Reducing everything immediately to good and evil is bad history - not only because it isn't true, but because reductionism is unpersuasive; it is boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one talk socratically - that one can present alternate viewpoints, not strawman arguments.
Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.
In policy arena after policy arena, Democrats respond to every failure of clunky government by proposing the addition of still more layers to 1960s-era bureaucracies as they break down.
Republicans must sell a big-cause, problem-solving vision - low-ego and happy-warrior in tone.
We must energetically tackle the significant problems the voters rightly want Washington to be addressing.
We must not extend nor expand Obamacare. We need a completely different solution to help those caught in the Obamacare snare.
We cannot let Obamacare expand geographically by setting up state exchanges, nor can we extend Obamacare's unlawful subsidies.
Obamacare cannot be fixed and Republicans must not extend this disastrous legislation.
Obamacare arrived also because Republicans failed to persuade the public that we could address the avalanche of problems government had already created by decades of interfering with the health-care market.
Democrats have long held an advantage over Republicans on health care, mostly due to a perceived empathy problem in my party.
Obamacare is not popular.
A family's desire to be able to keep its health insurance when changing jobs or geography (a problem that Obamacare doesn't make any better, by the way) is perfectly reasonable.
At our house we have come to conclude that building and strengthening character will require extreme measures and the intentional pursuit of gritty work experiences.
When I was a kid, we had airconditioning in the house... but we never used it.
We lack an educated, resilient citizenry capable of navigating the increasing complexities of daily life.
My wife, Melissa, and I, together with our neighbors, try to create experiences for our kids that build character. We want our kids to exercise their muscles and their minds.
Few experiences help our kids discover the distinction between needs and wants like the great outdoors.
Some of the United States' enemies now assume, perhaps rightly, that we hate each other so much that we'd sooner collaborate with them than do the difficult work of listening to each other. It doesn't need to be this way - but national recovery won't come from Washington. It has to start with you.
With a population of 1.4 billion, China is a lucrative market. But getting into that market isn't cheap. At best, the price of doing business in China is silence; at worst, it's reading talking points straight from the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing is not subtle about it.
We ought to have the courage of our convictions and confidence in our own ingenuity. After all, that's what America is all about. Either that, or learn Mandarin.
Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we're going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime.
My average duration in a job is more like six months, because I've done crisis and turnaround stuff for two decades. I've been in a lot of companies and not-for-profits and institutions that were really on fire; in a lot of ways, the Senate is the least urgent, least serious institution I've ever worked in.
I didn't go to Harvard because I thought they had good academics. I went because they had crappy enough sports so they'd let me play.
You know, my Uber driver rating is 10,000. People tell me it's the best rating. It's fantastic, believe me.
The #MeToo movement is a very important movement. It's messy. And it's complicated. And there are places where it's going to overreach.
The #MeToo movement doesn't belong to Republicans or the Democrats. The #MeToo movement belongs to women who are having the courage to come forward and say this is wrong. People should be protected. We want that for all of our daughters and all of our sisters. We also want there to be rights for the accused.
I'm a politician who has to for a time serve in public life, and I get death threats. And it is what it is because you've put yourself out there in the public square.
I read articles in the gym in the morning on a tablet or phone. Then I print out a stack of them that I carry around with me throughout the workday.
Martin Luther would be the headliner of any 'dead-or-alive dinner party' I would ever throw. He is, quite simply, one of the most fascinating brains and compelling personalities in history.
My life is too mundane for anyone to write up.
Well, I think it's clear that the climate is changing. I think reasonable people can differ about how much and how rapidly. But I think it's clear that it's changing and it's clear that humans are a contributing factor.
Persevering and getting through hardship makes you tough, and at our house we celebrate stitches. As long as we didn't do permanent damage to their spine that's going to have lasting effect, we applaud and celebrate stitches at our house.
I think we are doing a bad job of helping our kids understand that they have huge resiliency.
It is good for kids to learn how to work.
I do worry that we're failing in a whole bunch of fundamental ways to distinguish for our kids between needs and wants. And we're failing to distinguish between production and consumption.
I'm from a farm town that when I was a kid was about an hour outside of Omaha.
Work gives you meaning. Work turns you into a servant to your family and to your neighbors and to your local community.
The longest-term thought many people have in D.C. is how can I be sure I don't do anything that so annoys either my base or my general electorate that I might not be able to get my job back? I don't think that's the right way to think about it.
Politics is about maintaining a framework for ordered liberty so that people can live in the neighborhoods and the communities that they live in.
We have judges in the American system and they take on a black robe where they are supposed to shield their partisan preferences. They are not red or blue state judges. They are judges.
Politics matter, but politics can't come first. If politics come first in your life, something is wrong with you. It's a sad thing.
Most healthy people want to coach Little League, they want to go to church and they want to have great coworkers at the office and they want to put on faceplate when Nebraska's point football on Saturdays. That's the most natural way to live.
Obviously, we shouldn't be having any American officeholder or any American candidate looking for foreign nations to come in and be involved in U.S. elections.
There's no Democratic and Republican seats or gyms or coffee shops at the Supreme Court. Every American should be able to celebrate the fact that we aspire to nine justices who are looking to defend our rights and to defend the Constitution, not to advance policy preferences.
If you're not ten minutes early where I'm from, my dad chews you out.
American elections should be for Americans. And the idea that we would have foreign nation-states coming into the American electoral process, or the information surrounding an election, is really, really bad.
If the Republican party becomes the party of David Duke, Donald Trump, I'm out.
I don't trust that the big-business part of our coalition is ever going to defend federalism and argue against regulatory capture. I don't trust that populists are going to defend religious liberty and the rights of creedal minorities.
I don't think that our Founders would believe that America could long prosper if the people were not readers.