Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions. Confidence is the public face of competence.

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 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.

These were lobbyists—many of them compensated quite handsomely not to react as human beings.

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.

Confidence is the public face of competence.

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