I know 100 percent what it's like to have people tell you that you can't hold an office because of your color, and to have people vote based on that belief.

This sweet, blessed, God-inspired place called America is a champion that has absorbed some blows. But while we bend, we don't break. This is no dark hour; this is the dawn before we remember who we are.

Sometimes in this country, we don't focus a lot on people's experience and their resume. Mitt Romney would be the most experienced executive to be nominated since 1952. The fundamental task for the next president is going to be fixing things, cleaning things up, being a turnaround artist, if you will.

Ask yourself if these Democrats still speak for you. When they say we have a duty to grow government even when we can't afford it, does it sound like compassion to you - or recklessness?

We don't need flowery words about inequality to tell us that, and we don't need a party that has led while poverty and hunger rose to record levels to give us lectures about suffering.

Sure, there's a chunk of African-Americans out there who associate the Republican Party with racism, frankly particularly in the Deep South. It's an unfair perception, but it exists. Over a period time, that perception will die away if Republicans are focusing on issues that happen to impact African-Americans.

Historyis nothing other than a collection of the lives of people, some of them great, some of them ordinarynothing other than a collection of what people have done in challenging circumstances and how they have risen to those circumstances.