[Bashar] Assad himself has said on several occasions recently that if the people of Syria don't believe I should be there in the future, then I would step - I would leave. He has said it. He has, on occasion, hinted that he wants a political settlement of one kind or another. I think it's up to his supporters, his strongest supporters, to make it clear to him that if you're going to save Syria, Assad has made a set of choices - barrel bombing children, gassing his people, torturing his people, engaging in starvation as a tactic of war.

Just the fact that we can't pass budgets in our Congress, just the fact that we are gridlocked in our own democracy, the fact that everybody who travels can see that we're not investing in our airports, in our rail, in our infrastructure and so forth, people are noticing a United States that is not getting the job done in some ways.

I think that our own crisis of democracy is in its own way affecting our ability to leverage in the same way that we used to in the world.

We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night. So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time.

We still have a lot of work to do to protect our own democracy.

I think the United States is still the indispensable force for positive change and for rule of law and for order and structure.

We must uphold the promise of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton and never allow the President and his Republican friends to threaten Social Security by putting it on the Wall Street trading block.