Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen.

    My name is Gatewood Galbraith and I am the Reform Party nominee for United States Congress from the 6th District of Kentucky. Like almost everyone else here, I was once a member of one of the two so-called major parties. I ran twice for the Democratic nomination for Governor, in 1991 and 1995, before that Party abandoned the farmers, the miners, the unions, the veterans and the working men and women of this great nation and joined with the Republicans to ignore the Constitution and to exploit the wealth and good will of the American people in the name of a New World Order and a global economy.

    So in 1999 I accepted the Kentucky Reform Party nomination for Governor and last November we received 15.3 percent of the vote statewide and achieved 30% in the 6th District. Our campaign there now is this November’s only Congressional race where a third party candidate is entering on an equal footing with the Donkeys and the Elephants.

    The issues on which we campaign are straightforward. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have abandoned the Constitution and walked away from the principles and people who made them great in their mad rush to accept obscene amounts of money from the special interests, who seek to the purchase the birthright of present and future America. The Democrats have already been bribed to abolish Fair Trade and, in the name of Free Trade, abandon Human Rights, and open America’s workers to competition with virtual slave labor around the world. At the same time, the Republicans, who engineered the Republican Revolution in 1994, were promptly compensated to forget their pledges of smaller government and less taxes.

    So, in this day and age, where the Democrat and Republican Parties are no longer the voice of Main Street, but the puppets of Wall Street, it is natural that a Third Party should arise in the order of this, the Reform Party, and that such a party be dedicated to the traditionally conservative proposition that the blueprint for the operation of the government of the United States is the Constitution; and that the Bill of Rights cannot be swept aside at the whim of transitory elected officials, administrators and bureaucrats in the name of protecting we the people from ourselves.

    Therefore, not only has this Party arisen, but it can survive and thrive, locally and nationally, by laying claim to those conservative principles and to that political territory abandoned by the other two parties. The Reform Party can take root and grow by becoming the voice of the working men and women, the gun owners of America and 2nd Amendment proponents, the miners, the unions, the elderly, the Social Security and Medicare recipients, the military, the veterans and the taxpayers, all of whose interests are being short-changed while corporations are making record profits and our leaders spend America’s tax dollars trying to play policemen to the rest of the world.

    And let me take this opportunity to address the youth of this nation, in the hope that they will join us and lend energy to this effort of the Reform Party to rediscover America and its greatness through a truly conservative philosophy of government. There is much confusion among the young about what being a conservative really means, and that suits many interests because one of the tools of the New World Order is the concept of "New Speak" where the definition of common terms becomes so altered no is really sure what they mean anymore. Over the past two decades they have misused the term conservative so much that everyone is confused about it. So my young friends, let me set the record straight. Newt Gingrich was not, and Mitch McConnell is not, a conservative. They are much closer to Aliens! Now Barry Goldwater was a conservative and he would have taken Newt and Mitch by the ear, led them behind the woodpile and thrashed them for trying to pass off this emerging police state and its bloated, increasingly private, prison system as a conservative law and order philosophy. And to the Republican Party and Governor Bush, let me say that a "compassionate conservatism" does not include jailing millions of people for victimless crimes or depriving our elders of their proper medication while giving away billions of tax dollars to corporate welfare.

    The Reform Party can survive and thrive from this day forward if it becomes and remains a Party of principles, not personalities; and I believe that those truly conservative principles include a smaller government, less taxes and a commitment to take government out of the bedrooms, bloodstreams, bladders, brains, and backpockets of the American people and put it back in a little box where it belongs.

    The core of the American Revolution, what made it such a critical event then and what makes it so critical to continue now, is that, for the first time, the benefits and results of the processes of government are to flow to the people, not some king or other privileged elite holding power! Right now, in this day and age, that proposition is being sorely tested by the huge strength and influence of the petrochemical-pharmaceutical-military-industrial-transnational-corporate elite who view the protections of the people by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as impediments to the implementation of their New World Order, where the benefits flow not to the people, but to the corporate bottom line.

    These dangers to the American way of life are obvious to a great number of Americans, so it is natural that we should organize in political opposition to their presence. Since our Reform Party naturally attracts those disaffected from the present corruption of the Republicrats for a wide variety of reasons, we are certainly not going to be in agreement on every issue and we may be seriously apart on one or two issues. But we must not let our differences on these divide our efforts to come together, at this convention, as Americans, under the great mantle of the Constitution. We must find our common ground within the Reform Party. America itself is at stake and we must do all in our power to unite as defenders of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights so that indeed, this great nation, of, by and for the people, shall not perish from this earth.
 

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