I became a lightning rod for some partisan battles. I could not be prouder of the track record we've put together. By almost every measure, the country is significantly better off than when I came in.

I would have to investigate more of Bill's dancing abilities, you know, and some of this other stuff before I accurately judge whether he was in fact a brother.

We remember the grind of the insurgency -- the roadside bombs, the sniper fire, the suicide attacks. From the 'triangle of death' to the fight for Ramadi; from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south -- your will proved stronger than the terror of those who tried to break it.

perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.

We can be civil to each other, and we can try to express ourselves acknowledging that we're all patriots, we're all Americans, and not assume the absolute worst in people's motives.

We have to deal with issues like inequality, we have deal with issues of economic dislocation, we have to deal with peoples fears that their children won't do as well as they have. The more aggressively and effectively we deal with those issues, the less those fears may channel themselves into counter-productive approaches that pit people against each other.

Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.