My experience politically has always been that one-word definition of politics: money. Keep your eye on the buck. And that tells you where the American people are going to be.

Slavery is nothing to joke about! And the history of this nation's [the USA's] involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.

Government or politics in America today is big business. Everybody makes money involving themselves in one way or the other, whether it's pollsters, whether they are policy wonks, whether they are pundits, whether they are those who believe that they must call it as they see it and then to be fair about it.

Since Obama has expressed admiration for the portrait of Abraham Lincoln that Doris Kearns Goodwin paints in Team of Rivals, he could do the 16th president one better: He should name Hillary Clinton as his running mate in 2012. That would be both needed change and audacious.

Sept. 11 jolted America out of its second gilded age.

Certain black leaders would believe that you have to go through their prism: 'If I lay my hand on you, you're OK.' So many people have made a living off of the pimping of race.

Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening in the halls of power as had never been seen before by black America.