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President George W. Bush's Deputy Secretary of Labor D. Cameron Findlay spoke Thursday at the Kosciusko County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner about Sept. 11, his job and President Bush.
"I am honored to be representing our administration, a man I'm very proud to work for, President Bush, who I think is fair to say is turning out to be one of our greatest presidents," said Findlay. "I really have about the most rewarding, fulfilling job I've ever had. It's a job that's filled with lots of moments where I kind of have to pinch myself to see if they're really real."
Findlay was sworn in as deputy secretary of labor in June. Since then, issues relating to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have become part of his job and reality.
"After the events of Sept. 11, our department was asked to put together a package of proposals for dislocated workers, people who lost their jobs as a result of the terrible tragedies in New York and at the Pentagon. We worked with the White House to put together a package of proposals that ultimately came to be called Economic Stimulus Package," he said.
The job fell to Findlay to present the package at a meeting that involved the president and several members of the Cabinet. "Again, I had to focus myself to actually do my job because I'm still astounded I'm in that sort of situation," he said.
After Sept. 11, in the wake of the anthrax attacks, Findlay said, his department had to find a way to continue to get their mail so they could continue to do business.
"We had eight weeks where our building couldn't get mail. So we had to quickly improvise and think how was it we were going to get claims through our building when we couldn't even receive mail. ... From October to November, we just didn't receive any mail."
In part because of Sept. 11, the 43rd U.S. president has shown many characteristics similar to those of the 16th U.S. president - Abraham Lincoln, Findlay said.
"The principles that (Lincoln) stood for are really becoming relevant, especially in light of Sept. 11. If you think about it for a moment, when Lincoln took office in 1861, he was faced then with the greatest crisis that had ever confronted our country."
The country was tearing in two, Findlay said, and Lincoln's critics called him a simpleton. Lincoln had held office for only two years by that time as a congressman.
"People were despairing that the country would ever come back together. But President Lincoln was, of course, guided by high moralistic beliefs by his upbringing in Indiana. ... Even in the darkest days of the war ... he never wavered in his beliefs that the union would pull through and in November 1863, of course, he famously resolved that the dead shall not have died in vain."
Though Findlay said it's too early to compare Bush to Lincoln, he said "some of the parallels are striking. Soon after President Bush took office, he, too, was faced with an almost incomprehensible calamity. After the worst attack on the homeland in history. President Bush, like Lincoln, had relatively little experience in government. He spent six years as governor of Texas. And President Bush, like Lincoln, was thought of by his opponents as an accidental president."
Bush, like Lincoln, Findlay said, is grounded in the values of the heartland. "... Like Lincoln, President Bush has never wavered in his belief that right will make might."
On the homefront, Findlay said, Bush has achieved some major victories.
"He pushed through Congress the largest tax cuts since Ronald Reagan. Of course, it came at precisely the right time to cushion the recession. ... He proposed and just recently signed landmark education legislation that will require states to set standards and test students. He's made great progress toward trade promotion. ... Independent studies have shown that trade promotion authority should increase the GDP per person up $2,000. That's real money."
In the November election, such Bush victories, Findlay said, will probably help the Republicans keep control of the House and take back the Senate. The election, he said, will be won by Republicans not through faxes or press releases, but by Republicans getting out the vote.
Findlay graduated from Northwestern University in 1982, received his master's degree from Oxford University in England and received his law degree from Harvard University. After law school, he clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justin Anton Scalia.
He served in the first George Bush administration both at the White House as deputy assistant to the president and counselor to the chief of staff and at the Department of Transportation as special assistant to the secretary before becoming counselor for the secretary. He then joined a law firm in Chicago before being chosen by current president Bush as the deputy secretary of labor.
As deputy secretary of labor, Findlay is the No. 2 official in the department. He is the department's chief operating officer, oversees the department's budget process and chairs the policy planning board.
Findlay was introduced to those in attendance by his younger brother David Findlay, Lake City Bank, Warsaw.
