If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.

You try to hold on to some notions you might have had before, that this will somehow work out, this is a spell that will lift or be broken.

The President [Barack Obama] is very focused on [healthcare]. He, of course, is also writing this speech at high speed. And right coming up until the speech, he is convinced that a full plan, letter and verse of what the administration wants, will be released.

The key is to put your outrage in a place where you can get it when you need to, but not have it bubble up so much, especially when you're asked to explain new ideas or explain what you observed two people who share none of your experiences.

Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world.

Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction.

The President, who really had been mostly managing his one-man Barack Obama narrative and journey his whole life, without executive experience, certainly - he's not a governor. Some governors, of course, they have experience in executing power, which is something fairly unique, actually, in government. And he has, neither, a set of nourishing experiences.