Hope is different from optimism. Hope is a tough virtue, not a psychological predisposition. Hope insists on taking facts and reason into account and still insisting that improvement ... is always a real possibility.

I actually think there are more Republicans than people realize who would be sympathetic to immigration reform in the rank and file. I think the lesson for Jeb Bush is politicians shouldn't write books with long lead times.

Here you had John McCain and Lindsey Graham in a very principled way standing up and defending Barack Obama. You had people like Gene Robinson and a lot of other liberals, who said, and this I personally agree with, however flawed Rand Paul was as a messenger, we need a debate about this. The administration has not been forthcoming enough about its drone policy.

On the question of opposition, I think there are - when you want to send a signal if you're on the Democratic side that this is a very right wing cabinet at odds with so much of what [Donald] Trump said. And it's also going to be fascinating to see if your Republican Party in the congress actually goes along with those aspects of the Trump plan that are designed to raise wages.

The worst kind of job to have is a job with lots of responsibility and very little power.

Politically, Donald Trump doesn't seem to care much about what he says. He gauges the effect. Sometimes, in the middle of a speech, he will change his direction if the audience doesn't like him.

You have this all the way through this cabinet so that I think there are a lot of other things to worry about [Donald] Trump. But in conventional political terms, this is a cabinet that I think is going to have a very hard time delivering to the base that Trump courted in this election.