I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and BFW Hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points. There's some counties maybe I won, that people didn't expect, because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.

To try to blackmail a president into giving them some concessions on issues that have nothing to do with the budget.

I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, "[Don't] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it. Do you think that the only problem is that I don't care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people, or immigrants, or ...?"

I want every young man who sees me to know that I'm not that different from them. I wasn't born into wealth. I wasn't born into fame. I made a lot of mistakes - but I kept at it.

Politics didn't lead me to working people. Working people led me into politics.

Reality has a way of asserting itself.

But the basic principle that we’re going to have to see some of this debt written down, that the government is going to have to support some banks, that others that are not viable, essentially that we’re going to have to do something with those assets.