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Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no other way to put it, other than that this is urgent. We responded to the potential threat of a nuclear weapon eliminating civilization as we know it. Well, we’re staring at another kind of weapon, man-made, likewise, and uncontrolled at this moment, that has the ability to change life as we know it on this Earth.

Now, I can’t predict to you what’s going to happen, and none of you can either. But the precautionary principle suggests that we each have a responsibility to be out there doing something more serious about it, and the United States of America has to lead.

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You know, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev and Kennedy had a telephone line where they talked and had the ability to be able to deal with these kinds of things. We need some telephone diplomacy again. We need to get back to a creative effort that’s going to meet this challenge.

And I will tell you — your ability to achieve things in the international arena is not just a reflection of the policy. It’s not just a reflection of your president or whatever. It’s a reflection of relationships that you build. It’s a relationship that’s built on credibility about your country and the other things you care about.

To have walked away from Kyoto is to have hurt our ability to lift, the United Nations to deal with Iraq or other things, to walk away from Iraq. To do the things we’ve done badly in all these arenas affects the other arena. And it’s the conglomerate of that distrust and of our indifference that has created the predicament we’re now in.

I believe we could just change that almost overnight by showing our bona fides, and that begins by stepping up on global climate change. And I think it will pay off dividends in a host of other arenas.

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I think these issues are going to come to a head in ‘08. I think that is what ‘08 is going to be about. I think we’re going to grow the Senate, grow the House, and obviously and hopefully win the presidency, at which point we’re going to have the first moment potentially of progressive legislating in this country since the New Frontier, Great Society, which was the first moment in great terms since Franklin Roosevelt. And I think that’s the course we’re on.

And then, I think we will deal with health care; we will have to confront entitlements and the question of Medicare, Social Security. We will have to confront — we, obviously, have got to deal with No Child Left Behind and education, and we will deal with the sole question of energy.

And these are high stakes, and that’s why some of us are in this business — that’s what ‘08’s going to be all about. So the best hope I can give you is, ‘06 and ‘04 made a difference, they’re part of the march forward, and we’ve just got to get the job done this time.

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So for those of you who measure these things, you know, as the Republicans run around the country with this bellicose talk and saber rattling and as we measure the real interests of our nation, I believe this is a year perhaps not unlike 1960 with Kennedy and Nixon, where we ought to stand up and call them for what they are.

They’re paper tigers. They’re making America less safe. They are in fact not protecting the security of our country; they’re making it worse.

And I believe that we have a better plan and a better way of providing for that security, and I think we ought to draw that line as clearly and as distinctly as we ever have and make it clear to Americans there is a much better choice by which we can be protected and look to the long-term interests of our country.