Jay Nixon at the American Legion Boys State of Missouri in Warrensburg on the evening of Sunday, June 15th.

Our earlier coverage:

Jay Nixon at Missouri Boys State

Attorney General Nixon’s opening remarks:

It’s a great pleasure to be back at Boys State. I want to warn everyone, as I have for the last fifteen years, my remarks will be relatively short. I look forward to a spirited question and answer session. I stand ready to answer any of your hard or easy questions. But I have about six to eight minutes of things I’d like to go through first.

This is, when, when you’ve been at this a long time as I have, election to state senate 1986, now Attorney General in my sixteenth year, here at Boys State for fifteen years in a row, you think back a little bit as you prepare to move forward…

 

…As I think back fifteen years ago, basically didn’t have the Internet in any significant way, we didn’t have I-pods and hybrid cars. And, quite frankly, it means that thirty two or thirty three year olds are the ones who were out there hearing me speak the first time, folks that are now out doing what we all do. So, in that setting, looking at that, that time frame I want to make sure I give you all the same chance that everyone of them has had to try and stump your Attorney general or ask questions about public policy in any way, shape, or form that you think are important.

Now, in my line of work you get asked a lot, kind of how you got started in politics. What got you going? What, what, and my story is short but relatively simple. I see somebody over here with a DeSoto shirt on which happens to be my home town in Jefferson County. [audience: yell] At one point back then my dad was the mayor, small town, fifty eight hundred, now about six thousand. My dad was the mayor, my mom was president of the school board. And so we’d sit down for dinner and the phone would ring. And the mayor would look at the president of the school board and they’d point to me and I’d go answer the phone. And so I started in politics in constituent services, answering the phone – somebody have a crack in the sidewalk or a coach didn’t play their kid enough,or whatever it was. And literally, I’m the complaint line for Democracy, having people calling, wanting to talk to the mayor, wanting to talk to the president of the school board. And so I would go back a report the problem. My mom and dad would talk about it and deal with it accordingly.

After doing this for a while I decided to ask my mom and dad why they got into what they did. And I think that’s the, that’s the short story [garbled] tell. Dad, when he wanted to run for mayor, right before that they had defeated  by resounding numbers a bond issue to put in a sewage treatment plant in our home town. And at that point we were straight piping the sewage in DeSoto, Missouri right into Joachim [sp] Creek. Polluting it, causing it to be a horrible place, and unable to eat the fish. So my dad ran for office and he under, he learned and understood that you could get federal money and if you matched that federal money with local money that you could then build the sewage treatment plant. So he did. He ran for mayor. He won. They did that, they took the combination of those two. They built one of the earliest sewage treatment plants west of the Mississippi. So that by the time I was in high school the water in the creek in my home town was once again crystal clear. And the fish that we did catch we could take home and eat for dinner.

And my mom, I asked her why she ran. And at the time, back then, we didn’t have college curriculum preparation in a lot of small communities across the state. There weren’t foreign languages, there weren’t high end math classes, there weren’t specialized classes. And my mom ran for school board ’cause she wanted to make a difference, to make the curriculum more, much more challenging for kids going to college. And so she did, she did. She did it and it happened. So I, I say that I, I got involved in politics because my dad wanted me to go fishing and my mom wanted me to take algebra. But the, the point of all that is that politics and public service are about actually doing things.

There, there, there’s stepping from the role of spectator, or a critiquer into the role of participant. And I think over this week many of you will see that transformation yourselves. As you have driven the miles, or been driven the miles to get here coming here not knowing exactly what is going on. Not knowing just exactly how this whole thing works. When you leave here you will become, you will have moved, taking the first step, from being a spectator to being a participant. So, I’m a huge believer that that’s what drives this state and what drives this country. To see how you can actually make a difference.

In that set I’m a firm believer that the basis of this movement forward is a free public education. Competitive, reachable, assessable, [garbled]. And I think we’ve got a couple of things going on in this state and in this country challenging that. At a stunning level right now, with drop out rates still a significant problem, with college affordability a problem, we see the first time in many many decades where folks are facing huge amounts of debt when they graduate from college. Now, you, you’re, as to be seniors you’re probably not thinking about what’s gonna happen five years or six years from now, or eight years from now. But I will tell you if you look at the history of this country, my father was a veteran of World War II and of, of the Korean war. He came home, was a beneficiary of the original GI Bill. When he graduated from law school at the University of Missouri, he and my mom, and he graduated from law school. He graduated and that first dollar he made practicing law back in Jefferson County – his client signed a dollar, framed it, put it on his wall. He was debt free. Graduated debt free. That first dollar he made was his. Before World War II five per cent of the people in this state went to college. After the Korean war, with the GI Bill, it went to fifty per cent. And look what that generation was able to accomplish. Brought down Communism. Brought down the wall. Expanded our economy, being the dominant economy in the world.  And I’m a huge believer in the power of public education. In it’s true strength of improving ourselves through our school work, the challenge, of school work we have. But it’s not possible if there’s debt on the other end. And as I look at it from my side, looking at it now, when I graduated the university thirty years after my dad, I worked in the summer as a laborer, mom and dad helped a little, I graduated debt free. Unfortunately as you look at it now, kids graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

A friend of mine is a minister in Kansas City. He counsels young couples before they get married about the realities, the financial realities that face us in the world today. And he sees couple with sixty, seventy, eighty thousand dollars of debt that can’t start families, that can’t buy cars, that can’t buy new houses ’cause they’re paying off their college. And unfortunately what we’re seeing because of that is fewer and fewer people able to afford, on the edge. Retraining, reworking, and the things it’s gonna take to move this economy forward. I say that because I believe that in the political world we’re in right now this public education that I hold as a value, people view it as a wedge issue. They view it as a way to attack the schools, to say bad things about the schools. I think it is very very dangerous for all of us to take something that has a rich history, and the important avenue for positiveness, that our public education does. It’s the backbone of what I’ve been able to achieve. I’m completely educated in the public schools, all the way from ki
ndergarten through law school. It helped me as a young senator. It’s helped me as your Attorney General.

Real quickly, as your Attorney General, when I came into office my predecessor was heading off to jail. Corruption. It’s not really the way to motivate staff. But in my first term and in my second term and third term and fourth term I’ve tried to, and think succeeded, reinstate…beginning once again to have people respect the Attorney General’s office and respect law enforcement for what it is. As your Attorney general I came in, cracked down on things like frivolous inmate lawsuits. Inmates used to sue, thousands of these cases, these inmates suing us to decide whether we wanted to have crunchy or smooth peanut butter in our prisons and all that sort of insanity. We worked to fight for consumers. We turned [garbled] almost eighteen million last year through legal action and mediation. No Call program was mentioned. The efforts in fighting crime, as we work all across the state to fight crime. I’m proud of what our office has been able to accomplish.

Now, the serious and boring parts of my remarks are just about over. And the beginning of the fun of this, is just about to begin, which is you all asking me questions, but. But just want to complete what I say in my opening remarks by saying that each and every one of you has been chosen because of some skill set you have, by others, as a leader in your community. And you may not feel like one and that may not, you know, you may get lectured at by a lot of old folks about that. But I want to tell you that I think that all of you here can be a part of taking this state and this country to a much greater place than we’re at now. And the great confidence that I have in the future of this state and this country lies with you and your compatriots around this state. But when you go back home, and you will go back home, and when you have the changes that you have because of this week, I hope that each and every one of you continue to respect and value your friends that you get to know here, the processes you get to know here, and take the skills that you have to be leaders in the future. Now, with that, my prepared remarks are complete….