If immigration reform passes, it'll be a big victory for sanity - nobody really believes it's healthy for a country to have millions and millions of undocumented noncitizens living in the shadows. But it'll also be a sign that the Republican Party has gotten tired of letting the Tea Party push it around.

Once you're done being president, you tend to want to defend your record more than plumb your inner feelings. I find it hard to imagine Obama going home at night and writing sensitive, introspective journal entries about his meeting with John Boehner.

Downplaying their faults is pretty much the point of campaigns. But we do count on them living with the constant terror of public rejection.

My only thought about Margaret Thatcher is the same one I had about Ronald Reagan. I hated a lot of what they did, but once in a while a country just needs a change.

Now my poor hometown is being castigated as the center of an IRS scandal. Humble workers at the Cincinnati office targeted Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations for special scrutiny when those groups applied for tax-exempt status. There's no conceivable excuse for that. It was deeply, deeply wrong.

Despite my excellent mood, I don't have any sympathy for Romney. If he'd been a good candidate he wouldn't have had a different campaign for every month on the calendar.

Personally, I'd be really glad to have a national conversation about whether to outlaw most forms of birth control. For once, the kids and their grandparents would find themselves on the same side.

During the Obama years, the Republicans have done an unprecedented amount of stonewalling on cabinet-and-below appointees. I would also argue that their war on judicial nominees has been way beyond what went before. Really, if the president nominated God to serve on the D.C. Court of Appeals, Mitch McConnell would threaten a filibuster.

My own dream is that we discover that the NSA has been secretly keeping files on members of the National Rifle Association.

The IRS targeting certain groups for harassment because of their politics would be unfair. If we found out the NSA was keeping special tabs on everyone who worshiped at a mosque or took a Bible trip through the Middle East, you'd have an uprising.

You know what Americans are really sensitive to? Issues of fairness. I think this is a modern phenomenon, born of the civil rights movement. Once you convince Americans that something is basically unfair, you've got a winning cause.

I think voters want somebody who understands their problems. You're right that they don't expect the president to fix everything. When he's wrestling with Congress and Wall Street and the rest of the world, they hope he'll be looking at things from their vantage point.

I'm sort of suspicious of most economic development projects, but the ones that encourage taxpayer-funded relocation bidding wars should be declared unconstitutional.

My all-time favorite program in my entire life was 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'

Certainly Nancy Reagan had an extraordinary effect on her husband. I'm truly not sure that, say, Laura Bush had that much effect on the Bush administration. She certainly, you know, seems to be a nice person who I think the public likes. But I can't really put my finger on any huge impact she's had.

Until Eleanor Roosevelt, there was only one or two First Ladies in all of American history who made an impact, who people could even have recognized or identified. And it's really only been since Jackie Kennedy that there's been this idea that the family life of the president is such a central thing.

Some of our national heroines were defined by the fact that they never nested - they were peripatetic crusaders like Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Dorothy Dix.

You can hit as many revolutions as you want, but women are always going to wear uncomfortable shoes that look good.

It's possible that you have been told a time or 10 that you don't appreciate how tough your elders had it. It's true that, if you had been coming of age back in, say, 1960, you would probably be feeling more restricted, if only because you were doomed to spend your days in a skirt, nylon stockings and girdle.

The key to success for any woman who wants to have a really serious career and a family is to marry a guy who is going to take at least half the responsibility for the house and kids - and sometimes more than half.

When the women's movement started in the 1960s, there was a vision of a future where women didn't wear makeup or worry about how their hair looked, and everybody wore sensible, comfortable clothes. It ran into an absolute brick wall.

There are lots of reasons for that gap between men's and women's wages but to me, the big one is the work-family issue. Trying to juggle children and a job is tough under any circumstances, but especially if you're shooting for the kind of career that involves long hours at work and being on call 24-7.

Sarah Palin is an heir to the women's movement. She has not been constrained by gender. At no point in her life has she thought, 'I can't do that because I'm a woman.'

The one big, humongous, immense thing that we didn't change, that we didn't figure out how to deal with is, if men and women are both going to work throughout their lives, who's going to take care of the kids?