The foreign policy, you have to know how to pick and choose. There's no way, if Saddam [Hussein] had not had weapons of mass destruction, I would have gone, because I don't believe that the U.S. should be involved directly in civil wars.

Let's start off with my father being a mailman.

I was the chairman of the Budget Committee and the lead architect the last time it happened in Washington, and when we did it we had great economic growth, we cut taxes, and we had a big surplus.

Economic growth is the key to everything. But once you have economic growth, it is important that we reach out to people who live in the shadows, the people who don't seem to ever think that they get a fair deal. And that includes people in our minority community; that includes people who feel as though they don't have a chance to move up.

I am told that the Saudis have organized 34 countries who want to join in the battle against terrorism.

You can't go home and look at your plaques at the end of the day, because every politician has like a million plaques on their wall. OK? You don't go home and look at - you don't get anything for that. And you can't go home and say, boy, I really served the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. You want to go home and, you know, Fourth of July, you know, any of these special holidays that recognize our country, you want to feel like you've built a stronger nation, which means you helped build the people and put them in a stronger place where everyone's lifted.

We've just let too many things happen. And now, try to turn around and fix it. Getting involved in a [Syria] civil war directly was never something I thought made sense.