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As America prepares to pick our president for the next four years — and as Florida prepares once again to play a decisive role — I'm confident that President Barack Obama is the right leader for our state and the nation. I applaud and share his vision of a future built by a strong and confident middle class in an economy that gives us the opportunity to reap prosperity through hard work and personal responsibility. It is a vision of the future proven right by our history.

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He knew we had to get people back to work as quickly as possible — but he also knew that the value of a recovery lies in its durability. ..... President Obama invested in our children's schools ..... making college more affordable and making student loans, like the ones he took out, easier to pay back.

He invested in our runways, railways and roads.

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And the president invested in our retirement security by strengthening Medicare. The $716 billion in savings his opponents decry today extended the life of the program by nearly a decade and are making sure taxpayer dollars aren't wasted in excessive payments to insurance companies or fraud and abuse. His opponents would end the Medicare guarantee by creating a voucher that would raise seniors' costs by thousands of dollars and bankrupt the program.

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As Republicans gather in Tampa to nominate Mitt Romney, Americans can expect to hear tales of how President Obama has failed to work with their party or turn the economy around.

But an element of their party has pitched so far to the extreme right on issues important to women, immigrants, seniors and students that they've proven incapable of governing for the people. Look no further than the inclusion of the Akin amendment in the Republican Party platform, which bans abortion, even for rape victims.

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President Obama has a strong record of doing what is best for America and Florida, and he built it by spending more time worrying about what his decisions would mean for the people than for his political fortunes. That's what makes him the right leader for our times, and that's why I'm proud to stand with him today.

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We're in a heap of trouble, we're not growing economically. The president has failed. His policies have failed. I think now the effort needs to be — and this is why I'm excited about Romney's campaign — I think the general election needs to go beyond describing the president's failures to offering a compelling alternative.

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Imagine 51 senators and Majority Leader (Mitch) McConnell and Speaker (John) Boehner and Mitt Romney get together in transition. I could see them saying, "We're going to pass a budget, you're going to sign it on your inauguration day that changes the current run rate of spending to send a positive signal to the market. President Romney says, "I'm going to sign approval for the Excel pipeline on the first day. And I'm going to sign — I'm just making this up now — I'm going to sign an executive order that will do a thorough review of all the rulemaking processes and we're going to freeze some of them until we establish the template that we use to look at all rules — not just Dodd-Frank and Obamacare — but all rules. Then you announce a task force to make recommendations for the creation of an energy strategy beyond the energy pipeline that creates incentives for the use of natural gas in transportation and a variety of other things. …

There are probably 10 of those things that you could do, and what happens is it sends a really powerful signal to the world that we're not as dysfunctional as it appears ......

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