If acknowledging that racial misgivings and misunderstandings are still a part of politics and life in America, I plead guilty.

At the start of his second term, one wonders less about Obama's fitness than his willingness: Why doesn't he do more to build and maintain the relationships required to govern in era of polarization?

It's a deft trick to turn American exceptionalism into an exceptional political tactic.

According to a Public Policy Polling survey, most Americans find lice and colonoscopies more appealing than Capitol Hill.

With gridlock the norm, Congress's approval rating is below 10 percent and the public has lost faith in its national leadership.

Blending hard-bitten realism with long-view optimism, Obama said that every 20 or 30 years brings a new cycle of pessimism in America.

Although we were never pals and occasionally butted heads, my relationship with Clinton and his wife, Hillary, made me a better journalist.

President George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 largely because he was seen as comfortable in his own skin, while rival John Kerry was viewed as a flip-flopping opportunist.

Obama might do well to remember that his fast rise from the Illinois state Senate was due in large part to an uncanny ability to make friends and find mentors.

I'm hearing echoes of Bill Clinton, circa 1996, in President Obama's reelection rhetoric.

For a man who has compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the nation's challenges to those of the Gilded Age, Obama put forward a tepid agenda.

The products your life must have could be in the form of books you’ve read or teachings you listen to via audio or video.

After all, hadn't she been the one to pursue him? And Madame Dupuy had done it with a vigor that most women would have been too ashamed to display.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

A bachelor's life is no life for a single man.

Our lives are fed by kind words and gracious behavior. We are nourished by expressions like 'excuse me', and other such simple courtesies.

I really respond to putting myself out of my own depth and finding my feet.

I have my flaws too, but I am a professional who doesn't like to miss or lose.

I felt like an impostor, taking all that money for reciting ten or twelve lines of nonsense a day.

Spiral minds are harder to twist.

Well, I have an idea, usually a visual image of some sort. A setting. A particular, I don't know, urban scene, a particular time of day. Something that grips my imagination for some reason.