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.

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.

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.

Once they arrive, affirmative action kids are generally left to sink or swim academically. Brown (University) offers plenty of counseling and tutoring to struggling students, but, as any academic Dean will tell you, it's up to the students to seek it out, something that a drowning minority student will seek to avoid at all costs, fearing it will trumpet a second-class status.

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

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

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