hallway, flanked by the vice president and secretary of state. let's bring in chuck todd, our political director and the moderator of "meet the press." chuck, this has been a long time coming. why did it take so long? what has changed in the interim since the ball's been in the air? >> i think a couple things changed. number one, you had the environmental community made this a symbolic sort of, if you really want to fight climate change, you symbolically have to stand up against this. so there was a billionaire by the name of tom stieer, he threw a lot of energy into this. that was number one. number two is something we just found out again this morning, brian. we added 270,000 jobs. we have an unemployment rate now down to 5%. when we first started this debate on keystone, the unemployment rate i believe was closer to 7%, between 7% and 8%, and the jobs aspect of this fight and of this debate was something that voters were compelled to look at.