Under Bill Clinton we had a roaring economy that looked really good.

Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party.

The biggest issue for me is whether large numbers of Americans can begin to think that government can actually help make the country a fairer place. And that's partly a matter of policies that achieve results in terms of reducing inequality and raising middle-class and working-class incomes, which have been flat for decades. But it's also symbolic and rhetorical, it's whether Hillary Clinton can - or whoever's president - can persuade Americans that it's happening and that they can begin to trust their elected officials a little bit more and their institutions of government a little bit more.

I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire. In the extremity of war, character is revealed.

American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.

Like an odorless gas, [inequality] pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of the country's democracy. But it seems impossible to find the source and shut it off.

I think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent. And now it's in the single digits, so it plummeted. And with the plummeting of unions came the weakening of an organized working-class voice in politics.