I’d like to take just a minute to honor her, for leading our Millennium Project, for all she’s done for our children.  For all she has done in her historic role to serve our nation and our best ideals at home and abroad, I honor her.

Last year—­last year I called on Congress and every citizen to mark the millennium by saving America’s treasures.  Hillary’s traveled all across the country to inspire recognition and support for saving places like Thomas Edison’s invention factory or Harriet Tubman’s home.

Now we have to preserve our treasures in every community.  And tonight, before I close, I want to invite every town, every city, every community to become a nationally recognized millennium community by launching projects that save our history, promote our arts and humanities, prepare our children for the 21st century.

Already the response has been remarkable.  And I want to say a special word of thanks to our private sector partners and to members in Congress of both parties for their support.  Just one example.  Because of you, the Star Spangled Banner will be preserved for the ages.

In ways large and small, as we look to the millennium, we are keeping alive what George Washington called the “sacred fire of liberty.”

Six years ago, I came to office in a time of doubt for America, with our economy troubled, our deficit high, our people divided.  Some even wondered whether our best days were behind us.  But across this nation, in a thousand neighborhoods, I have seen, even amidst the pain and uncertainty of recession, the real heart and character of America.

I knew then we Americans could renew this country.

Tonight, as I deliver the last State of the Union Address for the 20th century, no one anywhere in the world can doubt the enduring resolve and boundless capacity of the American people to work toward that “more perfect union” of our founders’ dreams.

We are now, at the end of a century, when generation after generation of Americans answered the call to greatness, overcoming Depression, lifting up the dispossessed, bringing down barriers to racial prejudice, building the largest middle class in history, winning two world wars and the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War.

We must all be profoundly grateful for the magnificent achievements of our forbearers in this century.

Yet perhaps in the daily press of events, in the clash of controversy, we don’t see our own time for what it truly is—­a new dawn for America.

A hundred years from tonight, another American president will stand in this place and report on the State of the Union.  He—­or she—­will look back on the 21st century shaped in so many ways by the decisions we make here and now.

So let it be said of us then that we were thinking not only of our time, but of their time; that we reached as high as our ideals; that we put aside our divisions and found a new hour of healing and hopefulness; that we joined together to serve and strengthen the land we love.