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Politics is compromise.

You can't go to Washington as a congressman and a senator and expect to make a difference all at once. You have to earn your way.

If you look through history, all of the great work we've done in Congress has been around a table of compromise, when it comes to the most difficult problems.

Too often in Washington special interests urge us to fight one another just because we belong to different parties. It is time for this to stop and for Washington to focus on what needs to be done.

I'm not a career politician, so the ways of Washington may be a little obscure to me.

People are fed up with the career politicians who created this mess or failed to prevent it and neither was acceptable, and the only way we could change that was by sending a different type of person to Washington.

When you work in the United States Senate, and you are around people of all different ideas and beliefs, you realize that what our Founding Fathers did that was so genius, is that they made the Senate the place where compromises are supposed to happen because of the makeup of the Senate.

Sadly, far too many politicians in Washington lack the courage to do something to fix our problems. They are worried about the political implications of making the hard choices we so desperately need to cut spending and shrink government.

I stand with everyone who is sick of hearing about Washington cutting insider deals to their friends in business, politicians failing on their promises to fight increases in government spending, and more costly and complicated rules from Washington that make everyone's lives harder.