I am so thrilled to have you all here and I am so honored to be here with you this weekend.  There is no place that I would rather be than in this ballroom in this city at this moment in the history of the greatest nation in the history of the human race.  This is a great moment in time.

We've got a great line up for you this weekend.  Michele Bachmann, Congressman Alan West who's going to be out here in just a minute, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, Donald Trump, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Glenn Beck.  Other than that we really don't have much of a line up for you. 

But they're here not just to preach to the choir, although there'll be some of that.  They're here because what we are doing in this organization and what you are doing in the grassroots is absolutely critical not just to the outcome of the 2012 elections, but to the very future of our country.  And that's why we're not just going to be hearing speeches, but we're going to be going into breakout sessions where you're going to be learning about energizing and building bridges to young voters, to Hispanic voters, to non-traditional conservative voters in the African-American and the Asian American communities, the Indian-American community, overperfoming among women voters which was a serious problem in 2008, less so in 2010.  We're going to be teaching you how to engage in policy battles for the protection of the sanctity of innocent human life, for the importance of lowering taxes and reining in out of control spending, for the importance of making sure that the labor unions and especially the public sector labor unions are no longer driving the train of public policy in the United States of America.  How to start a Faith & Freedom Coalition either on line or in your county or city.  How to organize people by using the Internet and social networking technology.  How to engage in voter registration and voter identification and get out the vote.

Now the NFL may be in a lockout, but we are not in a lockout, so I want you to think of this weekend as an NFL mini-camp where we're going to teach you some basic fundamentals of how to block, of how to tackle and how to run patterns and how to know the plays so that they're so ingrained in your brain that you can execute them without even thinking.  And we're going to do that through sleep deprivation, through food deprivation, so that this is so ingrained in you that when you go back to your states and your communities, you're not only going to be able to execute these plays, you're not only going to be able to run this system, but you're going to win the biggest victory that we've ever seen in American political history.

And it's terribly critical, because in 2008—and this is a frightening statistic to consider—there were 17 million evangelical Christian voters who either weren't registered to vote or were registered but didn't go to the polls.  About eight million were not registered; about nine million were registered and didn't go to the polls.  17 million.  And of those who did go to the polls—and this is pretty scary—one out of every five self-identified conservative voters voted for Barack Obama for president.  One out of every five.  So I rolled out of bed the morning the morning after that election and—after this catastrophe, in which Barack Obama who was the most out of the mainstream, most far to the left candidate who had ever been nominated for president by either party, not only won but won in a landslide with over 360 electoral votes and carried states like Indiana and Virginia that hadn't gone Democrat in 44 years—and I vowed that as long as I had breath in me that that was never going to happen again as long as I live.

And so with the help of a lot of people in this room and many others who aren't with us yet but will be here throughout the weekend, including a lot of our speakers, we founded the Faith & Freedom Coalition in the summer of 2009.  And with your help in 2010 we identified about 15 million solid fiscal and social conservative voters, many of whom only voted in presidential elections, but not in off year elections.  And we mailed them and we phoned them and we e-mailed them and we sent them text messages and we knocked on their doors and if they still hadn't voted we pulled up in a car and we put them in the car and we drove them to the voting location.  We made 58.9 million voter contacts to those 15 million voters.

And let me tell you what happened.  Self identified conservative Christians comprised 32 percent of the vote, the largest ever recorded in an off year election.  They voted 82 percent Republican and only 16 percent Democrat.  And then the Tea Party vote, which was a subset of the group that we were working on turning out, although we got the sense that they were already fairly enthusiastic, they comprised 27 percent of the vote, and they voted 92 percent Republican and only 6 percent Democrat.  And since modern exit polling began—this is not our poll, this is a CNN poll so you know it's probably higher—41 percent of all the voters said they were conservatives.  That was about 10 percent higher, as a share or proportion of the electorate that we had ever seen. 

You see when we went out there and did what the other side did in '08, which is that blocking and tackling—not a media campaign, not a money campaign, but a people campaign.  Person to person, neighbor to neighbor, friend to friend.  You know we may live in the age of satellite television and I-phones and I-pads and broadband and the Internet, but let me tell you, you still win today in 2011 the same way you won in 1920 and the way you won in 1840.  You go out there and talk to people, you knock on their doors, you get in touch with them, you identify what their values are, what issues they care about, what candidates they care about and you get them out to the polls and ladies and gentlemen when we did that we didn't just win, we didn't just end the Obama presidency in terms of his ability to move a legislative agenda, we also replaced Nancy Pelosi with Speaker John Boehner who's going to be here in about an hour.  We replaced Steny Hoyer as Majority Leader with Eric Cantor who's going to be here in about 90 minutes.

