In Europe and the United States, you've got different systems to select candidates, and no system is perfect.

If you are wealthy and can hire enough accountants and attorneys, you can find ways around the code. It's fundamentally not fair. It wastes a lot of time and energy and effort to comply with it. It doesn't encourage savings and investment. And we need to simply it and make it more fair.

You may be right that people say: You know what, we had Obama. He was inexperienced. The guy had great rhetoric, sounded good, looked good, but has turned out to be an utter disaster. I want someone where I have confidence and credibility that they're up to the job and that I can trust what they tell me.

I have become an adjective. There is something called a Rovian-style of campaigning and it's meant as an insult. One columnist said it consists mainly of throwing mud until it sticks. One prominent blogger described the elements of a textbook Rovian race as fear-based, smear-based and anything goes.

It's time to put America at the front of all of our agendas and to find ways to work together on common ground.

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

The president has an obligation to serve all the people of America.