Abraham Lincoln once said, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present. Our present is piled high with difficulties. We must think anew and act anew – then we will save our country.” These words are as true today as they were then. Today we stand at another crossroads, no less pivotal than the civil war. In our names, the government pursues policies that reject two hundred years of American values and traditions. The country that once fought wars to give the common man a place at the table, now fights a war to shut the common man away from the table. The country that once fought wars for human rights, now strips away the rights of its own citizens in order to fight a war. The country that once fought wars to end torture, now uses torture as a means in war. And yet despite this clear betrayal of America’s soul, and of all we historically have represented to the world, the voices of opposition, yes even our Democratic Party’s opposition, have been weak, meek and apologetic. And to this systematic destruction of our values, too many Democratic Politicians offer nothing. They parrot the warmed over policies of a past that no longer exists. In that past, both parties agreed that those values were legitimate and defined us, an agreement that is no more. Most Democratic politicians refuse to acknowledge the radical nature of this administrations’s attack on those values, because they fear that the belligerent hatred that fuels those attacks represents the politics of the future. They prefer sticking to safe issues, hoping that if the people become disaffected with Republican offenses, they will vote for them without ever knowing exactly what they stand for.

I am tired of the old Democratic Party voices that lack the courage and conviction to define a vision in opposition to the nightmare that has become the Bush Administration. I believe that the Democratic Party needs new voices. Voices that are not weak and meek. Voices that are not afraid to take clear stands against the ongoing destruction of over two hundred years of American values. Voices that will unapologetically place those values at the very heart of the politics of the present. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I decided, very lately, to run.

We must reject the mantra that says that we can no longer afford freedom and decency if we are to protect ourselves from terror. That is the counsel of cowards. We can be strong on terrorism without being strong on torture. Nazi Germany and Japan in World War Two, and the Soviet Union during the cold war, threatened our very national existence in a way that terrorists could never do, yet we resisted the temptation to give up our values and sell our soul. The terrorists don’t threaten our national existence. They’re not a country. They can’t invade. We’re smarter and more talented than they are. We certainly have more resources. What do they have? They have dates and sand. We have atom bombs. It’s no-contest. There’s no reason to panic.

This is not to say that the terrorists are not a real danger, or that we shouldn’t make every effort to protect ourselves, and ultimately destroy their ability to hurt us. It is just to say that saving the country from terrorism does not require, as the Bush Administration and the Republican Party seem to think, that we give up the rights and values that make our country worth saving. We foiled many a terrorist plot before we had the PATRIOT Act. We must return to the values and the virtues that have always made our country strong in conflicts with our enemies. The value of good old fashioned American know how that always kept us one step ahead of our enemies, a kind of know how that can only be maintained in an open society. The value of good old fashioned American fair play, a value that made others want to help us in our struggles.

We need to make sure that our ports are controlled by Americans. We need to end the leases and take them back. Our ports are the most vulnerable link in the chain of our security against terror. If weapons of mass destruction are ever smuggled into this country, it will be through those ports. In a post 9/11 world, we can no longer afford our security to bow to the demands of profit. Not only must we make sure that the ports are in American hands, but we must make sure that those Americans have the resources to do the job. We must invest in the Coast Guard to enable them to do adequate searches of incoming vessels on the high seas. We must vastly increase the number of radiation detectors in operation so that every container that comes into this country can be tested. We must vastly increase the number of people inspecting those containers and not be content to have only 5% of all containers being inspected, as is true now.

We must bring our troops home from Iraq now. Unless we’re willing to commit genocide, to simply kill anyone there who objects to our presence, which may will be almost everyone who lives there, we can’t end the insurgency. We can’t end it because our very presence there pours gasoline on its flames. The best estimates of the total number of civilian, that is to say completely innocent, Iraquis that have been killed as a result of our presence there is somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000, and the numbers are rising every day. All too soon those numbers will exceed the number of Iraquis Hussein himself killed. How many more Iraquis have to die before we decide that even the noblest of our goals is not worth the price?

It’s for the Iraquis themselves to create a democratic state, if such a thing is possible there. Meantime we’re killing our own children, too – our soldiers still lack enough body and vehicle armor to protect themselves. It’s a disgrace that we send young men and women into war without the equipment to save their lives. That’s the bloody price of tax cuts for the rich.

We already see the effects of this war at home – in how we reacted to Hurricane Katrina. There were no national guardsmen available to help out in that emergency. A country’s first obligation is to its citizens, and yet we have stretched our resources across the globe so that we cannot meet a crisis here at home.

As a party, we must go back to being the champion of the working class. It’s no secret that the country’s drift to the right has been accompanied by a gradual loss of ground by working people. As we have more and more become Republican light, they have abandoned us. We must go back to the traditional Democratic policy of giving workers and the poor a helping hand.

This means first and foremost supporting universal national health insurance. It is a disgrace that we are the only western democracy that doesn’t have such insurance. As the richest country in the world, we clearly have the means to have it. What we lack is the will. If I go to Washington, I will do everything in my power to see that national health insurance goes to the top of the agenda.

We must give education the same kind of priority that it had in the cold war. Right now, we’re going back to the old days, when good schools were the exclusive preserve of the sons and daughters of the rich. We can’t afford that. We need to insure that talented kids, rich or poor, white or black, have the best education. From the thirties to the eighties, this country made a magnificent commitment to higher education for those who had the ability. At one time, talented students went to top flight schools like CCNY and Brooklyn College for free. That generation was the backbone that got us through the second world war, and through the cold war. It was that generation that laid the technological foundation for the power of which we are justly proud.

But the right wing has undermined that commitment to education, with predictable results. They have cut back on state funding for education throughout the country. Tests show American students lagging behind their counterparts in Japan and Europe. And with the erosion of our lead in education has come the inevitable erosion in our technological supremacy.

We need to restore the cuts that have been made in education. We need to invest in the education of our children just as our forefathers did. We need to do this not merely because it is right, but because our security demands it. In the modern world, the country that falls behind in technology will very soon fall behind in power. In the post 9/11 world, this is something we dare not let happen.

In particular, we must commit ourselves to returning to science and reason as the guideposts for our policies. We must reject the Republican position that there is any contradiction between science and religion. There is not. Science has given us magnificent benefits. But it has done so at the risk that we will destroy ourselves. As we have accepted science’s benefits, so we must accept its warnings and its counsels. The thought that there people in power who, on religious grounds, disbelieve the warnings that science gives us, is a terrifying thought. Religion is a wonderful thing because it provides a moral compass and can give us wisdom. It must never be a substitute for thought, as it all too often has been in the Republican Party.

There are technologies available to us that offer real hope about actually doing something about global warming. There is a technology, already used by submarines and space capsules, that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air. There are technologies available that can signficantly reduce our dependence on the fossil fuels that cause global warming. But it takes money and commitment. We need a Manhattan Project to create the solutions to Global Warming. The threat posed by global warming is much worse than the threat posed by Iraq. We need a solution so that our children and grandchildren won’t drown in a second flood of biblical proportions.

Unfortunately, George Bush has three more years to lead as down the course to destruction that he has already started. Unfortunately, our Republican opponents long ago sold out the people of this country in the name of party loyalty. Only the Democratic party, with leaders who are unafraid to lead, can stand between our country and the ruin that must necessarily follow from following so bankrupt and ill-conceived a policy. But if we are to do that, we must unabashedly go back to the values have formed the backbone of our party during all the great moments of its existence, to the values of the decency, of constitutional rights, and most of all to the welfare of all the people. I assure you, my dear friends, that if I am elected to Congress, those values will have a voice that will not be silenced by either fear or the interests of the moment.