Our politics at its best involves us recognizing ourselves in each other. And our politics at its worst are when we see immigrants or women or blacks or gays or Mexicans as somehow separate, apart from us.

As you might imagine, if you're a teenager having a couple of people with microphones and guns always following you around, that could grate on them. But you know, they've handled it with grace and I give Michelle [Obama] most of the credit for how well they've done, but I also just think they are graceful, good young, young women.

I think that when it comes to Social Security, all of us want to make sure that our senior citizens can retire with dignity and respect. And everybody has to be open-minded in thinking how do we firm up a system that, in fact, is going to be in difficulty in the coming years.

I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.

Back in the '50s and '60s, most politicians were concerned about not talking about faith, partly because there were consequences you had to deal with - (for instance) Catholicism had been made an issue.

I think it's really important to enlarge the issue behind abortion. I have been serving for over two decades and I have seen year in and year out largely the Republicans voting against women's contraception, family planning.

I was able to do that [showing up of Democratic benefits] when I was the candidate. But I've not seen or presided over that kind of systematic outreach that I think needs to happen.