First of all, there's no mention of political parties in the Constitution, so you begin American history with not only no political conventions but also no parties.

The point is that you see candidates running in these different kinds of contests. A primary shows you something that's different from a state party convention, which shows you something that is different than what a caucus shows you.

The original thing that fascinated me most was why we expect leaders, and especially presidents, at times to destroy themselves - and that's a sign of being a good leader or a good president. We usually don't expect that of almost anyone else in any profession, in particular, in public life.

The founders were very worried that if parties developed in America, you might have something like the modern Italian system, where you have 20 different parties that divide Congress and the country and can't govern.

Under the system that we now have to nominate presidential candidates, for instance, I would prefer that we have a system that is closer to, say, the one we had in the 1960s.

A lot of it was, you know, you look for moments where, for instance, we were dependent on Abraham Lincoln making sure that the slaves were freed or John Kennedy bringing civil rights, or the first one I wrote about, George Washington trying to stop the British from invading and ending this country before it even began. Those were turning points where, if you had not had a president stepping up to the plate, if there wasn't a story like that, we would not be here.

We cannot be spun, or at least we'd like to think that we cannot be. And the presidents who are trying to - too overtly to try to say, here is what you historians and what you later Americans should think of my presidency, 30 or 40 years later, they look silly.