There's no question that a lot of Americans on both the right and the left are expressing some fears and frustrations about the dislocations brought on by globalisation. Many of those frustrations are legitimate and they need to be addressed.

If you look at what happened, I came in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt who waited, well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.

Presidential elections always turn on personalities, they turn on how campaigns are run, they turn on natural desires for change.

Today we're seeing that climate change is about more than a few unseasonably mild winters or hot summers. It's about the chain of natural catastrophes and devastating weather patterns that global warming is beginning to set off around the world.. the frequency and intensity of which are breaking records thousands of years old.

Look, first of all, the climate is changing. I don't think the science is clear what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural. It's convoluted. And for the people to say the science is decided on, this is just really arrogant, to be honest with you, it's this intellectual arrogance that now you can't even have a conversation about it. The climate is changing, and we need to adapt to that reality.

Iran was nearing completion of a new reactor capable of producing plutonium for a bomb.

I will begin to remove our troops from Iraq immediately.