I'm optimistic about our future as a party. It's about winning. The Democratic Party, if I had to do one word: winning. We need to win elections, because one thing I've learned is that when Democrats win good things happen to a lot of folks, and when we don't do so hot, we see a lot of chaos and carnage.

Community colleges provide higher education where people live, helping to build strong ladders of opportunity that allow people to secure a foothold in the middle class.

One of the things the Democratic Party is trying to do is take the word off-year out of our lexicon, because we've tended to be an accordion as a party. We expand in the presidentials; we shrink in between; and we scratch our head and wonder why we lose midterms.

When you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu, my friend Lee Saunders has said, and he is correct.

People believe mistakenly, that with death comes atonement, when in reality, life is for atonement and Death is for Judgment.

Every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman's right to make her own choices about her body and her health. That is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state.

African-American women are the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party, and we need to do more to make sure that we engage them, that we don't take them for granted. We need to be there. And again, I keep thinking about that woman I met in Detroit shortly after my election, who said, "You've got to stop showing up every fourth October and telling me that you care."