George H.W. Bush: Nobody likes to lose. I used to call home when I was a 14-year-old soccer player away at school and tell my mother, “I got three goals today.” And she’d shake me off over the long distance phone and say, “It doesn’t matter, how did the team do?” When I lost a race for the United States Senate, I thought the world was going to end for me politically, and 18 years later I was elected President of the United States. The biggest disappointment was that I wasn’t able to communicate properly to the American people — with the proper conviction and the proper ability — where the country really stood. The pessimists, the naysayers, the change-wanters overwhelmed me, and I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t articulate enough to have the country understand that we weren’t in a recession, that we were in a rather booming economy in the last half of my presidency. That was a personal shortcoming, a failure on my path. My predecessor could handle it pretty well, Ronald Reagan.