So tonight we must forge a new social compact to meet the challenges of this time.  As we enter a new era, we need a new set of understandings not just with Government but, even more important, with one another as Americans.

New Covenant

That’s what I want to talk with you about tonight.  I call it the New Covenant but it’s grounded in a very, very old idea that all Americans have not just a right but a solemn responsibility to rise as far as their God-given talents and determination can take them.  And to give something back to their communities and their country in return.

Opportunity and responsibility—­they go hand in hand; we can’t have one without the other, and our national community can’t hold together without both.

Our New Covenant is a new set of understandings for how we can equip our people to meet the challenges of the new economy, how we can change the way our Government works to fit a different time and, above all, how we can repair the damaged bonds in our society and come together behind our common purpose.  We must have dramatic change in our economy, our Government and ourselves.

My fellow Americans, without regard to party, let us rise to the occasion.  Let us put aside partisanship and pettiness and pride.  As we embark on this course, let us put our country first, remembering that regardless of party label we are all Americans.  And let the final test of everything we do be a simple one:  Is it good for the American people?

Let me begin by saying that we cannot ask Americans to be better citizens if we are not better servants.  You made a good start by passing that law which applies to Congress all the laws you put on the private sector—­and I was proud to sign it yesterday.

But we have a lot more to do before people really trust the way things work around here.  Three times as many lobbyists are in the streets and corridors of Washington as were here 20 years ago.  The American people look at their capital and they see a city where the well-connected and the well-protected can work the system, but the interests of ordinary citizens are often left out.

As the new Congress opened its doors, lobbyists were still doing business as usual—­the gifts, the trips—­all the things that people are concerned about haven’t stopped.

Twice this month you missed opportunities to stop these practices.  I know there were other considerations in those votes, but I want to use something that I’ve heard my Republican friends say from time to time:  There doesn’t have to be a law for everything.

So tonight I ask you to just stop taking the lobbyists’ perks, just stop.

We don’t have to wait for legislation to pass to send a strong signal to the American people that things are really changing.  But I also hope you will send me the strongest possible lobby reform bill, and I’ll sign that, too.  We should require lobbyists to tell the people for whom they work what they’re spending, what they want.  We should also curb the role of big money in elections by capping the cost of campaigns and limiting the influence of PAC’s.