If I were the nominee

Here is what my address to the nation would look like.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming here tonight. Thank you for working so hard to make John Edwards and I your president. I promise to honor your faith in me with hard work and a sense of duty for your hopes.

Winston Churchill once said that the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies was fighting a war without allies. Do you know that America is providing 94.8 percent of the soldiers in the coalition of the willing? Do you know why that is? It is because President Bush failed to give the inspectors time to do their jobs and that alienated our closest allies. Decisiveness is not inherently wise! Churchill knew that partnerships can be difficult to wield, but he also knew that strong alliances cannot be easily broken by the will of a few. When he was faced with the responsibility of securing his nations safety he chose statesmanship and cooperation and it was the right choice then and it is the right choice now.

Every soldier that dies in Iraq is evidence that President Bush was premature to declare our Mission accomplished. Every soldier wounded in Iraq is proof that going it 98 percent of alone is not wise policy. I will not have a foreign policy that puts a target on the back of our troops and a deficit in the bank books of the American dream.

Followers are a pre-requisite to leadership and our lop-sided coalition is a testament to President Bush's deficit in that regard. If President Bush is steering the right course, then why is our coalition shrinking in the face of greater challenges, rather than expanding to meet them? If President Bush is steering the right course, then why are communities across America so divided? If President Bush is steering the right course, then why does he have the worst job creation record since Herbert Hoover? If President Bush is steering the right course, then why are we increasing our reliance on coal, the fuel of cavemen, to meet our energy needs in the 21st century?

When I am president I am not going to leave our forces under-manned and in harms way without an exit strategy because I believe that is the most irresponsible thing a commander in chief can do.
If you elect me President I am going to throw out the Bush doctrine in favor of multilateralism. Multilateralism works! Multilateralism won two world wars and drove the Russians out of Cuba. Multilateralism is allowing us to eradicate Polio and make substantial strides combating AIDS. Multilateralism is going to deny Al Quaeda a place to hide and the wherewithal to move money around the globe. Multilateralism is going to secure the nuclear materials which threaten us all. Multilateralism works because it is simply cooperation for the sake of the common good of all. It is similar to an old-fashioned American barn-raising or quilting party. People can do together what individuals cannot do alone.

Likewise I believe a strong America is an America united in common cause and I will NOT divide Americans by race, by class, by sexual orientation, by religion, or by party. Our Constitution is not a wedge. It is a sacred document that lays out the rights and liberties which make us all free.

It lays them out, but it does not guarantee them. What guarantees our freedom is the willingness of ordinary Americans to stand up for each other when these rights are infringed. All across America you are seeing this now in the resistance to the Patriot Act.

Martin Luther said that another man can't ride you when your back is straight. Well I know and you know that sometimes a man needs help to stand up straight when the burden he carries is too heavy. Our Constitution asks each of us to help their neighbor stand up straight by appealing to the best in our human nature rather than the worst. This behavior rewards us when it is our turn to stand before the dividers of a free society. America, right now gay Americans should not stand alone as this President and this Congress uses faith to single them out for unequal treatment under the law. Are you aware that Dick Cheney's daughter Mary is openly lesbian? Is there a Republican who will go on record tomorrow and deny Mary Cheney the right to make her home however she chooses? I hope not. I hope not.

Here is my plan to make us respected abroad and safe at home:

1. Communities all across the country have rejected the provisions of the Patriot Act because it makes a mockery of our Bill of Rights. I am going to cancel this divisive piece of legislation and replace it with a bill that does not betray our freedoms.

2. I am going to cancel the Bush doctrine which is nothing more than the self-destructive notion that might makes right. Our security depends upon strong alliances and coordinated action like never before in our history and to fail to see that is to endanger the security of Americans.

3. I pledged allegiance to an America which offers liberty and justice for all and I intend to honor that pledge by asking Congress to send me a bill making Civil Unions legal for Gay American men and women because to do otherwise is to create two America's and I will not have it. Gay Americans will not have to stand alone if I am elected president.

4. I am going to ask Kofi Annan to establish within the framework of the UN a way to deal with crises like the one unfolding in Sudan right now. We must not wait when close to a million people's lives are in jeopardy but must have a way to act swiftly to restore hope to a hopeless situation.

5. I am going to invest in a NASA-style program that takes the promise of energy independence off the drafting table and into American homes and automobiles. This will give us cleaner water, cleaner air, and a leadership role in an inevitable technology. We can create an energy web similar to our information web that is less susceptible to blackouts and which decentralizes our power generation. Breaking our oil dependence is going to be simultaneously sound environmental policy, sound economic policy, and sound foreign policy and I will choose to embrace the inevitable future rather than protect the inevitable past.

6. This is the 21st century and we need a 21st century economy. So, I am going to lift President Bush's stem-cell research prohibitions because the greatest growth industry in America also has the potential to save countless lives. The technology used in stem-cell research is also that which is used in in-vitro fertilization and you cannot make the moral argument that one is right and the other is wrong. Just as many parents owe the joys of parenthood to in-vitro fertilization, so too might they know the joys of a cured child thanks to stem-cell research. We must lead again, or we will forfeit the technological jobs of tomorrow.

7. I agree with Bill Clinton that we cannot kill, jail, or occupy everybody that we disagree with and so I think it is time in America that we created a Cabinet-level department of peace. If he'll take that job I offer it now to former President Jimmy Carter, a good man that has made a lives work of building peace.

America can only lead where others follow and we must reclaim the moral stewardship that has been the hallmark of this great nation. We must rededicate ourselves to the technologies and jobs of tomorrow to create wealth at home and trade abroad. We must rejoin the international community and fight alongside them for human rights. We must become again a home for hope instead of a fortress of fear. We must rekindle the American dream that has brought Barack Obama to us on the shoulders of Al Sharpton who himself is here because his mother was willing to scrub floors to give nurture to the dreams of her child.

Don't let anybody convince you it is weak to be free or impossible to be safe and free. Al Sharpton's mother felt freedom's call in her bones and wouldn't rest until she made something out of nothing so that her child could march on. When our grandfathers felt their freedom was endangered they fought tooth and nail the world over to defend it. There is not a force on earth powerful enough to extinguish the cravings of man for liberty and my administration will know where our strength lies and work to rekindle it. To be respected in the world again and safe at home we must secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our children and lead by force of example, rather than by force of arms.

This concludes my experiment and I have to confess I enjoyed it. It is my fondest hope that John Kerry has better speech writers, but ones which manage to convey this core message.