Speech: Remarks at the Lance Armstrong Foundation's Live Strong Gala

May 19, 2006
Austin, TX

Thank you very much. Thank you ladies and gentlemen for the wonderful welcome and thank you for being here to support Lance and his foundation. I was delighted when I learned that this dinner was occurring and I was scheduled to be in Austin for an event honoring my longtime friend B. Rapoport tonight over at the Palmer Center and to speak at the LBJ School tomorrow, at the commencement. I really wanted to come here, not only because I like Lance Armstrong so much, but I admire him and I believe in what he’s doing.

We just completed a speaking tour together across Canada. Over a week, we started in the eastern part of the country and we worked our way to Vancouver. Massive crowds showed up everywhere saying, “Who’s that old grey-haired guy with Lance Armstrong?” It was humbling but I’m getting used to it. In my role as a Senate spouse I have to get used to a lot. And I loved it. Humility is good. It’s a good thing.

Lance and I have had a lot of time to talk over the years. After the Tour De France victory when he came to the White House in my first term, he gave me one of those racing bikes, and I was scared to get on it. The Bushes jump out of airplanes and ride bikes and stuff. I play golf. But I have that bike on display in my Presidential Library in Little Rock to represent the kinds of people the President meets.

I’ve got a whole lot of things in my Library to try to give people an idea of what it’s like to have the job and how you relate to the American people. It’s amazing to see little kids stand in front of Lance Armstrong’s bike, a lot of them with those LiveStrong bracelets on, and watch what’s in their eyes. I say that because I think the great gift he gave to all of us, in the way he faced his cancer and overcame it and continued to win those races, inspiring us to believe that we could live our dreams too, and that no hill was too high to climb.

A couple nights ago Hillary and I were completing our weekly ritual. We have crazy schedules and we only spend weekends together most weeks, but we watch one TV show together: Grey’s Anatomy on Sunday nights. It was amazing, those last two episodes. As we were watching the show this ad comes on about cervical cancer and Pap smears and how it’s caused by a virus. When people discovered that cervical cancer in women was caused by a virus, it was a revolutionary thing. Nobody had any notion that any kind of cancer, at the time, was caused by a virus. With all the money that we have spent, it’s still amazing that most of the survival rates are getting better, but there is still so much we don’t know.

In the time I was President we doubled the budget for all the national institutes of health and research, but there are some things that get invested in, on a per capita basis, more than others. One of the things I tried to do, even though I lost my mother to breast cancer, was to even up the prostate cancer research. We were under-funding that because, for whatever reason, men had been reluctant to organize themselves into lobbies. In fact, the biggest prostate research lobby was organized by the daughter of a survivor. Women are better at this than men. But the point I want to make to you is that your being here, and what Lance has done with this Foundation, is not only important in and of itself, but is part of something that is sweeping the world today: the idea that private citizens have an unprecedented opportunity and responsibility to do public good, and to help to solve big problems, including those that may not affect them personally.

Now in America we’ve always been into this. Benjamin Franklin organized the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia before the U.S. Constitution was ratified in the late 1700s. Now the volunteer movement is sweeping the world. The Armstrong Foundation is, in the common parlance, an NGO—a nongovernmental organization. It enables you, through your funds, to empower him, not only to advocate for more public research money, but to do more public good as a private citizen with direct investments. This is going to be more and more important, as more and more American citizens have funds which they can contribute, and as more and more Americans of modest means find ways to contribute, principally though are either some really brilliant marketing strategy like the LiveStrong bracelets or through the internet.

When the tsunami hit South Asia, Americans gave over $1.2 billion. 30% of households gave; over half of them gave over the Internet. That means that if there’s any public cause whatever that has broad support, then people with very limited incomes, even if they can only give one or five or ten dollars, can change the world if they all decide to do it and they can do it overnight because they can give over the net. This is a stunning thing.

Now that I’m not in office anymore, this is the world I spend my life in. Working on AIDS and projects to empower people against poverty, and my major health cause in America now, trying to reverse the tide of obesity and its complications, including a breath-taking rise in diabetes among young people.

The main point I want to make is, no matter how much we do as taxpayers and citizens through the government, there will always be a difference between where we are and where we ought to be, and public citizens, will have to step into that gaps.

All over the world, people are now starting to do the same things. When I became President there were no organizations like the Lance Armstrong Foundation in Russia. Now there are 63,000. There were none in China, now there are 265,000 registered NGOS; there may be three times that many.

So you are part of a global movement of conscious, conscientious people who want to reach beyond the parameters of their daily lives to do some public good – some of you because your lives have been touched by cancer; some of you because your lives have been touched by Lance Armstrong; some of you because you just know it’s what you ought to do.

When you leave here tonight, I hope you will remember just this: the need for this sort of activity is going to increase, not diminish.

It doesn’t matter whether we have an election, whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, or a liberal or conservative. It doesn’t matter whether the day comes when everybody you vote for wins, and does everything you think they ought to do and the economy is rocking along fine. There will always be a difference between what is and what ought to be that organizations like this will have to fill. You have done a great thing tonight. It is part of a movement sweeping the world, and you should feel very empowered by it.

I’ve reached the age now where just about the only thing I really care about is that I don’t want anybody younger than me to die before their time without a chance to live their dreams. I feel that I have had the luckiest, most improbable, most unusual life that anyone could imagine. One thing I’ve learned traveling all over the world is that intelligence and effort are equally distributed, but some people get a break genetically that’s bad. Some people get a break economically that’s bad. Some people get a break by their race, by their ethnicity, by the fact that they happen to be born in a country that’s dysfunctional or where there is violence or oppression. Yet every one of those young people has dreams.

I told Lance one time that one reason I loved him and I watched him blowing by people riding those bikes up hills that I could barely imagine walking up, is that I could see in his eyes what I wish that I could put into the eyes of every single child. So, yeah, you can beat cancer. But if you do it with him, you’ll also be helping to inspire people to believe that they can live their dreams. Thank you very much.