It's one thing to work women into your talking points. It's another to tell them how you are going to educate their kids, how you are going to ensure they get health care, how we are going to rebuild infrastructure, how they are going to get equal pay.

Just a few months ago in the Republican primary Mitt Romney said to his opponents, who he was crushing at the time, stop whining. And I think that's a good message for the Romney campaign. Instead of whining about what the Obama campaign is saying, why don't you just put the facts out there and let people decide rather than trying to hide them.

That's the other thing that you find most often with women. They're not really concerned about what's happened over the last four years. They really want to know what's going to happen in the next four years.

This is the debate we have every time we talk about the minimum wage, that if we raise it even 50 cents, that it means employers are just going to shut down. It's not true.

As a commander-in-chief what you do and what you say has real consequences.

There's nothing harder than going on TV and saying something that you don't believe. I don't do that anymore.

Politics gets me out of bed in the morning It's what really interests me. I'm a competitor, but I also feel like I'm contributing, whether it's working on health-care policy in the White House or out here in Chicago.