So it is with Barack Obama. He has lit a spark of hope amid the fierce urgency of now. I believe that a wave of change is moving across America. If w… - Ted Kennedy

Every four years, citizens of our country exercise one of the most important rights of our democracy--the right to vote for the President of the United States. This constitutional privilege is valued by all Americans and envied by millions around the world. It proves that the will of the majority will prevail, and that power will be transferred peacefully through the election process from one President to the next, time and again.

There is a critical question about accountability. Dr. Rice was a principal architect and advocate of the decision to go to war in Iraq at a time when our mission in Afghanistan was not complete and Osama bin Laden was a continuing threat because of our failure to track him down. In the Armed Services Committee before the war, generals advised against the rush to war, but Dr. Rice and others in the administration pressed forward anyway despite the clear warnings. Dr. Rice was the first in the administration to invoke the terrifying image of a nuclear holocaust to justify the need to go to war in Iraq. On September 9, 2002, as Congress was first considering the resolution to authorize the war, Dr. Rice said: We do not want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud. In fact, as we now know, there was significant disagreement in the intelligence community that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program, but Dr. Rice spoke instead about a consensus in the intelligence community that the infamous aluminum tubes were for the development of nuclear weapons. On the eve of the war many of us argued that inspectors should be given a chance to do their job and that America should share information to facilitate their work.

When we went with Wilbur Mills, they thought, in the ’74 period, ’76 period, that they were going to have a veto-proof Congress. They said, “Why are we making accommodations and adjustments now to try and get a bill, when we can wait, and we’re going to pick up all kinds of seats in the House and the Senate, have a veto-proof, and therefore, we’ll be able to get a much better bill?” It’s always the classic kind of circumstances, where you’re holding out for the perfect, rather than dealing with the good. This was the first example. The next example—and we may not want to get ahead of ourselves—was during the period where [Richard] Nixon was just getting started on Watergate, and getting impeached—the process of threatening for the impeachment. Mel [Melvin R.] Laird, who was very close to President Nixon, and had also been on the Ways and Means Committee or Appropriations Committee, was a very smart person and had talked to Nixon. They believed that if this was such a powerful issue and one with such popularity, that it might even save Nixon from impeachment.