When the women's movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the '60s besides a women's movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It's just great to let other people carry the narrative.

Take Hispanic voters. They favor Democrats because they like the party's programs, from health care reform to government spending on education. It's not because the Republicans don't have a big enough Office of Hispanic Outreach.

I used to have a sort of soft spot for Huckabee. He seemed to have a genuinely saintly streak, which caused him to defend illegal immigrants and give pardons to criminals who were perhaps a little less rehabilitated than he had imagined.

The middle of 'America's Women' is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.

Illegal immigration can never be completely stopped, no matter how high the wall or how many patrol agents you have watching it.

Well, it'd certainly be fascinating if we discovered that gays were better at being married than heterosexuals are. Talk about irony.