"I am really looking forward to addressing a significant part of the convention tonight. Obviously not everybody is here, but this is the way my schedule has worked and I'm grateful for the opportunity to be able to talk. I did have the chance to talk to the California convention last year in its entirety.
"But I also want to say that I think it's time that California had a president who treated California as friendly territory not foreign territory. For whatever reasons, President Bush did not see fit to travel to California until he had travelled to almost half the states of the nation, despite its size and importance to the economy. And I believe when he finally got here, no president in 30 years had taken that long to come to the state of California as president.
"Since discovering California, there have been repeated efforts by his administration to undo or block efforts of Californians to meet their needs -- whether it's care for children, or whether it its drilling off shore or obviously dealing with the price of fuel.
"When Enron was the subject before this country, rather than defending Californians, Dick Cheney and President Bush defended Enron. And at a time when many people felt that there should have been an investigation into price gouging and the extraordinary increases in pricing, that never took place.
"Now we see 43 states in our nation that have record gas prices at the pump, and yet what has been only a 12 cent increase of crude oil to the refinery has been translated into 43 cents of increase at the pump. That is wrong. And I am today calling on Secretary Abraham [Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham] , who I have written a letter to today, to squarely face up to the realities that exist in this country in terms of consumers whose confidence is low, an economy that is severely hurting, unemployment that is increasing, and now the price of fuel that is [word missing] too many working families, average families in America, and stealing from them their capacity to be able to meet their needs.
"I believe we need to investigate immediately, not wait, not dawdle,
not play games, but investigate now why these price increases have taken
place in so significantly, why it is that the refinery industry and fuel
industry is now posting record profits at the expense of the average American,
and I hope the President will in fact order such an effort and in fact
invite the executives of the oil industry to meet with him in order to
see how they could join together, not to profit at Americans' expense,
but to help their country at this time of possible war and when our economy
is in such dire straits. That is the urgency of the moment and that
is I think the priority of a president of the United States."