Barack Obama

Which cracked me up.

I wasn't as funny about saying this, but even four, five, six years ago, I'd say, you can't just be a scold all the time.

You can't constantly lecture people

without acknowledging that you've got some blind spots too and that life's messy.

And so the vulnerability, I think, comes in and saying, all right, I've got some core convictions.

I've got beliefs that I'm not going to compromise.

But I'm also not going to assert that I am so righteous and so pure that

And so insightful that there's not the possibility that maybe I'm wrong on this.

Sure.

Or that other people, if they don't say things exactly the way I say them or see things exactly the way I do, that somehow they're bad people.

And so there was this weird – what I saw in –

and I think this was a fault of some progressive language, was almost asserting a holier-than-thou superiority that's not that different from what we used to joke about coming from the right and the moral majority and our way and a certain fundamentalism about how to think about stuff that I think was dangerous.

I'd get my ass kicked.

They do seem to be rallying around the maple leaf.

Yeah, look, I mean, I think the way I describe it, America has always had warring narratives.

A lot of American history is a war of ideas.

Right.

And I gave a speech – probably my – the speech that is closest to my heart that I gave throughout my presidency was the speech I gave on the 50th anniversary of Selma, the march on Selma over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

And I talked about that clash being as important as –

Gettysburg or Appomattox.