I think that, with age, people come to realize that death is inevitable. And we need to learn to face it with serenity, wisdom and resignation. Death often frees us from a lot of senseless sufferings.
People jump back and forth in pursuit of pleasures only because they see the emptiness of their lives more clearly than they do the emptiness of whichever new entertainment attracts them.
As I reflect back on what's worked for me in this [presidential] office it's been that I've gotten people who maybe didn't believe in the process to get engaged. Ironically, I've even gotten the other side that maybe didn't believe in the process to get engaged.
Unless you have a sense of values that's shared by people and turns them loose to do certain things on their own within those sets of values, the organization, whether a nation or corporation or citizen group, just doesn't work very well.
A lot of the reason why the debate is acrimonious is because of the 24/7 news cycles, blogs, and people being able to just throw something out there in order to get attention. And I'm not going be out there doing the same thing, trying to trash my successor or call attention to myself. I hope that's a positive contribution to the dialogue.