“You’re so confident, Mr. President, and so focused. Is your confidence ever shaken? Do you ever wake up and say, ‘Damn, this is hard. Damn, I’m not going to get the things done I want to get done, and it’s just too politicized to really get accomplished the big things I want to accomplish’?”

“It seems to me that there is a sort of meanness that’s settled over our political dialogue. It started this summer at these town hall meetings....President Carter is now saying that he thinks it’s racial. Nancy Pelosi says it could be dangerous. What do you think it’s all about?”

“House Speaker Pelosi worried about the opposition, the tone of it, perhaps leading to violence as it did in the ’70s. There’s more recent examples of anti-government violence — occurring even in the mid-’90s. Do you worry about that?”

“You campaigned to change the culture in Washington, to change the politics-as-usual culture here. Are you frustrated? Do you think it is much, much harder to do that than you ever anticipated?”

“You lost two nominees, two appointments today. Did that make you angry, I imagine?...How do you prevent the lesson from being that, no matter how lofty the goals of the new guy coming in, Washington wins, in the end?”

“This week I went down to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, where they have this wonderful new visitor center. And one of the historians down there reminded me that Thomas Jefferson once said the presidency is a ‘splendid misery.’ But at the end of his term, he also said, quote, that ‘the presidency had brought him nothing but increasing drudgery and a daily loss of friends.’ I just wonder, have you lost any friends yet?”