Citizenship in the 21st century requires more than paying your taxes and voting and occasionally running for office. That even if you're never in political office, you have political responsibilities. You can make your society stronger and better.

For too long we've been told about 'us' and 'them.' Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that 'they' are the problem, not 'us.' But there can be no 'them' in America. There's only us.

You can't blame the administration and the Republicans for taking us back to deficits, for spending the Social Security surplus and assaulting the environment. That's what they promised to do in the last election.

The power of our example is more important than the strength of our military.

If you wanted to create jobs in a way that has minimal effect on the deficit but has government action, the two best things you could do are the infrastructure bank and a simple SBA-like loan guarantee for all building retrofits, where the contractor or the energy-service company guarantees the savings. So that allows the bank to loan money to let a school or a college or a hospital or a museum or a commercial building unencumbered by debt to loan it on terms that are longer, so you can pay it back only from your utility savings. You could create a million jobs doing that.

The era of big government is over.

A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.