The American people have now spoken, but it's going to take a little while to determine what they've said.

constituted a critical lapse in judgement and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely responsable

One of the real dilemmas we have in our country and around the world is that what works in politics is organization and conflict. That is, drawing the sharp distinctions. But in real life, what works is networks and cooperation. And we need victories in real life, so we've got to get back to networks and cooperation, not just conflict. But politics has always been about conflict, and in the coverage of politics, information dissemination tends to be organized around conflict as well.

President Obama's approach embodies the values, the ideas and the direction America has to take to build the 21st-century version of the American Dream: a nation of shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, shared prosperity, a shared sense of community.

Globalisation is not something that we can hold off or turn off. It is the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water.

If we have the right preventive and primary care, if we start charging for comprehensive care in the chronic cases, 10 percent of the cases take up two-thirds of the medical expenses, and if we do more on problems like childhood obesity, that we can, to use the parlance that's popular in Washington, bend the cost curve and eventually reconcile this so our costs will be closer to our competitors and so we can cover everybody.

Let me say this as clearly as I can: No matter how sharp a grievance or how deep a hurt, there is no justification for killing innocents.