An institution that borrows on a non-prioritized basis would never contemplate borrowing on a prioritized basis. Doing so would undermine its standing in the bond market and suggest that it is not worthy of its strong credit rating. This type of self-imposed downgrade would materially affect its financial prospects.

What the establishment was trying to do was to position me as a Republican running in the Democratic primary.

In my private sector career, two of my favorite sayings were, 'Strategy is easy and execution is really hard,' and that we should 'run at criticism.'

We really need to move to a bit of a post-partisan world where we actually start solving problems and stop kind of living in a country where the political leaders act like half the country is entirely wrong about everything they believe and increasingly try to pit American against American.

The need to change our country's fiscal trajectory, including reforming entitlement programs, is an unassailable reality that will define our time.

Repealing the estate tax won't create jobs, it won't boost GDP, and it won't add efficiency to the market. Instead, repealing the estate tax will simply add to the debt, hurt our ability to build a stronger economy and worsen economic inequality.

I don't say bad things about my Republican colleagues, ever.

My mother wanted me to be a doctor.

I think dealing with climate change should be a centerpiece of any campaign in the 2020 election cycle. Yet I'm the only one with a bipartisan carbon tax bill.

There are definitely problems with technology companies, mostly around privacy, in my opinion, and the fact that they don't protect our privacy and we haven't passed privacy laws.

By any measure, CapitalSource outperformed both our direct competitors and the financial services industry in general, particularly in the context of the near collapse of the financial services industry where 19 of the 20 largest financial institutions in the country either failed or were bailed out by the government.

Representative democracy is in crisis in the United States.

We already spend too few days in Congress working on meaningful legislation; we simply can't afford to waste more time on legislation that doesn't move the needle to improve the lives of everyday Americans.

Federal spending is like a massive ship that takes a very long time to turn.

As an entrepreneur and public company CEO, I've dealt with dozens of rollouts, and when unveiling a new product, the operating approach should be, 'Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.'

I strongly believe in a free market, and it is great when companies make money and pay their people well.

Our employment future rests on the shoulders of the small employer, and we should be investing with them.

If you approach economic policy with the spirit of compromise, you can actually get good support.

You can't really yell, 'Charge!' and hope to have your team behind you unless they agree that the hill you are trying to take is a hill you should take.

For years, comprehensive tax reform has eluded legislators.

George W. Bush said the reason the Oval Office is round is there are no corners you can hide in.

If we practice hard enough, we can become thoroughly interested in even the simplest things of daily life, the way a child would. The smallest things would become so meaningful, they might even be worth a few words or a photograph, whatever method you use to capture them.

Politicians have done some grim things in pursuit of the office. President Franklin Roosevelt was a philanderer; nevertheless, he pushed aides to use his opponent Wendell Wilkie's affairs to hurt him. He even tutored aides on how to spread rumors without getting caught.

Chess masters don't evaluate all the possible moves. They know how to discard 98 percent of the ones they could make and then focus on the best choice of the remaining lot. That's the way expertise works in other fields, too: Wise practitioners recognize familiar patterns and put their creativity, improvisation, and skill toward the marginal cases.

In the modern presidency, the Chief Executive is expected to respond to anxious national moments with words that stabilize the country. President Trump chose a different route. He did not give a stirring speech of unity or create a national gathering point around common ideals. He spent his passion on other things.

Inaugural speeches are supposed to be huge and stirring. Presidents haul our heroes onstage, from George Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. George W. Bush brought the Liberty Bell. They use history to make greatness and achievements seem like something you can just take down from the shelf.

The walls of our upstairs hallway testify that we once had photogenic children. There are rows of framed pictures that show them playing baseball, basketball, holding a toad, and smiling in the sunlight at their eager parents. Everything is orderly and bright.

My mother, Nancy Dickerson, was a reporter for CBS and NBC and the first female star of television news; my father, Wyatt Dickerson, was a successful businessman. Their parties, from the '60s to the '80s, attracted cabinet officials, movie stars, and presidents.

CBS's Major Garrett writes in 'National Journal' about a new version of the 'stray voltage' theory of communication in which the president purposefully overstates his case knowing that it will create controversy.

In 2008, Senator John McCain forbid his staff from using an ad that referred to his opponent Barack Obama's inflammatory former pastor Jeremiah Wright or from raising that issue in any other way. He believed it was a sneaky way to use Obama's race against him.

Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

In addition to surviving the Forrestal, McCain has survived three other plane disasters, including being shot down over enemy territory.

An old theory holds that air conditioning ruined Congress. Members no longer had to flee the Washington heat to spend the summer back home. The long vacation forced them to bond with their constituents.

Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination on a platform of 'self-deportation' for illegal immigrants - and the Obama team never let Hispanics forget it. The Obama campaign also branded Republicans with Romney's ill-chosen words about 47 percent of Americans as the party of uncaring millionaires.

The culture of undermining sends signals of disrespect. This approach not only saps motivation and undermines teamwork, it also lowers the motivation to work extra hours anticipating what can go wrong.

After President Obama took office, his campaign book 'The Audacity of Hope' receded into his past fast. Its sweet, naive, bipartisan 'let's reason together' passages fell away, too.

During the 2008 campaign, Hillary Clinton ran a blunt television ad asking whether Barack Obama could handle a foreign policy crisis.

My children are vampires. I don't mean that they are going to dress as vampires for Halloween. I mean that, like vampires, they cannot be captured on film.

A number of Donald Trump's supporters told me during the campaign they had faith that he would be a good president because he would be helped by the experts around him. But the president's improvisation saps experts of their key skill: pattern recognition.

For Hillary Clinton, Iowa was a tough state for her in 2008, and she's put a lot of effort into fixing those mistakes.

Mother's Day is a welcome event in partisan times. Nearly everyone agrees that we should show mothers gratitude.

In the end, Obama won, stealing the change message from John Edwards and beating back Hillary Clinton's focus on experience. And the race turned on a remarkable speech Obama gave on the night of Nov. 10, 2007, in Des Moines.

To be the windowpane - this is basically a bastardization of what Orwell said about good writing - so you can get the conversation going and frame it the right way and make sure people aren't lost. And then you let the candidates illuminate the issues themselves.

If Michael Flynn lost his job because of a gradual erosion of trust, shouldn't the easy and frequent production of official statements that are so many connecting flights from the truth also be concerning?

The house was big enough for my brother and me to have firecracker wars at one end and leave Mom and Dad undisturbed at the other. When firecrackers weren't available, we attacked each other with pennies and marbles and clumps of Crisco, which made brilliant greasy asterisks when you missed and hit the wall.

When former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote his recent book, 'Duty', it was full of tough assessments and candor.

Comey worried that the pressure from Trump to end the Flynn investigation or remove the 'cloud' of the larger investigation would 'infect' the investigation if he let others working on the case know about it. You don't need to believe the particulars of each exchange to see that this mode of management was not productive to a larger purpose.

When the news broke that John McCain had been diagnosed with brain cancer, the outpouring of well wishes all hailed his toughness.

When the campaign ends, and you are home, the alarm clock is the same, but you don't know where to start after it goes off: expense reports, new stories, the crusted paint cans that have to go to the hazardous-waste disposal site, the wiper blade on the Honda that has gone droopy.

In the 2012 campaign, the president successfully transformed the most intense conservative positions into liabilities on immigration and the role of government.