The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.

My hope and expectation is that regardless of what Donald Trump said during the campaign, he's going to have to look carefully at the realities when he moves forward.

In sectors like energy, I haven't been arguing for more spending per se; I've been arguing that it doesn't make sense for us to spend $4 billion subsidizing an oil industry that's mature and very profitable. We should be using that money to finance clean energy of the future.

The bottom line is that it's hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts. And what makes America complicated as well is the degree to which this is not just a black/white society, and it is becoming less so every year.

Many of us were kind of irritated with Obama for larding it with tax cut, which we didn't think was going to be stimulative.

People'd be like, "Oh, spending taxpayer money." It's like, "No, no, I actually I'm paying for all of this. The only thing I don't pay for is Secret Service and an airplane."

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.