When we executed this program initially in '09, just in two states—we were only a few months old—we raised about $2 million, we identified the pro-family and the Tea Party conservative vote, we contacted it, we turned it out and in New Jersey we replaced liberal, big spending Jon Corzine with conservative champion Chris Christie.  And in Virgina Bob McDonnell won that Virginia governor's race by 18 points.  In Ohio we replaced Ted Strickland with our friend John Kasich, who's one of the finest governors in America.  And in the fourth largest state in America we replaced Charlie Crist with tax-cutting Rick Scott.  And I think that's a pretty good trade.  And then after Crist had betrayed his party and his professed principles, we beat him with Marco Rubio, who's now in the United States Senate.

But we're not done yet.  We're just beginning.  And that's what this weekend is about.  Because in 2012, we're going to add to the majority in the House, we're going to see a conservative majority in the U.S. Senate, and we're going to replace Barack Obama with a president that we can be proud of. 

You know Ronald Reagan once said that the closest thing to eternal life on this earth was a federal program.  Once enacted, it's kind of hard to get rid of.  But we're going to change that.  Because after that new Congress is sworn in on January 5th 2013, after we've already defunded it, after we've already sued it in the courts, after we've already restricted it and constrained it, we're going to pass a bill repealing Obamacare and it's going to be signed into law by a new president. 

Now we've got a great lineup of speakers and you came here to hear them and not me, so I want to close this morning and turn the program over in just a minute to one of the greatest conservative champions in the country today, Congressman Alan West of Florida.  Great American. 

But before I do, I want to tell you I've seen this movie before.  I was privileged to be the executive director of the Christian Coalition when we gained 53 House seats and 8 Senate seats and then had two switches in the Senate for a total of 10 Senate seats.  It was the biggest off-year landslide in the 20th century.  We took the House, took the Senate and all the polls showed Bill Clinton was going to lose and lose big in 1996.  And we thought that we had entered the promised land. 

And what we discovered is what you're about to discover if you haven't already figured it out.  And that is the presidency is the most powerful and consequential office not only in the history of this country but in the history of this planet.  And don't underestimate the other side.  There is nothing they will not do.  They're now, the IRS is now targeting donors to conservative organizations; they're now telling anybody that does business with the federal government that they have to disclose any donation they give to anybody, even though that's protected by the First Amendment.  You know my mother was born in Chicago, and I don't know that much about Chicago politics, but I do know it ain't beanbag, and that's the environment that Barack Obama and David Axelrod and this political team comes out of.  Now Barack Obama is going to have a billion dollars, he's going to have Air Force One, and he's going to have the power of the federal government and every special interest in America in his back pocket. 

So I'm telling you we're going to have to work harder than we've ever worked.  We're going to have to rearrange our lives, if we're going to be able to triumph over that kind of political machine.  And more importantly, we're going to have to pray.  We're going to have to do this prayerfully so that it's not by might or strength, but by His power that this country will be turned back to Him.  That's what we need to do.

Now why do we do this?  I'll tell you why we do it.  JoAnne and I were privileged to be in Normandy in France about a month ago and so this Memorial Day that we just had this week impacted me more deeply than any Memorial Day I had ever experienced, because I stood up there on the cliff where those Nazi machine gun stations were firing down on those young men.  The average age of the men who hit that beach that morning was about twenty years and six months.  And I stood up there and I overlooked the beach that we named Omaha where 9,800 brave soldiers lost their lives, and we walked among the crosses and the Stars of David, and not just there but on every continent on this globe there are places of rest like that where people who bore the ultimate burden and paid the ultimate price gave all that it is possible to give that you and I might be here this morning, might experience freedom, and might be able to be free Americans.  And now they surround us, as the Apostle Paul said, like a great cloud of witnesses, like a celestial audience, and they're looking down on us, and they're saying we gave you freedom, we preserved America, now finish the job that we began.  Make sure this country remains free, that it remains strong and that it never perishes from the face of the Earth.  Thank you all very much.  God bless you and have a great weekend.