So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan's home.

I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.

There are things about classic liberalism that obviously I'm drawn to and I bet all of you are as well. Those are things like liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights. But the reason that I reject the label is that I grew up cutting my teeth against the liberals.

I don't know that I ever bought into the "American dream." I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the '50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.

[Students for a Democratic Society] it's a social democratic program.

I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.

That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.