Question: What should be the big issues of the 2008 US Presidential presidential election?

Billy Collins:    Well, finding a government that is more responsive to the real problems that we’re having not just politically, but in terms of the globe, the planet.  I don’t have anything new to add to this, but as someone said, I read the other day that if we start doing something about climate change now, it’ll be a lot different from starting five years from now or worse 10 years from now.  I think people’s minds are changing.  We’ve gone, I think, from some sense of alarm; a kind of a Chicken Little sense that the planet’s going to cook up to 190 degrees and we’re all going to die.   The evidence just keeps mounting, which as a result of; well growing consensus that yeah, this is real and it’s not good.