I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.

I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.

I found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.

I've said for thirty years that capitalism is an exhausted system. But now you can see the handwriting everywhere. And one especially horrifying part is the fiscal crisis.

What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.

If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.