David Gergen

I have known other people who wanted to be president who decided not to run because they had an issue like this.

You then have to be able to look your supporters straight in the eye and said, don't worry, I'm OK.

This story is going to have lots of legs and keep marching along and chase him along.

I think -- that's what I think -- why I think that John Edwards, having opened this Pandora's box, needs to get everything out of it as quickly as possible.

He owes it to the party to move swiftly to put out every fact that's there, to get this paternity test done, to get all of this resolved so that this doesn't linger and hang over the campaign.

I think we should become less judgmental about other people's marriages and their personal lives, their private lives.

Barack Obama doesn't pull a lot of punches on the campaign trail.

He needs to have a group of surrogates, including first and foremost a vice president, who can take the fight to the opposition.

We need someone who is -- yes, has integrity, yes, has judgment. Those are obvious. But we're going to need someone with courage, political courage to face this.

We're going to need extraordinary leadership over the next four years.

The problem with the Hillary care plan way back when was it was an attempt to have to win with 51 percent of the vote as opposed to 65 percent.

You can only persuade the Americans. That's what John McCain is saying. We will only sign an agreement in the United States if China and India signs an agreement.

The world wants to subsidize -- there's no way. You would get impeached as the president if you went up to Detroit and asked the auto workers, 'You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to raise your taxes so we can send them over to India…

It's vital that we reform the health-care system. The health-care system is broken.

We're going to need an extraordinary -- really extraordinary leadership over the next four years.

We're going to need someone with courage -- political courage to face this, and very importantly Anderson, I think far more than what we've had in the recent years, we're going to need a consensus builder.

The next president has got to try and spend a lot of time and that's why you can't get sucked in and spend all your time in Iraq and Afghanistan and not deal with these other issues.

The big thing of our time, is not -- but there big movement of our time is that the center of gravity in the world geo-politically in large extend economically is moving from the west to Asia; moving from west to east.

The new president is -- may well be put in a position of having to come up with a short-term economic plan for the next year or two.

If you're the Democrat, you come in there, you commit to getting out. You start taking the lid off that pot. If it starts overflowing, erupting, and you suddenly become the candidate, the president who lost the war.

It would help to have two of the best fighters in the game, to have the Clintons right there at your side.

Hillary Clinton long ago predicted that the Republican attack machine would crank up against Obama. And she's been proven business right.

George Bush is going to give you something that looks like it's doing better. You know, Colin Powell has long argued this is like putting a lid on a pot. The American presidency is like putting a lid on a pot, and you can keep it on simmer…

What it tells me is that Barack Obama and his team need to take a fresh look at the prospect of Hillary Clinton being his vice president.

It was Hillary Clinton who had long ago predicted that the Republican attack machine would crank up against Obama and she's been proven absolutely right.