This week you will nominate the most experienced executive to seek the presidency in 60 years in Mitt Romney. He has no illusions about what makes America great, and he doesn't confuse the presidency with celebrity, or loftiness with leadership.
There is no right to a job or a wage rate, but there is a right to move from one country to another in search of a better life. This is the point of view of Thomas Jefferson, John Locke and other great supporters of the natural rights tradition in Am...
But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.
I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
The essence of America - that which really unites us - is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion - it is an idea - and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things.
It's one thing I like about America - they respect the sportsman. They put them up on a pedestal. They don't try to knock them down. And that's a great thing, to be respected by the whole country. It's so patriotic!
America is a great country. We are so wealthy. But our one remaining challenge is to fulfill the potential of all our people. And the only way we can do that is to try to bring everybody together to a higher place.
Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.
Spiritually, we have marginalized the Bible. We've trivialized marriage, and we've neutralized the church. America today is in great turmoil. It feels like the soul of our nation has been taken from us.
For the pageants, it was my mother who got me involved in Miss America. It really gave me the opportunity to sing all around New Hampshire. And it was great when I was young, but looking back, it was also unbelievably stressful.
I think the moral majority and religious right have been shrinking and having not quite as loud a voice in America, and all of a sudden people are coming to their own realizations going, 'Joe down the street is gay and he's a great guy.'
I'd love to visit South America, especially Argentina, as I'm a winemaker myself. They do a fantastic malbec, so it would be a dream to sample their grapes. New Zealand would be great, too. I'm a golfer, so it would combine both my loves.
Content that's generated out of America, whether it be film or music, has, in my opinion, much greater impact in sustaining our credibility and our place as a cultural capital. This is our great export.
London is the financial capital of Europe, a great platform to America and Asia. I love the fact that in British culture you can be whoever you want, and people don't even look at you. I don't feel that in Paris or Milan.
My television and movie career has also taken me all over the world. I've had great times in the Far East, Russia, South America and Sweden - where I met my wife of 55 years, Maj.
I've had the privilege of working with Bono for the past few years in the One Campaign to fight AIDS and hunger and disease around the world. Bono is an Irishman and a great humanitarian. And I remember him telling me of his admiration for America.
Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back.
When we're touring America or Europe, we use our own plane and a great advantage of that is it cuts out an awful lot of time checking in. You literally drive up to the plane, get on and then drive off at the other end.
I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean.
The subculture of felons is in great vogue among adolescents. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so forth allow us Republicans to say to America's young people, 'We be thugs.' The GOP may capture the youth vote at last.
Reagan won because he was real. He believed in America. He told people he was gonna make it great again coming out of a disastrous four years of Jimmy Carter and Watergate before that.
