-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am trying to decide whether I am heartbroken because Senator Romney didn't approach me and ask me to run for President or I am heartbroken because I know almost as much about failed Presidential campaigns as Senator Romney does, or something of that nature.

I appreciate so much the sentiments today that I wanted to get up. I have heard the word ``virtue'' used twice in the last week on this floor, once in the Rudyard Kipling poem that Senator Booker read and once in Senator Romney's incredible farewell speech. Coming out of both places, it made me feel like, on some level, how foreign that sort of trait is in our politics these days, but how well it fits the people that we are talking about, whether it is Senator Romney or Senator Tester.

I want to say a couple of words about Senator Tester before he kicks us out of here, which I know he will.

First of all, I came here a little bit to demand an apology. Jon knows about this but not everybody does. When I first came back here and I had been appointed to the job, I was coming over from the Hart Building to the Senate to get sworn in. My daughters were 9, 7, and 4. Susan was with us, and the three girls were with us.

Anne was the youngest, who was 4. She was sucking her thumb all the way from the Hart Office Building to the Capitol, and I was panicked because she was about to meet the Vice President. I was about to get sworn in. In fairness, I was probably more worried about my getting sworn in than her meeting the Vice President, but she was sucking her thumb. I said: Anne, stop sucking your thumb. You are in this beautiful dress. Anne, stop sucking your thumb. You are driving me crazy. Anne, please stop sucking your thumb. I will do anything.

I didn't know that Jon Tester was on the car--on the subway car with us--but we were. He watched all of this happen. But we really had not met before.

We got off the subway car, and Jon Tester, who is the size that he is, and Anne Bennet, who is this size at the time and who was looking up at Jon Tester--Jon Tester said: You know what happens if you keep sucking your thumb?

She said: No.

He whipped out his hand, and he showed it to her.

She is 20 years old, and she has not recovered from that moment ever. She cries herself to sleep every night because of what Jon Tester did on that very first day that we were together.

I will never forget it because it made me realize what an extraordinarily genuine person he is. Who else would take the risk, not ever having met somebody around this place, and do that to their 4- year-old daughter? Jon Tester would, and that is why he is a legend in our house--one of the many reasons.

One of the things I am going to miss most about Jon is, for years and years and years, we traveled back and forth from the West to be on this floor, to get together with a number of Senators from the Western United States who have had to stop in Denver on their way to wherever they go. I have been very fortunate because I get to Denver, and I am a half hour from my home. Jon, if he makes his flight--if he makes his connection--is hours away from landing in Montana, and then he is another hour and a half away from home, at least, depending on where he is going.

And then, as he said today, as all of us know, there are many nights when he has been working on the combine and doing other things around his shop that have kept him up to 3 in the morning with Sharla, working on things, as he does his real job on the farm.

When the people in this Chamber barely can hold onto the one job they have here, Jon and Sharla would be working two jobs, maybe three jobs, in the time he has been in the U.S. Senate--and, more important, never a word of complaint.

Jon doesn't fit all that well into the plane seats going back and forth to Montana, and I never heard him complain about being on that flight ever. I never heard him complain about being on a second flight ever or the fact that he worked until 3 in the morning.

In fact, he knew it was a privilege that he had the chance to be able to do both. He had the chance to be able to serve here and the chance to be able to contribute to his community and to his family by working on his farm.

All of us should have that level of connection to the people that we represent, to the place that we represent. That is why, in my view, Jon's loss is not just a loss for Democrats. It is not a loss, particularly, for Democrats, and it is not his loss. In many ways, it is a loss for the U.S. Senate because we are the ones that are poorer for Jon not being here.

Jon's life, I think, will be enriched by not being here. Our lives will be poorer because he is not here.

And that is because I think, when you think about what the Founders had in mind when they set up this form of representative government, they knew a lot about the worst parts of human nature. They did. They worried about it. They wrote about it. They talked about what humans could do to one another, and they worried about what despots could do in a republican form of government. They worried about what self- interested legislators could do. They worried about what parties could do.

But one of the things they counted on--what they said we would be sunk if we didn't have--was public virtue. It was virtue that elected leaders would have and that the American people would have to be the glue that held together this set of rules that they were writing; that held together the aspirations they were making; that held together the assumptions they had about what it might be like to live in a place where there was no King or tyrant to tell you what to think, where you lived in a place where you actually had the freedom to think for yourself and the freedom to disagree with other people. And out of those disagreements, we wouldn't create shabby compromises, but we would create more imaginative solutions than any King or tyrant could come up with on their own. That was the whole idea.

But the whole thing relied on something you couldn't legislate across the ages, which was public virtue--the virtue of somebody who could bring his life experience to this place and inform his colleagues about that; the perspectives of his State, the perspectives of rural Montana, the perspectives of the West.

And he never proceeded on an idea that he had a monopoly on wisdom or that he couldn't learn something from somebody else. And that is what we are going to miss, because, I think, he has set the standard--a standard that the Founders of this country imagined we would be at our very best, not just as Senators but, much more important than that, as citizens of this country.

So I am going to miss him terribly for all of that because, I think, underneath his tough exterior, there was somebody who had a huge heart for the people of Montana; for the people of his hometown, Big Sandy; for the American West; but also for what this democracy can actually be. And that is an example we can never let go of.

Thank you, Jon, for setting that example while you have been here.

(Applause.)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source