My first port of call was Los Angeles. That's where I laid my first foot on America.

Those memories of living in a developing nation are part of who I am today and give me a profound understanding of the challenges of economic development - an understanding which will make my tenure as Peace Corps director, I hope, a very special one.

I can tell you I love California - and no more.

People can voice their different points of view. We are also a country where there will be criticism.

We're a robust democracy here. That's the wonderful thing about this country.

I know what it is like to feel vulnerable and fearful during a difficult time.

We want to make sure that workers know their rights and that employers know their obligations. That is the best way to protect workers.

Outside of Washington, D.C., most Americans aren't concerned with doing things 'big.' They're looking for less government spending, lower taxes, and good jobs.

Our private-sector work force is the most industrious, innovative, productive, and ambitious in the world.

In campaigns, lots of things will be said, and what they have said about my husband is just simply not true.

Our country needs to produce 250,000 net new jobs every month just to keep even with population growth.

My husband has an outstanding record in promoting opportunity for women and the women that he surrounds himself in his staff and the women that he has promoted throughout his career. He's the father of three daughters. He's obviously a husband who's been very supportive of a very active wife with her own career.

Typically, after moving backwards, the economy takes even more steps forward.

Even a healthy economy and labor market would have struggled under the additional expenses enacted and proposed in 2009 and 2010 - from healthcare mandates and higher taxes, to carbon cap-and-trade and delay in extending the last decade's tax reforms.

Around the time President Lyndon B. Johnson was declaring a War on Poverty in the 1960s, federal, state and local governments began accelerating a veritable War on the Private Sector.

What out country is facing right now is a skills gap.

The OPPA route is nothing new. It follows the decades-old liberal agenda on trade, health care, global warming, and mass unionization. That agenda has never brought prosperity to workers.

As I looked up at the Statue of Liberty, I thought at that time, 'What a wonderful country.'

Confidence, capital, and new markets fuel entrepreneurship and job-generating expansion of existing businesses.

Government at all levels has kicked the fiscal can down the road for far too long.

The Obama administration's zeal to not 'waste a good crisis,' as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it, has been stunning even for Washington insiders to behold.

When my mother, sisters and I arrived on the shores of America when I was 8 years old, the boat on which we came, a freighter, passed the Statue of Liberty.

Confidence, capital, and credit fuel entrepreneurship and economic expansion.

I'm the first secretary of labor in the 21st century, and the competitiveness of the American work force and the modernization of decades-old regulations have been among our top priorities.