What you learn growing up in a place like Buffalo is that your job isn't just your paycheck, it's your identity. It doesn't just give you dollars, it gives you dignity.

Growing up in Buffalo, I saw shuttered factories that once housed thousands of steel manufacturing jobs. I remember the hollowing-out of the middle class in our community. I witnessed hope turn to hardship as a once-thriving city reckoned with a fast-changing world.

It's a false choice to say we either have job safety or job growth. It's a false choice to suggest that the only way for a business to survive is to make sure workers have low wages and little or no benefits. There are ample models across this country where we've demonstrated the contrary.

Every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman's right to make her own choices about her body and her health. That is not negotiable.

But as important as the job to be done by government in the neighborhoods, the people must also be involved.

Having said that, I believe we must not compound the natural disaster of Katrina by creating a fiscal disaster in Congress - it is our duty to ensure that we reign in other government spending in any event, and especially in this time of national emergency.

The intellectual architecture means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics.

The Senate is allowed to work the way it was designed to - meaning a place where nothing is decided without a good dose of deliberation and debate, as well as input from both the majority and minority parties - it arrives at a result that is acceptable to people all along the political spectrum.