My brother got a .22 for his 12th birthday; I got a .22. He got a hunting knife; I got a hunting knife.

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.

This is nothing new. We saw this with the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Right Act - constitutional challenges were brought to all three of these monumental pieces of legislation.

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.

The most disappointing thing this week is that Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, because he was the intellectual leader of the Republican Party. Because Paul Ryan decided to join Mitt Romney's ticket, he is completely reversed himself on some of the issues he has been very strong on, like the $716 billion in savings that are in two of his budgets.

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.