It is one thing to rouse the passion of a people, and quite another to lead them.

Rapid change, accommodating it can be one of the great human capacities. But living through it can be the stuff of stress and often suffering.

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.

I don't have to deal with the issues of the daily news cycle.

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.

To try to be authentic these days, to ask questions of the people in power - it's difficult. This administration has evolved new techniques to handle people like me. Their strategy, in a word, is simple: ignore them.

Two sons, they'll both be presidents after they win their Nobel Prizes. And the daughters, they'll be prima ballerinas before they become the president of Princeton and start their Internet company. And I just started to think about What's the conventional load of those expectations you carry around? You have to pull them out one by one and smash them in the corner. You realize the pile is quite high. But in a way, it becomes oddly liberating to do that.