Folks who are getting their strokes in the South are not as unhappy with Howard Dean. You don't see anybody starting any movement to get him out of office.

I knew early on that I wanted to be a reporter, but I didn't know I was a political journalist until my first job in Boston, in the '70s, covering the public school committee at a time when busing was a huge issue. Children's lives were being directly affected by political decisions, and that's when I realized that everything is politics.

Can't disagree with the need for a grasp of history.

Aspiring black leaders are often asked to transcend race, even though no one ever asked, say, Hillary Clinton to transcend gender. This is a precarious race straddle that most members of the breakthrough generation seem to reject. Even the most well meaning white Obama supporters seem to take deep satisfaction in this idea. Obama, they insisted, could be raceless, a reasurringly optimistic view of America's deepest burden that ignores countless peices of evidence to the contrary.

Barack Obama didn't get elected president, would never have been elected president, had he decided to run as a black candidate. In order to reach the broadest number of people you have to speak to their interests as broadly as you can.

We used to say in the black community that if somebody else caught a cold, we caught pneumonia.

People are always surprised when they see me speak live that I have a sense of humor. And I say, Well, you know, there's not much opportunity to laugh when you're reporting the dread news of the day.