My particular worries on any given day - how I'm doing in the polls or what somebody is saying about me... for good or for ill - isn't particularly relevant. What is relevant is: What am I building that lasts?

Here at home, we will strengthen our defenses but not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don't hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.

We do not benefit from a relationship with China or any other country in which we put our values and our ideals aside.

Beside the two wars he inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan, and promised to end, a financial crisis at home had pushed the United States to the brink of another Great Depression. When we spoke with the new president in March of 2009, the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month, the government was throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at failing banks, and the auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Politically pummeled from all sides, Obama did his best to keep a sense of humor.

When people see opportunity, when they have a sense of control of their own destiny, then they're less vulnerable to the propaganda and twisted ideologies that have been attracting young people - particularly being turbocharged through social media.

Mitt Romney is familiar with jobs being shipped overseas because he invested in companies that were shipping jobs overseas.

America ranks 21st when it comes to math education. We rank 25th when it comes to science. We used to be number one in the proportion of college graduates. We now rank ninth. And at an age where knowledge, skills, are the determinant of how successful we're going to be, unless we reverse that we're going to keep slipping behind economically to a lot of other countries.