Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.

Playing to resentment and using a lot of, you know, grand abstract phrases like make America great again is - it just doesn't have the answer. It's simply a way to whip up emotion and then leave people more bitter than you found them.

Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.

We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.

Hillary Clinton's such a classic Democratic political figure and believes so much in institutions and in gradualism in the old way of reaching compromises with the opposition in the back rooms. That's what she did in Congress. It's what I imagine she'll try to do in the White House.

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're there or not, for years to come. It will not be Vietnam; it will not let us go home and lick our wounds.