I`m not planning to endorse anybody. I have a long friendship with the family and a long friendship with Jeb [Bush], but I`m, like a lot of people, sitting on the sidelines watching and waiting.

Look, America was a narrowly divided country in 2000;49-49 was what Michael Barone called it. It's a 49-49 nation.

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.

If we're going to have a strong and dynamic economy in the years ahead, we need to tackle some of the structural challenges that our economy faces and the tax code is one of the biggest.

If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. It's not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.

I hate to sound sort of diffident about it but it strikes me that a lot of people on the right have got active lives and are doing other things.

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.