One of the greatest sources of our strength throughout the Cold War was a bipartisan foreign policy.  Because our future was at stake, politics stopped at the water’s edge.  Now I ask you, and I ask all our nation’s governors, I ask parents, teachers and citizens all across America, for a new nonpartisan commitment to education, because education is a critical national security issue for our future and politics must stop at the schoolhouse door.

To prepare America for the 21st century, we must harness the powerful forces of science and technology to benefit all Americans.  This is the first State of the Union carried live in video over the Internet, but we’ve only begun to spread the benefits of a technology revolution that should become the modern birthright of every citizen.

Our effort to connect every classroom is just the beginning.  Now we should connect every hospital to the Internet so that doctors can instantly share data about their patients with the best specialists in the field.

And I challenge the private sector tonight to start by connecting every children’s hospital as soon as possible so that a child in bed can stay in touch with school, family and friends.  A sick child need no longer be a child alone.

We must build the second generation of the Internet so that our leading universities and national laboratories can communicate in speeds a thousand times faster than today to develop new medical treatments, new sources of energy, new ways of working together.  But we cannot stop there.

As the Internet becomes our new town square, a computer in every home:  a teacher of all subjects, a connection to all cultures.  This will no longer be a dream, but a necessity.  And over the next decade, that must be our goal.

We must continue to explore the heavens, pressing on with the Mars probes and the International Space Station, both of which will have practical applications for our everyday living.

We must speed the remarkable advances in medical science.  The human genome project is now decoding the genetic mysteries of life.  American scientists have discovered genes linked to breast cancer and ovarian cancer and medication that stops a stroke in progress and begins to reverse its effects, and treatments that dramatically lengthen the lives of people with HIV and aids.

Since I took office, funding for aids research at the National Institutes of Health has increased dramatically to $1.5 billion.  With new resources, NIH will now become the most powerful discovery engine for an aids vaccine, working with other scientists, to finally end the threat of aids.  Thank you.  Remember that every year, every year we move up the discovery of an aids vaccine we’ll save millions of lives around the world.  We must reinforce our commitment to medical science.

To prepare America for the 21st century we must build stronger families.  Over the past four years the Family and Medical Leave Law has helped millions of Americans to take time off to be with their families.