In undergraduate school, I chose a career path that always leads to certain unemployment: I majored in politics and public affairs with a double-minor in philosophy and history.

I've been a loud voice as a Democratic leader for years, but that's not my job now. My job is to represent fishermen and farmers - everyone.

Looking for a job, I was working with the Salvadoran American Foundation, a humanitarian aid group, and from there, I got an offer from the Cuban-American National Foundation.

If you give everybody a good government job, there's no crime.

Smaller government, more individual responsibility, more individual control creates more Republicans. More state power and ownership and control and top-down decision-making creates more Democrats.

And some of what we're doing in Government even now, some of the welfare reform programs that are helping lone mothers come into work are based on things that were very new under the Labour Government in the eighties.

Whenever Congress was in session, we were in Washington. So four months out of the year we were in Tennessee and the rest of the time in Arlington, which is where my mom grew up. Then, of course, in 1992 we moved into the vice president's house in D.C. I was 15 then.

The foundations of a strong economy don't rest alone on the decisions of Chancellors or the spending programmes of government.