Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn't have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.

The problem with the war in Iraq is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.

I think there was an absolute, deep gap between consensual relations between adults, which people may like or dislike, and people who physically impose themselves on children or misuse their authority to impose on children.

The most active people in the country know different things, and because each one tends to hear mostly and deal mostly with people with whom they agree, they are reinforced not simply in the conviction that they are right, which is totally appropriate, but that they are the majority. So you have both sides, the Left and the Right, thinking that the majority of the country is really with them.

While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April, the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery, and the projections of the Bush Administration.

Donald Trump has done more for getting people to understand the importance of public policy that respond to public needs in an affirmative way than anything we could have done on our own.

Particularly marijuana, I think is a great hypocrisy. I think frankly it contributes to a good deal of the sense of unfairness you have among younger people who are told they shouldn't do this because it’s got all these negative effects, but then older people are engaging in all kinds of things that probably have a greater impact on people.