The President [Barack Obama], I think if you look at it from his shoes, you know, was facing a very difficult situation where he had to own Washington, tame New York, save a collapsing economy, with a collapsed financial system. He moved, I think, to a team that he felt was tried and true, in terms of dealing with financial crisis. That was his decision.

By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books.

The informed, unmanaged question. That's the most dangerous thing at a press conference anywhere.

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community?

[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.

I think that there's a lot of anxiety out there in people wanting their children to be part of the mainstream, to achieve based on the well-worn yardsticks.

I absolutely reject that idea that the press is liberal and what it does is liberal. In my view, it's like accusing a doctor of malpractice or a lawyer of malfeasance.