Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.

The Chinese Communist Party and the American people are locked in conflict.

Before becoming a college president, I helped over a dozen organizations find strategies to get through some very ugly crises.

Obamacare has eliminated choices for millions of families, suffocated patient-centered medical innovation, and moved the United States closer to European-style centralized planning.

The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.

I loved teaching social studies. And I loved starting each year by teaching about John Locke and the social contract. That lesson helped me teach not just about our rules for the classroom, but how, in our democracy, we give up some individual rights to ensure we collectively have the right to live and prosper in a society.

Basically, I think society functions thanks to how certain key industries work - government, finance, healthcare, education, energy. Pretty much all of these have a huge impact on everything else.

Momentum has always counted for something, not everything, but it's always perceived as being something that matters in American politics.