rust Belt. It’s been almost 40 years since the economic decline hit the Midwest and Northeast. One after another, factories closed their doors due to inflation, import of foreign steel and cheap foreign labor costs.
Tim Ryan is the US Representative for Ohio’s 13th congressional district.
I was born and raised in a three-and-a-half-room apartment in Brooklyn. My father was a paint salesman who worked hard his entire life, but never made much money. This was not a life of desperate poverty — but coming from a lower middle-class family, I will never forget how money, or really lack of money, was always a point of stress in our home.
My mother’s dream was that someday our family would move out of that apartment to a home of our own. She died young, and her dream was never fulfilled. But during her life, at least our family was always able to afford a roof over our heads, because we were living in a rent-controlled building. That most minimal form of economic security was crucial for our family.
Bernie Sanders is a US Senator from Vermont.
Like a lot of Americans, my story isn’t exactly a straight line. I dropped out of college at 19 after the first boy I ever loved asked me to marry him, and I got a job answering phones. Even though I thought my dream of teaching was over, I had a good job and a good life.
Then, I heard about the University of Houston. It was a public four-year college just 40 minutes away and tuition was just $50 a semester — something I could afford on a part-time waitressing salary. I got my degree and went on to become a teacher for students with speech and learning disabilities. I got to live my dream.
My daddy ended up as a janitor, but I got to become a teacher, a law school professor, a United States senator and now a candidate for president because higher education opened a million doors for me. But the chances I got don’t exist anymore.
Elizabeth Warren is the senior US senator from Massachusetts.
In the late 1990s, I lived in Grosse Pointe, an affluent suburb of Detroit, Michigan, while raising my daughter. During that time, there were people in inner-city Detroit who would rent apartments in Grosse Pointe, several families at a time, to enable their children to attend Grosse Pointe South High School, a top-notch public school.
Local governments determine the enrollment policies of children in their school. Grosse Pointe’s was that your house, rented or owned, had to be your primary residence. If a child was enrolled in a school where the family was renting a second property, living with a relative, or with a parent who did not have primary custody, the district could eject them from school, extract fees from their families and potentially prosecute them for making false statements about residency.
Marianne Williamson is a bestselling author, activist and spiritual lecturer.
So, in 2011, I started Venture for America, a nonprofit that placed recent graduates in cities such as Birmingham, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Detroit — giving them the chance to support local businesses and create jobs in these areas. I wanted to create a path for smart young people to go out and build things, not toil away on corporate mergers that just shifted money from one millionaire’s account to another.
We picked these towns because they were struggling by most obvious measurements. They had lost manufacturing jobs to automation and were facing high levels of economic insecurity, unemployment and drug overdoses. However, looking at these numbers on a spreadsheet was very different from stepping off of a plane and seeing these struggling communities in person. I thought, “I can’t believe I’m still in the same country.”
Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur and a former ambassador for global entrepreneurship under the Obama administration.