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

If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat.

By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books.

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.

A little known area often defines the fortunes of leaders -- management skills.

The President [Barack Obama], I think if you look at it from his shoes, you know, was facing a very difficult situation where he had to own Washington, tame New York, save a collapsing economy, with a collapsed financial system. He moved, I think, to a team that he felt was tried and true, in terms of dealing with financial crisis. That was his decision.