That's part of what I tried to describe to my team and supporters after the election, there was a lot of disappointment.

What is certainly true is that the American people, just like the German people, just like the British and people around the world, are seeing extraordinarily rapid change. The world is shrinking, the economies have become much more integrated and demographics are shifting.

That's what building a body of work is all about. It's about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime to a lasting legacy. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star, because the one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished. It's cumulative. It deepens and expands with each day you give your best. You may have setbacks and you may have failures, but you're not done.

Will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.

The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11 ... The program does not involve the NSA examining the phone records of ordinary Americans. Rather, it consolidates these records into a database that the government can query if it has a specific lead - phone records that the companies already retain for business purposes.

If in fact the Republicans make some modifications [of Obamacare], some of which I may have been seeking previously, but they wouldn't cooperate because they didn't wanna make the system work, and re-label it as Trumpcare, I'm fine with that.

I was reminded that it is my obligation not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society, but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided.