Carol Moseley Braun

It's not impossible for a woman - a Black woman - to become President. ”

I think the legacy of the civil rights movement is that now whites are more open to being represented by people of color or people who are women or, again, non-traditional candidates. ”

The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything. ”

I'm used to people not paying me a whole lot of attention and underestimating me and, frankly, for me a big challenge is to have people believe that I can be the president of the United States. ”

To me, that means getting back to the point where our Constitution means that you don't tap people's phones and poke into their e-mail and you don't arrest people and keep them hidden for a year and a half without charging them. ”

I'd come back after having served as ambassador to New Zealand and found that I had real concerns about the direction in which this country was headed. ”

So I think that if we want to have a Congress, if we want to have government that looks like America, if we want to have government that is truly a representative Democracy, then we need to clearly address how we get our campaign laws out of the way of Democracy. ”

The failure in Ohio to have adequate voting capacity for the people who were registered and eligible to vote was an absolute denial of their right to vote. ”

The fact is that the diversity in this political class serves the same interest as diversity in any arena, which is it stirs the competitive pot. ”

And frankly, being a woman I think gives me a slightly different take on a lot of the issues and on a lot of the solutions to the problems we face. ”