All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments.

I personally - if I were designing the tax code - would have a tax code in which Mitt Romney paid more than 13 percent, given what I know about the kind of investments he made money from.

I think [Donald Trump] will do something on immigration.

I think reading intelligent expressions of different points of view is a good thing, and there is a way in which being in academia in a classroom at the University probably gives you, can give you an academic view of things, and reading actual real time debates about what should we do in Syria or the Buffett rule, budget issues...gives you a kind of sense that's hard to get in a classroom.

The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to narrow defeat.

He should release the tax returns tomorrow. It's crazy. You've got to release six, eight, ten years back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two. He has to give a big speech in defense of capitalism, and that will elevate, I think, this race above this tactical back and forth, which I do think he's on the margin of losing.

There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.