When you lose an election, you don't blink, you don't turn away. You look it right in the eye and say, why did we lose?

Democrats don't relate to middle-class people.

What I want to do first with education is my student loan idea. Basically, if you go into teaching and teach for five years, your student loans should be forgiven. It doesn't cost that much.

When I started to get involved in the crime issue, people said, "it's a local issue." I said, "No, there are lots of ways the federal government can help." And the best way the federal government can help, and did in the Crime Bill, is to find programs that work around the country and help them spread.

Biking through New York's boroughs in 2005, I thought about some old friends, Joe and Eileen Bailey. Though they are imaginary, I frequently talk to them.

Crime can be a unifying argument - not an argument that people use as a code for us vs. them.

In education, I'm going to try to find what works. One thing I want to do is improve the quality of teachers. There are a lot of people who want to go into teaching; it's fundamentally a very fulfilling profession. But people don't feel they have financial support. We pay starting teachers in particular too little to attract the quality people that we need. I want to make it easier for good people who want to go into teaching to do that.