What the United States has done hasn't always been liked or popular. But if you look at some of the most populous places in the world - China, India - the United States is not only respected but, in fact, popular.

I'm actually genuinely optimistic about the United States and what's possible in the United States. And when you're out here, you see Americans across racial and economic and socioeconomic lines working together. And you maybe get a little bit less cynical than when you sit in the seat of kind of the epicenter of it all.

I get letters from kids from all over the country. I always try to answer them because there were people I looked up to in my youth and just wanted to be in contact with. It's also important to realize that you find your role models in a lot of different places. I've never believed that your role models have to look like you. You can find them in all sort of colors, shapes and sizes.

It has been hard to muster the resources to support fledgling democracies and to intervene on behalf of the most desperate. The AIDS orphans in Uganda, the refugee fleeing Zimbabwe, the young woman who has been trafficked into the sex trade in Southeast Asia. It has been hard, yet this assistance together with the compassionate work of private charities, people of conscience and people of faith, has shown the soul of our country.

I don't think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.

We're in a new world. We're in a world in which the possibility of terrorism, married up with technology, could make us very, very sorry that we didn't act.

I may not agree with everything, but our President, just like President [George W.] Bush did, is trying to do his best under difficult circumstances.