One of the gratifying things, I think, about the end of my presidency even though admittedly my successor ran against a lot of what we stood for, is when you look at the individual issues and the progress that we've made on a lot of those issues, we got the support of a pretty decent majority.

We have to be successful at the cutting-edge industries of the future like Twitter. But we also have always been a country that makes stuff.

For Democrats who are feeling completely discouraged, I've been trying to remind them, everybody remembers my Boston speech in 2004. They may not remember me showing up here in 2005 when John Kerry had lost a close election, Tom Daschle, the leader of the Senate, had been beaten in an upset. Ken Salazar and I were the only two Democrats that won nationally. Republicans controlled the Senate and the House, and two years later, Democrats were winning back Congress, and four years later I was President of the United States.

I think I did in the sense that there's a whole generation coming up behind us that was engaged, inspired, worked for change during the course of my presidency, saw what was possible. And that generation, it's coming.

This is what I would call old politics. This is the stuff we're trying to get rid of. Because the problem is, when we start breaking down into conservative and liberal, and we've got a bunch of set predispositions, whether it's on gun control, or its' on health care, any attempt to do health care is socialized medicine.

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe.

If you ask the average person they'd tell ya, "Naw, it's much more dangerous," despite the fact that violent crime has dropped precipitously.