Obama:

What's amazing when you watch it is how much this whole experiment depended on. And it started, frankly, with a bunch of rich guys who didn't want to pay their taxes.

Democracy was not the beginning. This was not the central animating principle at the beginning of the American Revolution.

There was frustration with the Empire, and the colonists felt as if they were being forced upon them. And it was a pretty narrow agenda.

And over time, what happened is that these actions, behind the initial actions like the Boston Tea Party, you start to get an articulation of this broader idea.