My fellow Americans, you have to decide what kind of country you want to live in. If you want a you’re on your own, winner take all society you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities - a ’we’re all in it together’ society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

This line comes from Bill Clinton’s campaigning on behalf of the Democratic presidential ticket during the 2012 U.S. election, when incumbent President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were seeking a second term against Republican nominees Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. Clinton, a former Democratic president, was deployed as a high-profile surrogate to frame the election as a choice between competing governing philosophies rather than a referendum on personalities. The wording echoes a long-running Democratic critique of “winner-take-all” economics and a contrasting appeal to collective responsibility, themes sharpened in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the contentious debates over taxation, health care, and the social safety net.

Clinton frames the election as a moral and civic choice between two competing social contracts. The “you’re on your own, winner take all” phrasing casts Republican economic and social policy as privileging individualism and market outcomes, while the “shared opportunities and shared responsibilities” alternative presents the Democratic vision as communal, reciprocal, and oriented toward broad-based prosperity. By addressing “My fellow Americans,” he adopts a presidential, unifying register, then uses stark contrast to mobilize voters: supporting Obama–Biden becomes synonymous with choosing solidarity and collective investment. The quote exemplifies Clinton’s long-standing “opportunity and responsibility” rhetoric, adapted to endorse the Democratic ticket and to define partisan difference in values rather than in technical policy detail.