THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you, Ohio!  Thank you, Cleveland!  (Applause.)  Thank you so much.  Thank you very much, everybody.  Everybody, please have a seat.  Have a seat.  We've got some business to do today.  (Applause.)  Thank you very much.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  We love you!

THE PRESIDENT:  I love you back.  Thank you.

Before we get started I want to just acknowledge some outstanding public servants who are here.  First of all, somebody who I believe is one of the finest governors in this country -- Ted Strickland is here.  (Applause.)  The lieutenant-governor and soon-to-be junior senator from the great state of Illinois -- or Ohio -- I was thinking about my own home -- Lee Fisher is here. (Applause.)

I used to hear that line all the time about “senator from Illinois” -- that would be me.  (Laughter.)

Outstanding mayor of Cleveland, Frank Jackson is here.  (Applause.)  The mayor of Parma, Dean DePiero.  (Applause.)  Somebody who is fighting for working families each and every day, Senator Sherrod Brown is here.  (Applause.)  And three of the hardest-working and finest members of the House of Representatives -- Dennis Kucinich, Marcia Fudge, and John Boccieri.  (Applause.)

Good afternoon, everybody.  It is good to be back in Ohio.  (Applause.)       
 
You know, in the fall of 2008, one of the last rallies of my presidential campaign was right here in the Cleveland area.  (Applause.)  It was a hopeful time, just two days before the election.  And we knew that if we pulled it off, we’d finally have the chance to tackle some big and difficult challenges that had been facing this country for a very long time.

We also hoped for a chance to get beyond some of the old political divides -– between Democrats and Republicans, red states and blue states -– that had prevented us from making progress.  Because although we are proud to be Democrats, we are prouder to be Americans -– (applause) -- and we believed then and we believe now that no single party has a monopoly（垄断，独占） on wisdom.

That’s not to say that the election didn’t expose deep differences between the parties.

I ran for President because for much of the last decade, a very specific governing philosophy had reigned about how America should work:  Cut taxes, especially for millionaires and billionaires.  Cut regulations for special interests.  Cut trade deals even if they didn’t benefit our workers.  Cut back on investments in our people and in our future -– in education and clean energy, in research and technology.  The idea was that if we just had blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we left everyone else to fend for themselves that America would grow and America would prosper.

And for a time this idea gave us the illusion of prosperity. We saw financial firms and CEOs take in record profits and record bonuses.  We saw a housing boom that led to new homeowners and new jobs in construction.  Consumers bought more condos（公寓） and bigger cars and better TVs.

But while all this was happening, the broader economy was becoming weaker.  Nobody understands that more than the people of Ohio.  Job growth between 2000 and 2008 was slower than it had been in any economic expansion since World War II -– slower than it’s been over the last year.  The wages and incomes of middle-class families kept falling while the cost of everything from tuition to health care kept on going up.  Folks were forced to put more debt on their credit cards and borrow against homes that many couldn’t afford to buy in the first place.  And meanwhile, a failure to pay for two wars and two tax cuts for the wealthy helped turn a record surplus into a record deficit.

I ran for President because I believed that this kind of economy was unsustainable –- for the middle class and for the future of our nation.  I ran because I had a different idea about how America was built.  (Applause.)  It was an idea rooted in my own family’s story.

You see, Michelle and I are where we are today because even though our families didn’t have much, they worked tirelessly -– without complaint -– so that we might have a better life.  My grandfather marched off to Europe in World War II, while my grandmother worked in factories on the home front.  I had a single mom who put herself through school, and would wake before dawn to make sure I got a decent education.  Michelle can still remember her father heading out to his job as a city worker long after multiple sclerosis（多发性硬化） had made it impossible for him to walk without