Carol Moseley Braun

It's not impossible for a woman - a Black woman - to become President.

I think the legacy of the civil rights movement is that now whites are more open to being represented by people of color or people who are women or, again, non-traditional candidates.

The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.

I'm used to people not paying me a whole lot of attention and underestimating me and, frankly, for me a big challenge is to have people believe that I can be the president of the United States.

To me, that means getting back to the point where our Constitution means that you don't tap people's phones and poke into their e-mail and you don't arrest people and keep them hidden for a year and a half without charging them.

I'd come back after having served as ambassador to New Zealand and found that I had real concerns about the direction in which this country was headed.

So I think that if we want to have a Congress, if we want to have government that looks like America, if we want to have government that is truly a representative Democracy, then we need to clearly address how we get our campaign laws out of the way of Democracy.

The failure in Ohio to have adequate voting capacity for the people who were registered and eligible to vote was an absolute denial of their right to vote.

The fact is that the diversity in this political class serves the same interest as diversity in any arena, which is it stirs the competitive pot.

And frankly, being a woman I think gives me a slightly different take on a lot of the issues and on a lot of the solutions to the problems we face.

I was very productive as a senator for my state.

New Zealand, by the way, where I was ambassador, has had two women prime ministers - one from either party.