Because of a mass media more interested in gossip and sensationalism than real issues, I would say a vast majority of the American public doesn't have a clue about how the Congress functions and what goes on.

I went back to a small town in Poland where my dad grew up. It was a very traumatic experience for me as a young man to know that my father's family were killed by Nazis, killed by Hitler. And that left, you know, if not intellectually, at least an emotional part of me which said, God, we have got to do everything we can to end this kind of horrific racism or anti-Semitism. And I have spent much of my life trying to fight that.

Our job is to provide coalition the military equipment that they need; the air support they need; special forces when appropriate. But at the end of the day for a dozen different reasons, not the least of which is that ISIS would like American combat troops on the ground so they could reach out to the Muslim world and say, "Look, we're taking on those terrible Americans."

We are living in the richest country in the history of the world, yet we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country and millions of people are struggling to put food on the table. It is my absolute conviction that everyone in this country deserves a minimum standard of living and we've got to go forward in the fight to make that happen.

In any democratic, civilized - even non-democratic nations, if you are a nation, it means to say that in our case, if there's a hurricane in Louisiana, the people of Vermont are there for them. If there's a tornado in the Midwest, we are there for them. If there's flooding in the East Coast, the people in California are there for us.

If you want to run for the United States Senate, you hire a consultant who will do polling for you, who will tell you the kinds of television ads you should run, who will tell you that most of the money you raise has got to go into TV. Raising money, and then putting that money into the hands of consultants, who then put on TV ads - that's more or less what campaigns are about. We've got to change that.

The American people understand that it is grotesquely unfair - we are a society that prides itself on fairness, that prides itself on equal opportunity, and people are looking out and seeing, since the Great Recession of 2008, 99 percent of all new income going to the top 1 percent.