My humble suggestion:
"Many of you expect me to comment on the details of the war in Iraq tonight. But this war is more than a problem in itself. It's a symtom of a cancer that is eating away at the wealth, the happiness, and the noble founding principles of this great country. It's a symptom of our dependence on an oil economy.
We THINK we pay $X or $Y dollars for oil, as measured by cost per barrel. But the TRUE cost is thousands of times greater. It includes the costs of contolling oil producing nations and peoples. It includes the costs of diplomacy, the costs of direct transfers through foreign aid, loans, grants, etc., and the costs of military intervention when these non-military efforts fail.
It includes the cost of guarding ourselves against terrorist attack. (Our lost productivity as we stand in line at airports, every day, year after year, across the country, is but one example.) And it includes the terrible costs we pay when our anti-terrorist measures fail.
Finally, it does unmeasurable but profound damage to our national psyche. It causes us to fight amongst ourselves, and to monitor one another, and to distrust one another. It does violence to our view of ourselves as a nation of fair and decent people.
Taken together these costs are staggering, and they are unacceptable.
Today, I propose that we take the incredible sums of money we are wasting on the Iraq occupation and apply them immediately to a bigger and more important challenge: the transfer of our economy from one based on oil to one based on renewable energies. We will take the same level of funding, motivation, and top-level research capability currently applied to the development of our military technology and apply it to solving the energy problem once and for all. We'll increase wind power, find ways to produce energy from the vast tidal power we enjoy on both coasts, and ramp up solar power. We'll work hard on any other method we can find of producing power safely, cleanly, and without emissions.
By doing so we will break our corrupt ties with oil producing nations throughout the world. We will radically reduce our involvement in oil-rich regions, and save billions of dollars in military expenditures. And we will eliminate the damage caused to our environment and to our peoples through air and water pollution. With enough luck and hard work, we will address the looming danger of global warming before it is too late.
This will be a tremendous effort. But we know we can pull it off. We made a similar effort to fight against tyranny in WWII. Americans mobilized, volunteered, sacrtificed, and contributed to the common good. We pulled together as one, for the betterment of all, and we won the good fight.
We ARE a great nation, but we must continue to prove it by continuing to improve the world and the lives of the people in it. Because that is what great nations do. Please join me in this noble mission.
Thank you and good night."