We're in a kind of vicious cycle where the media tell the politicians, and the politicians tell the people, that perception is reality, and the perception of saving dooms a politician. I don't believe perception is reality, or that all Americans think that.

The difference between recession and depression is simple. Recession, goes the saying, is when you lose your job; depression is when I lose mine.

Coolidge and his treasury secretary Mellon loved new technology. Like JFK, C.C. divined that a new technology could lift the nation out of its doldrums; the only difference was that JFK's new technology was space travel, and Coolidge's travel by airplane.

There's something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents' faith, if he knows them.

In a way, Calvin Coolidge is better than Reagan. His tax rates were lower, and he cut budgets.

I'm not sure Roosevelt was quite a monster, he just did a poor job on the economics.

People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.