YouSaid · the spoken record

Bob Shrum

lines on the record
75
first
2018-09-20
most recent
2018-09-20
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “And Bush made the then what I think is a classic mistake of trying to redeem himself by saying, well, I knew that. I knew that. Best off, you just let it go. It's like Lloyd Benson when he delivered the line about you're no Jack Kennedy. Quail inexplicably interrupted him and said, Senator, I think that was uncalled for. At which point Benson and none of this had been prepared. Benson just turned around and said,”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “First of all, what are the big themes? What's the big message? Can you get it across? Number one. Number two, are there going to be moments? Because moments really matter in presidential debates. Of John Kerry in the first debate with Bush. And we sort of knew that Bush had this habit, which I suppose his own people warned him against, of justifying the Iraq war by citing 9-11. And so Kerry had a mantra in his head. He says, About two thirds the way into the debate, I think it was. Bush did exactly that. He said the reason we went into Iraq was the enemy attacked us. And Carrie flattened them. Said, you know, Saddam Hussein didn't attack us, so Osama bin Laden attacked us.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Absolutely. And all you have to do is watch the first Kennedy Nixon debate, and you find that out immediately. Nixon, who had been a high school and perhaps a college debater, very much engaged in a kind of point-by-point argumentation. He even won the flip of the coin and chose to go second. Who would choose to go second in a presidential debate? You want to go first. You want to set the tone. You want to set the terms of engagement. I think that they're very, very different. What you have to think about, and you've done this too, what you have to think about when you're engaged in presidential debate preparation, aside from the obvious things, what's the other guy going to say, et cetera, is”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “There were two different kinds of debate back then. There was a very small circuit of Yale, Princeton, John Kerry was a debater at Yale. They didn't debate the rest of us. What was then called or still is the NDT, the National Debate Tournament Circuit consisted of most major colleges and universities in the country. And I always thought that it was interesting because it was a different kind of debate. Ours was a very policy-oriented debate. Who has the best policy at the end of the round? And theirs was a more oratorical form of debate.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Kept beating their debaters. Well, let me tell you, the Harvard debate team was then and now quite extraordinary, as you might expect.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “No, I never took the bar. I went to law school because that seemed to be what you were supposed to do if you were interested in politics. And I knew I was going to be very interested in politics. I already was. And I applied to Harvard and Yale and I got into both of them. And I went to Harvard because I could get a job coaching debate. So they gave me a scholarship for the tuition, but I...”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The cadets had no time, and debate required a lot of time. You had to do a lot of research. You had to do a lot of preparation, and you didn't have Mr. Google to help. You had to go to the library and do it yourself. But Wes Clark was lethal.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Wes Clark was the best debater I ever General Clark that West Point ever had. West Point was always at a disadvantage because”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Alive then, even though it's so powerful if you watch it in film, to understand how deeply that speech touched a lot of people in my generation. So that's one of the first things I did. But I spent most of college half studying and debating over and over and over again national debate tournaments.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So we had these vigorous debates every week about politics. And I do remember that the first night I was there, and it's very different now when you go to college now. You know, my stepson took a college tour. Everybody takes a college tour. You go around and look, first time I ever saw Georgetown was the first day I arrived to go to school. You know, you weren't going to fly from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. to look at the place. So that first night of someone who was a friend of mine who I knew actually from high school debate who was in my class, he and I went down and stood on the Capitol Steps where the inaugural address had been given. I think it's hard for people who weren't”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “When I was growing up here, everybody was discovering the new sport of surfing. I am not, as I once told a German ski instructor who tried to teach me how to ski in Switzerland, he said, you are sportif. No. And I said, no. And so for me, it was books. And at a competitive level, high school debate. And that just carried over into college. But the other thing we did was every week the Philademic Society had debates. And Georgetown at that time was probably, even though it was Catholic and Kennedy was Catholic, it was probably 60, 65% Republican. And it was an expensive school. I mean, I had a scholarship, but it was an expensive school and kids came from pretty well-off families.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I didn't do a lot in terms of what, you know, like Bill Clinton going off and working for J. William Fulbright and stuff like that. He came several years after I did. I met him when he was a freshman. I was a senior. But I got very involved in college debate. And I also got very involved in debating on campus. We had something called the Philodemic Society. And we would meet every week and we would have debates.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And I'm having the time of my life. And so it was a very nice conversation. I go downstairs and Pierre Salinger looks at me and says, you know, you're supposed to take people up there. You're not supposed to go in and talk to the candidate. What is your mother's phone number? So I had to give the phone number and called my mother and said, is it all right if we give him a hotel room, which I actually shared with a Coca-Cola machine, I still remember. And if we give him some money for food. And she said, sure. On orders for...”