You know, one of the things I think you understand as president is you're held responsible for everything, but you don't always have control of everything, right?
So I analyzed that and decided I didn't want to be the president during a depression greater than the Great Depression, or the beginning of a depression greater than the Great Depression.
A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it. Dealing with Congress is a matter of give and take. The president doesn't get everything he wants, the Congress doesn't get everything they want. But we're finding good common ground.
Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented this.
I'm just beginning to live the next chapter of my life. In other words, politics - being governor and president - is not the end of my life. It's a chapter.
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.