VOTE FOR KARLOS IN 2040!

INTRO

To our likable enough [EDIT: Who let Barack near the teleprompter script again?] Chairman Chelsea Clinton and to all my 410 million fellow citizens across our 51 states, it is with profound gratitude and humility that I accept your nomination for the 2040 presidency of the United States of America.

Well, last night Senator Ben Affleck of the great state of Massachusetts showed us how a real nomination speech should be given. And made us all forget he once made the movie “Gigli” [That was Matt Damon.]

Now, as we all know, Senator Affleck rides the high-speed rail with a devotion that would do the late Vice President “Amtrak Joe” Biden proud. Thanks to the now-completed Northeast Corridor, Senator Affleck now makes it from Washington to his Boston home in just over three hours. After decades of watching China and Brazil out-build us, we finally have world-class high-speed rail of our own!

[Dramatic pause]I only wish we could say the same for Washington. My friends, I know it’s been tough these last four years. President Marco Rubio has been behind the wheel of our train, and he steered it off the rails and into a ditch.

The president derailed the train by failing to regulate the Virtual Telepathy speculative bubble of the 2030s. He derailed the train with tax breaks to the billionaires and lunar jet owners who needed them the least.

The president derailed the train by trying to dismantle our third rail—privatizing Social Security—and by slashing our senior citizens’ social safety net with Paul Ryan’s long-debunked austerity.

And finally, the president derailed the train by failing to safe-guard our electrical grid from insidious hackers—both foreign and domestic. By failing to shore up our levies and seawalls from higher sea levels, Mr. President, you’re not doing a heck of a job!

My friends, I would ask you, as President Reagan once did, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Sadly, it’s a rhetorical question. We must not settle for this new normal. A new normal where too many Americans are out of work, too many seniors are neglected after giving our country so much, and too many cities are flooded or go dark at a moment’s notice!

Look, the train’s not pretty. It looks–well, it looks like a train that has been stuck in a ditch for four years. It desperately needs a tune-up, could use a paint-job, but—thanks to the hard work of the Democrat-controlled House and Senate—the train is getting back on track. But just as the train is ready to leave the station, the Republicans called. They want the keys back.

And we’re here together tonight to tell the President: No! You can’t have the keys. You’re a terrible driver. You’ll just drive it back into the ditch.
The president loves to recycle President Lincoln when he says, you “Don’t trade horses in midstream!” Well, I’m here to tell President Rubio: You’re no Lincoln! I’m here to tell my opponent: Get off my train!

Because it’s the morning shift again in America! And with your help this November, the train will be under new management. A management that rejects my opponent’s crippling austerity. It didn’t work in the Great Depression of the 1930s. It didn’t work in the Great Recession of the 2010s. And it isn’t working today!

Look, there’s a reason why, when you want to go forward, you put the train into ‘D,’ and when you go backward, it goes into ‘R’. It’s not a coincidence!

[STAGE DIRECTIONS: Pause. Nod to the Obamas for letting you borrow that one. Smile to the Clintons for this next one.]

Now, we meet at a special moment in history, you and I. The Cold War II is over. Beijing slowly moves to democracy. Taiwan has become their Wall Street Island. The Great Firewall of China has been scaled by five decades of the Internet revolution, decentralized communication, and the undaunted courage of the Chinese people, some of whom died for the very freedoms we enjoy here every day.

A new economic alliance has been forged. China is the world’s great manufacturing economy. We are the world’s great service economy. But, just as we have won the Cold War II abroad, we are losing the battles—social, technological, and ecological—here at home. Now that we have once again changed the world, it’s time to change these United States of America.