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.

I think the most important thing for us to make judgments about is what can we really do? What can we achieve?

President Obama made the right choice, over 1 million Americans are still working today. The American auto industry is not just surviving. It is thriving. Where Mitt Romney was willing to turn his back on Akron, Dayton, and Toledo, Ohio, the president said, "I've got your back''.

We're proud of the work we're doing to make Chicago a great city for people of all ages. Nothing's more important than keeping in mind the needs of older adults - and how valuable a role they play in improving the city, based on their amazing collective talent and wisdom.

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

At some point, deliberation begins to look more like indecisiveness which then becomes a way of emboldening our enemies and allies and causing our allies to question our resolve. So we shouldn't let one component of this determine our national security here which depends on providing an Afghanistan which denies a safe haven to terrorists as well as stabilizing Pakistan. Those are our two national security interests at stake in Afghanistan.

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.