In a world with no systems, with chaos, everything becomes a guerilla struggle, and this predictability is not there. And it becomes almost impossible to save lives, educate kids, develop economies, whatever.

I want to make it very clear that this middle-class tax cut, in my view, is central to any attempt we're going to make to have a short-term economic strategy and a long-term fairness strategy, which is part of getting this country going again.

I don't know in my long life that I ever worked with anybody that has quite the combination of policy knowledge and concern, political skills, of a personal touch with people, and a sense of innate fairness that inspires confidence.

If we want to invest in the prosperity of our nation, we must invest in the education of our children so that their talents may be fully employed.

Music, to me, was - is - representative of everything I like most in life. It's beautiful and fun, but very rigorous. If you wanted to be good you had to work like crazy. It was a real relationship between effort and reward. My musical life experiences were just as important to me, in terms of forming my development, as my political experiences or my academic life.

The risk is that as we come out of this recession, we'll have so much debt to finance, we'll either have to have inflation or very high interest rates to continue to borrow the money, or both. That's a risk.

If you want to live like a Republican, vote like a Democrat.