[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.

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.

The fact is that in a way, journalists become a kind of default in the system when you don't have substantive two-party back-and-forth inside of the government.

[Barack Obama] says at one point, "[Jimmy] Carter, [Bill] Clinton and I suffer from," what he called, "the policy wonk's disease."

Younger colleagues tended to draw untested self-confidence from their bonuses and prestigious degrees.

All of the leading terrorism experts are clear on one thing: that in terms of protecting America, we are almost never going to know a place or a time of an attack.

Civilizations rise and fall on confidence. America had figured out a way to borrow money to manufacture it.