To balance China the democracies will need new friends - and India with its fast-growing economy youthful population and democratic politics seems the obvious candidate.

If you really want to diminish a candidate depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself.

When I started 'CNN ' I made the decision to stay out of endorsing candidates and let the doers make up their own minds about politics that it wasn't going to come from me.

The days when the words 'Hollywood actor' framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics - candidate consultant pundit and Tea Party crowd extra alike - is an actor now a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.

African-Americans who might have disagreed with candidate Obama's left-of-center politics voted for him in 2008 because electing a candidate with brown skin was too historic an opportunity to miss.

I guess you'd call me an independent since I've never identified myself with one party or another in politics. I always decide my vote by taking as careful a look as I can at the actual candidates and issues themselves no matter what the party label.

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is I think the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.

For us political activists and candidates the morning after any election is a mix of emotions - the personal and the immediate the culmination of your own recent campaigning efforts and the fortunes of your party and the success or otherwise of what you stand for and believe in.

My mom was a diabetic. Her sister was a diabetic so I was already a candidate.