If you look at sort of how politics has divided itself here in this country, the big divide right now is between urban areas, which have become increasingly Democratic, and rural or exurban areas that feel as if they're being ignored.

We know hackers steal people's identities and infiltrate private e-mails. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets.

We are reminded that, in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame, but rather how well we have loved and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better.

We now live in a world where the most valuable skill you can sell is knowledge. Revolutions in technology and communication have created an entire economy of high-tech, high-wage jobs that can be located anywhere there's an internet connection. And today, a child in Chicago is not only competing for jobs with one in Boston, but thousands more in Bangalore and Beijing who are being educated longer and better than ever before.

I promised to bring change to Washington. The underlying reason for the economic mess we're in has been building for years. It's a fundamental imbalance in which the top 1 percent now gets almost a quarter of all national income. We haven't seen income and wealth this concentrated since the late nineteen twenties, and we all know what happened then - the Great Depression. We'll never really get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession until we fix this basic problem.

Our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind.

For me, Lincoln is like just a handful of people - a Gandhi, or a Picasso, or a Martin Luther King Jr. - who is an original and captures something essential.