“Why are you doing this?”

 

A ways into Campaign 2012, a reporter for the Orange Leader newspaper in Texas looked up from his notebook and said: “Why are you doing this?”

 

Boy, if I had a dollar for every time I’d heard this question in the last 12 years of campaigning, I wouldn’t need a Super PAC. Also, if I had a dollar for every time they used every time I was compared to Don Quixote in a story, well… Warren Buffet and I would be buddies.

 

And while I talk, at length, about why I’m running for president in the Declaration Speech elsewhere on this page, as I talk about what that’s entailed so far as well, here’s the short version…

 

This is my fifth consecutive time running for president.

 

I declared the first time at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia on April 30, 1999 – and there’s been no turning back since. As there’s been no big money and no special interest backing. Just a dream and a series of late model motor homes.

 

And in those motor homes, my family and I have primarily traveled the back roads of America. We have stumped at so many small town street corners, diners and little league ball parks – I can’t tell ya. We’ve been interviewed by so many small town newspapers – I can’t tell ya. And we’ve had so many heartwarming, funny and just plain nuts family moments on the road (that’s right) – I just can’t tell ya.

 

Why are Liz and I doing this? I can tell ya that.

 

We’re your average concerned Midwestern parents who are watching in horror as the country spins further and further out of control for our kids, and everybody’s kids.

 

Some 55 million babies have now been killed in their mothers’ wombs. (Think the Nazi Holocaust with a huge exponent.) Little first graders are lying in pools of blood on an elementary school floor in Connecticut, and school shootings are becoming more and more common place. As are inner city shootings. Figures show eight youth are shot to death every day in America – a fatality way higher than the combined amount of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan a day during those wars.

 

Global warming looms like a scary doomsday scenario, as we stand at the brink of leaving a world of climate chaos for our children. And that is, if there’s a world at all – with nuclear weapons proliferation marching on… toward one push of that button.

 

And as our children are more and more physically in jeopardy, so are their souls. We have gotten to a point in this country, for instance, where the amount of media violence and sex our kids are being exposed to is literally off the charts. As American parents, we should be absolutely aghast, and we should be absolutely ashamed. As we should be ashamed about the amount of broken homes, and general dysfunction, our children are growing up with these days as well.

 

Meanwhile elsewhere in the world, millions of kids live in slums, go hungry, don’t have access to clean drinking water… And we could be helping them, so much more than we are.

 

So while a lot of the American populace has, for a large part, apathetically sat back on a lot of this, and politicians wrangle their way further and further into partisan gridlock… enter some average, small town parents from Ohio who said: “That’s enough.”

 

But not only did we exclaim, we also gave up our professions, our home, any semblance of a normal life… and have gone out into America to look for common sense answers to change all this. I’m a former small town journalist. I took a lot of notes.

 

What’s more, in the notes are the solid, common answers we were looking for.

 

Those answers are thread throughout this site. As they’ve been thread throughout our dialogue in school talks, in press interviews, and countless one on one’s with people on the streets.

We are, indeed, planting seeds.

 

And as people pick up on these answers in their own town, who knows how far they quietly ripple out – making our country, and our world… a better place for the children.

 

Oh, one more thing.

 

I am also trying to win.

 

Liz and I figure the most expedient way to mobilize the change really needed at this point, for all our kids sakes, is through the presidency.

 

I mean, its America after all.

 

This actually could happen.

 

Ever see the movies Dave… or: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?

 

I have.