While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery and the projections of the Bush Administration.

This Bush administration has a growing credibility gap maybe even a credibility chasm on environmental policy. The President has lost the trust of the American people when it comes to the environment.

The Obama administration now has regulations that tells them that they can no longer promote marriage to these young girls. They can no longer promote marriage as a way of avoiding poverty and bad choices that they make in their life. They can no longer even teach abstinence education. They have to be neutral with respect to how people behave.

The Bush-Cheney administration had betrayed some basic American values. So there was hunger for change.

The reality of split government puts a premium on creativity within the administration. President Obama needs to put the right people in charge of the agencies and then have them push the bounds of administrative power to change policy through those agencies. President Obama has a pretty good track record of this.

Let me be absolutely clear. Israel is a strong friend of Israel's. It will be a strong friend of Israel's under a McCain administration. It will be a strong friend of Israel's under an Obama administration. So that policy is not going to change.

According to the Small Business Administration more than 70 percent of all family businesses do not survive through the second generation and 8 percent do not make it to a third.

Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.

Oh I don't think Tom Sowell would tell anybody to join the administration. That's not his style. But I think his attitude has always been if it had to be done he'd prefer me to do it than somebody else.

So while an incredible amount of progress has been made on this fifth anniversary I wanted to come here and tell the people of this city directly: My administration is going to stand with you - and fight alongside you - until the job is done. Until New Orleans is all the way back all the way.

There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America but I remember as being a very very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air the punk rock movement made sense.