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Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have a lot of ideas to help make life better in our modern economy. As you saw earlier, I proposed a whole raft of them in my campaign. So even as Democrats play defense in Trump’s Washington, we have to keep pushing new and better solutions.

On that trip to West Virginia, I spent some time with a group of retired miners who were concerned about losing the health care and pensions they had been promised for years of dangerous labor, often in exchange for lower wages.

One retiree told me a story that has stuck in my memory ever since.

Many years ago, when he first went into the mines, he told his wife, “You’re not going to have to worry. We’re union. We’ll have our health care, we’ll have our pensions, you won’t have to worry about nothing.” But quietly, he still worried about his neighbors who didn’t have the same benefits.

In 1992, he decided to vote for the first time in his life. He wanted to vote for Bill. When his friends at the mine asked him why, he said the only reason was health care. “You’ve got health care; what are you worried about?” they asked. But he was adamant. “There are other people that don’t have health care,” he would say. And when Obamacare was finally passed, he thought it didn’t go far enough.

Now some coal companies were trying to take away benefits that had been promised long ago. The security he had assured his wife was rock solid was now in jeopardy.

“People need to worry about one another,” he told me. “We are our brother’s keeper, and we need to worry about other people. Me, personally, I have faith; I know God is going to get us through it. But we need to be worrying about our brother.”

Most of the folks I met in places like Ashland, Kentucky, and Williamson, West Virginia, were good people in a bad situation, desperate for change. I wish more than anything that I could have done a better job speaking to their fears and frustrations. Their distrust went too deep, and the weight of history was too heavy. But I wish I could have found the words or emotional connection to make them believe how passionately I wanted to help their communities, and their families.