I find it extraordinary as I listen to folks talk about the free-market system that they don’t recognize that the free-market system is truly broken and beyond repair so that we have to start all over again. I think Barack Obama sees this, and so I am very, very pleasantly surprised at his determination to fix something that is not of his making. As President Bush sails away into the sunset leaving us with a trillion-dollar debt, I think to myself, “I’m glad it’s Barack Obama, because at least he’s got a different way of looking at it.” He seems to be very realistic, he seems to have an idea of who we are as Americans and how we can, as individuals, take hold of this country and bring it to the place we want it to be. This is very exciting to me. I’m even getting all excited now, thinking, “Oh, well maybe I should go there and be part of history.” But I’m not going to slip into that. History is going to happen on my flat screen, in my house, where the toilet is and my snacks are. So if people come over to my house with little babies, they can actually bring their strollers. Or if they want to sit down on a chair of their own design, they can do that too, which you will not be able to do in Washington.

Then I started to think about health care. He’s made some interesting choices. Tom Daschle, I think, is a really smart choice because he’s a smart guy — I like him a lot. Sometimes I wish he might have turned out to be the vice president but I realized that just wasn’t going to happen. But then I started to think about this panic everyone is in with Leon Panetta. I kind of look at it like this: George H. W. Bush — the daddy — I don’t think he had a lot of experience when he took over the CIA, but he had ideas. So maybe Leon Panetta is a new idea guy, who knows how the system works, and he’s walking us through and saying, “Here’s what I’m going to do, here’s how I see it. Maybe it’s time for some of our actions to shift. I don’t say that we need to change the entire system, but maybe there are some things we need to tweak."

What else should we be thinking about? We should be thinking about what WE can do. What you and I can do to make sure that this transition is smooth. Because, remember now, this is the fastest this has ever happened. No other president has had to have his act together so quickly and have so much information for so many people to go over and mess with. Because they can’t just let you have your ideas — they have to talk about it and comment on it, the House and the Senate, and all these folks. And people keep saying, “Well, it’s going to be a Democratic Senate and it’s going to be a Democratic House, Congress, everybody’s going to be Democratic.” But I have to believe that within that group of people, if given the chance, better things can happen.

Because if we start thinking about ridiculous spending that went on — I will simply point out that eight years ago, we had money. Eight years later, we’re a trillion dollars in debt. Now, that’s not all President Bush, but some of it is him — quite a bit of it is his fault, actually. Not all of it; a lot of it is these people who just got greedy and piggish, and started to do silly things, lending money to people who had no way of paying it back and only thinking of themselves and their pockets.