With a normal president like President [Barack] Obama, he says a word, and that's because there has been some thought that he's done and there had been policy papers and there's been aides and there's been advisers and then there is a connection to an actual set of policies. And so, the words like have roots into actual stuff.

Some children lack tools to see their course in the world in far-sighted ways. Just introducing school vouchers won't change that. You have to have nurse-home partnerships, early childhood education, mentoring programs and so on. People learn from people they love.

Politics really is a team sport. You really have to work the whole system to get somewhere down the road.

Tim Kaine has been obviously a governor. He's been a senator. He's one of the smartest rising stars in the Democratic Party. He is very plausible as someone who could sit in and be president.

I generally think the president [Donald Trump] should get his Cabinet picks, unless they're egregiously out of the range, either ethically or intellectually out of the range of what's acceptable.

The legitimacy of a war is not established by how it is organized but by what it achieves.

There are no free and democratic and wealthy countries in the world that have US rate of gun violence. We have to worry about loners and alienated people. We have to do better on mental health.