President Elect - Obama's Commitments

Dear ONE Member,

The U.S. presidential election was historic, and ONE members had a front-row seat all the way.

At town hall meetings where 20 people turned out to hear from a candidate on a cold winter’s night in New Hampshire, you were there. At the caucuses in Iowa and Nevada, you were there. By the end of this campaign, ONE members spoke directly with Senator Obama, Senator McCain, and the other candidates more than 1,500 times. You shook hands and held signs. You gave out ONE bands and raised your voices to call for new solutions for extreme poverty.

And you mobilized en masse. More than 100,000 ONE members successfully urged the presidential candidates to go “On the Record” with their plans to fight extreme poverty. Another 100,000 of you won pledges from the candidates (including our president-elect) to go to Africa during their first term. The candidates saw you, and they listened to what you had to say.

In response, the commitments the presidential candidates gave are unlike any our community of advocates has ever been able to win. No matter which candidate won on Tuesday, it would have been a victory for the world’s poorest.

Special thanks go to the key players in this effort: Former Senate Majority Leaders Bill Frist and Tom Daschle, who co-chaired the ONE Vote ’08 campaign and led a bipartisan delegation of political leaders to Rwanda; Senator McCain, who was especially attentive to ONE volunteers at his events, frequently passing the microphone so they could share our message with the national media; and of course, President-elect Barack Obama, whose election has already ushered in massive celebrations around the developing world.

I look forward to seeing President-elect Obama move forward on his strategies for reducing extreme poverty. These include:

Doubling annual foreign assistance from $25 billion to $50 billion.
Signing the Education for All Act and request the funding needed to fulfill our share of the $10 billion needed annually to put 100 million children in school.
Making the Millennium Development Goals American policy.
Halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day and suffering from hunger by 2012.

You can read all of Obama’s plans and watch the videos he recorded for ONE members here:http://www.onevote08.org/ontherecord/obamaupdated.html?id=672-2718592-112TxYx&t=2

These are ambitious goals and I’m extremely optimistic that in the coming years we’ll see America lead a global effort to fight extreme poverty and be a symbol of hope for the world’s poorest. And though we celebrate our achievement in getting the candidates On the Record, as well as the significant landmark of this election, our work is far from over. We must now turn our attention from securing commitments to making sure they are delivered. The journey ahead is long, but thanks to your extraordinary efforts during this election season, we’re in a better position than we have ever been.

Thank you for all you’ve done to bring us to this point,
David Lane, ONE.org