I remember having meetings with Republican senators who initially had been trying to engage [Obamacare] but saw that the politics of 'no' were growing inside the Republican Party.

n case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died - an entire town destroyed.

The kind of violence, looting, destruction that we saw from a handful of individuals in Baltimore, there's no excuse for that. That's not a statement. That's not politics. That's not activism. That's just criminal behavior.

The American people want to make sure that the rules of the game are fair. And what that means is that if you look at surveys around Americans' attitudes on trade, the majority of the American people still support trade. But they're concerned about whether or not trade is fair, and whether we get the same access to other countries' markets that they have with us. Is there just a race to the bottom when it comes to wages, and so forth.

I will never apologize for saying that the future of humanity and the future of the world is going to be defined by what we have in common as opposed to those things that separate us and ultimately lead us into conflict.

The best education I received was working with people in the community on a grassroots basis. Because what it taught me was that ordinary people, when they are working together can do extraordinary things.

I didn't have a perfect model, but I wanted to try to blend my own personal reflections and experiences with this broader canvas to see how a lot of the narratives we have about economy and foreign policy got stuck. Because we have these categories of liberal, conservative, free marketer, open government - all these stereotypes about our politics and the categories we try to put things in are inadequate to this sort of complex, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory experience we have as ordinary people and that I have as an elected official.