in high school i played football for a guy named jerry faust. he taught our team that there's nothing in life that you can't accomplish if you're willing to show up, work hard, and make the sacrifices necessary in order to succeed. and i follow this code when i ran a small business. but i had no idea it would ring even more true in politics. a long time ago a philosopher called politics the slow boring of hard bores. it can be pretty hard when you have a government like ours that is so big and bossy as my good friend mitch daniels like to say. we've got a responsibility to recognize that even with control of all branches of government, real reform doesn't happen all at once. it's one step at a time. and our responsibility is to keep faith. to give our countrymen a cause to believe in. and even as we recognize the realities of today, we have to be as ambitious as hell about what we need to do in our future. now, listen, no one loves congress, but i can tell you for a fact that the house at least is a different place than it was just a few years a