Where We Get Into Problems, Typically, Is

Four Years Ago, I Promised To End The War In Iraq. We Did. I Promised To Refocus On The Terrorists Who Actually Attacked Us On 9/11. We Have. We've Blunted The Taliban's Momentum In Afghanistan, And In 2014, Our Longest War Will Be Over. A New Tower Rises Above The New York Skyline, Al Qaeda Is On The Path To Defeat, And Osama Bin Laden Is Dead.

I Promised To Bring Change To Washington. The Underlying Reason For The Economic Mess We're In Has Been Building For Years. It's A Fundamental Imbalance In Which The Top 1 Percent Now Gets Almost A Quarter Of All National Income. We Haven't Seen Income And Wealth This Concentrated Since The Late Nineteen Twenties, And We All Know What Happened Then - The Great Depression. We'll Never Really Get Out Of The Gravitational Pull Of The Great Recession Until We Fix This Basic Problem.

In Your Generation, Everybody Is Constantly Bombarded With All Kinds Of Different Input From Different Cultures, And That's A Strength, That's A Positive Thing. That's Why I Remain Confident About America's Ability To Compete In The World, Precisely Because We've Got A Little Bit Of Everybody In This Country.

First And Foremost, It's Important To Remember That, From My Perspective At Least, My Most Important Legacy Was Making Sure That The World Didn't Go Into A Great Depression.

In Many Ways [those Middle-aged Black Ladies] My Touchstone, Because They Are What I Meant When I Talked About The Audacity Of Hope.