I should say the leadership's proposal in the Senate and the House are very unpopular. And when people realize it will raise taxes, raise their insurance premiums cost and explode the deficit, they think twice about it.

Things happened there that I don't think are the finest hours for anybody, whether it was a journalist, the legal system or, in that case of the political system, who would say that was an example of when Washington worked best.

You may say I may be unfit to be mayor. But you can never say I'm an unfit mayor.

I think indeed our response on counterinsurgency needs to be finely tuned to the needs of Afghanistan. This is not Iraq. We don't have a Sons of Iraq here. We don't have the same divisions here that we had between Sunni and Shia.

We're bending the law as far as we can to ban an entirely new class of guns.

I like what I read, I find it intellectually engaging and I don't really have that much time, so I gotta make every bit count. I read magazines and stuff like that, but if I'm going to read a book, I want to come out smarter. It's not to escape, it's to learn.

There was no blueprint or how-to manual for fixing a global financial meltdown, an auto crisis, two wars and a great recession, all at the same time.