As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Washington, I ritually watched the Sunday-morning political talk shows with my family. We parsed and argued and jeered at the screen as national figures delivered careful, poll-tested talking points.

Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.

For our family, learning was everything. Homework came first; books, being sacred, were never to be left on the floor.

To have come of age during and after the global financial crisis of 2008 is to belong to a generation often unable to do what an American could once expect, and to do what was once expected: Get a job, pay off student loans, and find a place of your own.

Winning the election is a good-news, bad-news kind of thing. Okay, now you're the mayor. The bad news is, now you're the mayor.

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

Everybody wants to do 'The View.' It's this iconic show. When I worked at the White House, I used to watch the beginning to see what they were talking about. If a political topic was on their radar, I used it as ammunition with the president or the White House staff.

American government was founded on a belief and a faith in God and in doing what is right and just.