Sometimes we take somebody who's been in the trenches and fought the good fight and been steady for granted. Sometimes we act as if never having done something and not knowing what you're doing is a virtue.

The problem is that the way [President] Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents - number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome - so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back. [That's] $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic.

I've said many times around the world that like any government, like any country, like, any set of human institutions, we have our flaws. We've operated imperfectly. There are times we've made mistakes.

In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies.

I think that what is true is that the Russians intended to meddle, and they meddled. And it could be another country in the future.

I'll be honest, there have been times when I've listened to the rhetoric in Europe where an easy equivalent somehow between the United States and Russia and between how our governments operate versus other governments operate, where those distinctions aren't made.

As an elected official who comes from the African-American community, there are some similarities. You are always trying to reconcile your own personal biography and affiliations with the demands of the broader democracy. And you need to make sure you are representing everybody.