I worked in the Senate in the 1970s. I worked for the Labor, Public Welfare Committee, and we had Ted Kennedy and my old boss, Bill Hathaway, and Walter Mondale.

I'm old enough to remember Richard Nixon. They called it the imperial presidency when he was refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated.

One of my life principles is that if something isn't working, doing something harder isn't necessarily going to produce the same result.

I had no intention of getting back into politics. I was teaching at Bowdoin and happily retired from politics.