We know that we have to have the right combinations of government policies and private sector energy and dynamism. Getting that balance right is what I know President Obama has tried to do, and at every turn he's been stopped.

I mean, honestly, we have to be clear that the life for many Afghan women is not that much different than it was a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. The country has lived with so much violence and conflict that many people, men and women, just want it to be over.

Women can't be charged more than men for our health insurance.

I'm not interested in, you know, turning the clock back or pointing fingers, but I am interested in trying to figure out how we come together to chart a better way forward and one that will restore confidence in, you know, small and medium-size businesses and consumers and begin to chip away at the unemployment rate.

Every day, no matter what is happening around me, I consciously try to discipline my own feelings and my mind about what I have to be grateful for, because by any stretch of the imagination - even during the worst times when people are accusing me of things and doing all that they do - I'm a very lucky person.

I've never understood the division between so-called realists and so-called idealists.

I think what the president [Barack Obama] understands, and what he's trying to do, is that we have to support the Arab and Kurdish fighters on the ground who are actually doing the fighting.