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Said no. And so we knocked on the door and JFK answered the door. I can tell you that he did fill a room. I mean, his presence was magnetic. And he said, who's this? April said, well, he's working for you. He's never, he's never, I shouldn't say April, although he became a friend of mine. Yes, I know you were very close to Pamela. So I got into a conversation and said, you know, where are you going to go to school? And I told him I thought I was probably going to go to Georgetown. He told me his brother-in-law, Steve Smith, had gone there and loved it. Steve told me many years later that he didn't like it at all. And then he said, well, tell me how you're working here. How does that work? What are you doing? I said, well, I take the first bus in the morning from Culver City down here. I take the last bus home at night.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I went and volunteered at Citizens for Kennedy, which was run by a woman or the office was run by a woman named Liz Russ, who worked for Martin Pollard, who was a big car dealer out here who was involved in the Kennedy campaign. And when the campaign moved into the Biltmore Hotel, she sent me over to work for Pierre Salinger. One of my jobs, and this tells you how much politics has changed, how much our sense of insecurity and danger prevails now. One of my jobs was to take people up from Salinger's office to JFK Suite, which was supposedly secret, although lots of people knew where it was. And so I met Hubert Humphrey because I took him up to the suite. And I took Avil Harriman up to the suite, and he said, have you ever met Senator Kennedy?”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I went to St. Augustine's Grammar School in Culver City and then the Loyola High School. Which was a Jesuit high school where I learned Ancient Greek, which actually has no use that I can figure out. But I did find one once. We were in Greece before it joined the European Union, and all the road signs were in Greek. And even though the language has changed massively from ancient Greek to modern Greek, the alphabet's the same. So I could say that's”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Left for California. My father drove us across the country in a 1948 Chevrolet. We found an apartment in Culver City And it was the best thing that ever happened to me. The quality of schools that I could go to. You went to Jet?”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And now, like the old soldier of that lore. Of course, what he did was he didn't fade away. He tried to run for president in 52 and lost. But we left when I had just turned eight.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, I didn't. I didn't. My grandfather died, the one who had been in the legislature, died two months before I was born. And his name was Matthew. That's my middle name. Because of when it happened, I always loved and cared about politics. Why? I have no idea why. I can tell you that I... As a five year old, I vividly remember my parents clanging pots and pans together to celebrate when Harry Truman unexpectedly won the 1948 election. And I remember in 1951 when Truman fired MacArthur and Douglas MacArthur was giving a speech to Congress. I successfully petitioned my family to let me stay home from school.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “In the old days, we would have said it was literally trees that you just cut down trees, you printed this stuff. It doesn't matter to people if they don't get a sense of empathy from the candidate who's talking to them. And fairly or unfairly, I think that's what happened with Hillary Clinton.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “But it's the same, they want somebody who cares about them. Now, the ironic thing is Hillary Clinton actually had on our website, as she says in her book. I had all these plans on my website. Well, most people don't read the website and don't read the plans. But she actually had a plan for a kind of modern, updated Appalachian redevelopment act of the kind that JFK pushed through in 1961. I don't think those folks even knew about it. And if they knew about it, they didn't credit it.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “That's part of it, and I think part of it is that a lot of folks, even people who voted for Obama in 2008 or maybe 2012, voted for Trump. And I think the difference is that there was this feeling they got that Obama cared about them, understood them, and would try to do something. It's a phenomenon that's an old one in my lifetime. Robert Kennedy had an extraordinary appeal both to African Americans during the unrest of the 1960s and to Wallace voters.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, I don't know about that, but the sad thing is my steps on Michael took me on a roots trip back to Connellsville, and it's depopulated compared to what it was when we left. Houses are boarded up downtown is a ghost of what it was. My grandmother's my father's mother's house has been knocked down for a highway extension and we were there for about three hours and I said can we please leave and go back to Pittsburgh? Which, of course, is a. Thriving city and it's an area that was reliably democratic for decades, generations, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “My father was a tool and die maker. My mother stayed home, raised the kids. It was the 1950s. Her father had represented Big portion of southwestern Pennsylvania in the Pennsylvania legislature. So she's kind of married on the wrong side of the tracks. He, though, had started off as a coal miner and become a labor organizer and then gotten into politics. And I found some things that he wrote over the years to the Pittsburgh papers that have now been put in books, and he was a very eloquent writer. It's a genetic.”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “at USC. And we've just started the Center for the Political Future. Just going to do a lot of things that an institute of politics does and some other things besides”

    2018-09-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 270 — Bob Shrum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source