I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or who you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try.

We will send an additional 475 service members to Iraq. As I have said before, these American forces will not have a combat mission - we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq. But they are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment.

I think we would have made a lot more mistakes and would have accomplished a lot less had we not been grounded in some basic truths.

Building on our Young South-east Asian Leaders Initiative, I'm hopeful that we can continue expand the ties and cooperation between our young people and students.

One of the challenges over the last decade is America has done experiments in nation building in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and we've neglected, for example, developing our own economy, our own energy sectors, our own education system. And it's very hard for us to project leadership around the world when we're not doing what we need to do.

The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil.

I have got to figure out a system because I have bad filing, sorting, and organizing habits.