I think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American.

Let me tell you never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

September 11 was terrible but if one goes back over the history of the IRA what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.

Nixon in 1968 unlike Obama 2008 was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet in 1972 he won what in some measures was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.

Hollywood has a history of raising expectations beyond Washington's reach of appealing to the very American desire to mythologize political leaders particularly the president.

When you say things like 'We have to wipe out the Taliban ' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that you know America created anyway.

Wherever you go in the history of America there have been Black people making contributions but their contributions have been obscured lost buried.

What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that he is a centrist just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life.

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.