Thank you Epatha. Every time you emcee our event you elevate it with your presence and your sparkle and humor.

And thank all of you again for coming this evening. We are grateful for your participation, and we will continue to do all we can to earn your support in the coming years by taking the fight against childhood hunger to new levels.

I especially want to thank General Mills and Mary Catherine Toker, and our wonderful dinner committee members, who have done so much to make this evening a success.

America is a country built on the middle class. It is our national identity. Almost all of us, including many of us who are quite affluent or quite poor, think of ourselves as middle class. One of my favorite public opinion findings comes from the pollster Celinda Lake, who says that a higher proportion of people living in the United States describe themselves as “middle class” than describe themselves as “American.”

All of this is more pronounced in election years. Whether the candidates are fighting over “soccer moms” or “NASCAR Dads,” or some other metaphorical slice of the electorate, the slice being fought over is a middle class wedge.

I’m not here, of course, to play politics, but I do want to speak for just a minute about a much larger wedge – and to offer some unsolicited, and perhaps unwelcome, advice to candidates – not just for President or Senate or House but at all levels of government.

My advice has five quick points – you should think of it as a 60 second campaign commercial for what FRAC believes.

First, we are no longer quite as middle class a country as we would like to believe. Inequality has grown markedly, many more families are locked into unstable, lower wage jobs, often without benefits, and two out of five Americans fall into poverty at some point before the age of 50.

Second, this economic insecurity and inequality is creating a great deal of hunger and food insecurity – 35 million of us live in households that cannot afford an adequate, healthy diet meeting basic nutritional standards, and that number has been going up.

Third, the federal programs on which FRAC works – food stamps and school lunch and breakfast, WIC, summer food and afterschool food, the emergency food program and food for kids in child care – these programs are among the most effective investments our government makes. They buttress the incomes of low-wage workers and their families.

They reduce hunger, but they also improve school readiness and school achievement. They improve health and nutrition and combat obesity. Candidates who care about health care costs, or education, or school readiness, or productivity, or competitiveness, should care about expanding and improving these programs.

Fourth, these programs are very popular, and they have great bipartisan support. Every poll and every focus group on school breakfast and school lunch, on afterschool programs, on food stamps, on WIC, tells us there are extraordinarily high levels of support for ending hunger and strengthening anti-hunger programs. Many of these programs have their roots in the bipartisan efforts 30 years ago of Senators Robert Dole and George McGovern, and we see the continuing vitality of this bipartisanship in the 2002 food stamp reauthorization, in this year’s child nutrition reauthorization – which is likely to be finished in a year when, frankly, little legislation is being finished – and in the leadership of tonight’s honorees and other recent honorees like Senators Cochran, Harkin, Lugar and Leahy.

Fifth, we identify ourselves not just as middle class people, but as a moral, just and humane people. Candidates need to speak to the morality of ending hunger, the morality of making sure every needy baby gets WIC, the morality of giving children a school breakfast every day so they can learn and achieve their potential. A candidate who does this isn’t sticking his neck out too far: it was in 1917 that the U.S. Surgeon General said that it is “expensive stupidity...trying to educate children with half-starved bodies.” The Campaign to End Childhood Hunger, nearly a century later, says that it remains stupid...costly...and immoral to tolerate childhood hunger in America.

That’s our election year commercial.

So, I’m Jim Weill, and I’m not running for anything, but I’ve approved this message.

We thank you for your support.