“This guy’s done everything right. He’s raised his family right. He’s fought his way all the way to the top of the Harvard Law Review, in a blind test becomes head of the Review, the top editor there. Everything he’s done is clean as a whistle. He’s never not only broken any law, he’s never done anything wrong. He’s the perfect father, the perfect husband, the perfect American. And all they do is trash the guy.”

“When you watch the President like that, I always feel he’s got so many pluses, doesn’t he? In a sense, he’s personable, he’s handsome, he can be funny. You know, abroad he has this great image for America. A lot of things are just perfect about Barack Obama.”

“Given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb…. What I see in front of my nose is a President whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.”

“One of the perils of being President: Everything you ever wrote will become public. And today, Barack Obama, age 22 — long before he met Michelle — new letters and diary entries revealed in Vanity Fair from a biography out soon….The future president writes adoringly about life in New York. Quote, ‘Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways. Birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks.’ Oh, we were all so romantic when we were young.”

“He [Thomas Jefferson] was a tall, cool, cerebral President who won re-election, who was actually really good at politics, even though he didn’t want to act as though he was. So, there’s some similarities with President Obama.”

“I wanted to take you back to something you wrote. You wrote that ‘I have never had a President who inspired me the way people tell me my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe, I have found the man who could be that President.’ Do you still feel just as inspired by President Obama?”