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.

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.

[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.

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

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.

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.

The media has become more forceful, has begun to recognize its traditional historic role and act on it, and truth is infectious.