Washington always has a high level of hypocrisy, right, but I think the level of hypocrisy that has come out of the United States Senate on both sides of the aisle is amazing.

This is an issue that has an exceedingly high number of threads in it. It involves race, it involves culture, it involves crime, it involves justice.

As the inevitable discussion proceeds in the months ahead, this memo should provide both perspective and a reality check. President Bush's approval numbers will again fall back to more realistic levels fairly quickly. All were quite successful on Election Day.

I may be a little old-fashioned, but I actually believe that if you live and work in our house and you work on our payroll and you take oaths, then integrity matters in elections.

The president [George W. Bush] broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn't matter. P.R.? It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter.

As you know, in this democracy, in order to have a healthy democracy, we have to get to the common good. But the only way to get to the common good is if we have a common set of facts, which we don't seem to have today, and we have a common level of decency. And my problem with the president and what happened today and why I think it affects the country as a whole is, first, we bring up our kids better than this. We teach them not to do this. We tell them not to do this, and it is not the right standard of behavior.

Well, Americans expect our president to be human beings, and as imperfect as all of us are. They expect us to make mistakes and all that. But one thing the American public likes is, if you make a mistake, you do that, you cross that line that they expect you to behave under, then you apologize or then you correct that behavior and said you have learned, you are going to do better, you are going to achieve better, and you are going to serve a higher purpose than that.