YouSaid · the spoken record

David Leonhardt

lines on the record: 80
first: 2019-01-28
most recent: 2019-01-28
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

“All over the place, right? Corruption, foreign powers, all these things. And so, look, if I got to choose, it would probably be he's voted out of office in 2020 without having done much more damage. But none of us can guarantee that he won't do much more damage as president.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's volatile stuff. I don't think it's going to happen either. I just would think people should be foreclosing the possibility. The founders put the possibility of removal from office in the Constitution for.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did. He did. You're right. And not only that, but you kind of go back, and George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, they were all active in politics and they were defending him until pretty close to the end. And so to me, it remains plausible that some combination of revelations, whether it's suborning perjury or something else, or the condition of the country will ultimately cause more Republicans to turn on him. And if that happens, I don't think it's out of the question that Senate Republicans will decide.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think we should take his approval rating of 40%. That's not a floor. That's where he is right now. And Nixon retained the support of the Republican Party very long into Watergate. And I think there is a point”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we could list more states, right? North Dakota, North Carolina. Tom Tillis. Exactly. So they're a set of Senate Republicans who really need to worry about their jobs because of Trump's unpopularity.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a fair counting. That's a fair counter. I guess what I don't think there's any surefire way to make sure he's not the president anymore. But I do think he's more vulnerable than many people may realize. His approval rating is 40%. He just got thumped in the midterms. So imagine you're Joni Ernst, the Republican senator from Iowa, or Corey Gardner, the Republican Senator from Colorado. Or Susan Collins, or Susan Collins.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in some ways a vote of the American people in 2020 is the best outcome because it's democratically legitimate. The problem is we're two years away from that happening and are we really comfortable with him being president in two more years? So I guess the thing I try to remind people is Nixon was never impeached.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think very briefly, it's just important stating the fact that he's violated his constitutional oath, he's broken the law, he's unfit to be president, and leaving him there presents enormous dangers to the country, right? If there is a foreign emergency, if there's a storm like Katrina, I mean, we should not trust this person to manage the country, and I think he's doing active damage in a way that no president, Democrat, or Republican in our lifetimes has ever done, right? And sort of let's just, there's a lot of noise every day, but let's focus on that reality. And so I consider it akin to a national emergency. And to me, the most important thing is to think about, is there any way to have him removed from office? I don't think an impeachment by the Democrats right now helps that cause. I think it hurts the cause. I think it turns the attention on to the House Democrats who are impeaching him. But I do think it's really important that”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I actually think that's a little bit wrong, which is all of us as human beings are almost incapable of looking at a number like 10% and putting it in the right context. We all kind of say, ah, that's not going to happen. And so I've tried to reflect on that. And I don't have an answer. What is a better way to present this notion of one scenario is more likely to happen, but the other one really could happen. I think that also explains some of the coverage problems.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's fair. And another thing that it's caused me to reflect on is Obviously, I like numbers as we've been talking about. And I know a lot of people feel angry will the polls said that Hillary was going to win. And the thing that I've reflected on is if you look at these sort of prediction models that now people follow quite closely, they said a couple of the bad ones said that she had a 99% chance of winning. But the best ones were sort of between 10% and 20%. Maybe 10 and 25 percent. And for Trump. And my old answer to that was we just need to tell people that events with 10 and 25% likelihood happen all the time. You and I are baseball fans. 10% of plate appearances lead to an extra base hit. If a batter comes up and hits a double, you don't say, hey, no one told me that was going to happen, right?”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you put yourself in their shoes, they are thinking, wait a second, the downside of going public with this is I potentially undermine the credibility of Hillary Clinton's election, right, through the thumb on the scale that you're talking about. I think my guess is that there wasn't enough kind of game planning of, well, wait a second, what if Trump actually wins? Yeah”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And although, and I think the Obama administration made this mistake, I think if President Obama had thought that was a 50-50 campaign in terms of who was going to win, we can't know, but there is a good chance he would have chosen to be more forceful in public about describing Russia's interference.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And I actually think if you look at a lot of the problems we have coming out of 2016, you can point to many people who made that mistake. Whoa.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I'm happy to talk about it. I just don't want to suggest that I'm in charge of it or responsible for it. My basic view of the media, and I think it's fair to put the times in this, is that the media's done an extraordinarily good job of covering Trump as president and did not do so good a job covering the 2016 campaign. We didn't figure out how to deal with the fact that we had these two candidates, both of whom had flaws, but one of whose flaws were vastly larger than the other. We didn't really figure out how to deal with the email.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did not personally, but yeah, the paper has, for the most part, it's done it through buyouts, but the paper has essentially decided we need to grow in some areas and shrink in others. And clearly that is a painful process. I guess to me, it is better than the alternative of the New York Times ceding major areas of coverage or seeding audio to other places. It's deeply in line with the Times' history, which is the Times has changed.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six edits before they go into the print paper. It's not that those edits weren't improving the stories, that they were. But if you have to decide between”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. It's an enormously fun project and a great team of people. And so he asked me to be part of this group that would try to figure out where the Times is going. And what we basically, we made a whole series of recommendations, but one of them, in some ways, the main one was The Times has large needs that it must hire for. We need to hire more of these data visualization experts, people who make graphics. We need to ramp up our audio, which has now become a hugely important part of the times. We need to put people in new places where we don't now have reporters. And unfortunately, we can't grow our staff 50% right now. So we have to think about where plausibly we are investing too many resources. And this was not without controversy, as you can imagine, but one of the things that Dean and we concluded was that we were over editing some stories, that stories don't necessarily need”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's being honest about that. So he said to me, look, we've changed an enormous amount, but we haven't changed enough in terms of how we present information to people, in terms of the shape of our staff. And because I was on the one hand this sort of traditionalist who's, I've now worked there almost 20 years, I ran the Washington Bureau. I'd come up through the business staff. But I had also started the upshot, which was this digital first.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Old Chicago, he won a Pulitzer here in Chicago. Yep. He likes to joke. He won it for covering Chicago corruption, which is the easiest way to win it. That's his line.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For reading it, for reading it, yeah. Well, look, our attitude is as long as they're reading it in one form, we're happy. So I'm on the opinion side now, right? So I fulminate about various things. But I've spent most of my career at the times on the news side. And back in 2015, Dean McKay, who's the boss, the executive editor, asked.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm dating myself. I still like that word. And I actually, look, I'm a big advocate for digital media, but I think it's worth remembering paper is still a good technology in some ways, right? Like it's convenient. You don't have to wait for it. I love reading.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, she would be because they agreed with her on the issues much more than Trump. And so my hope is there's a candidate who can really excite people and who in the course of doing so doesn't end up having to essentially have their image, their political image be all about these social issues. Because, I mean, Americans just not as progressive on immigration, on abortion as the Democratic Party is, or as many people on the left, I think sometimes would like the country to be. And you sort of can't wish for the electorate that isn't there.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is, there will be. The thing that I would try to, and we don't yet know who's going to emerge from this field, right? My hope would be someone emerges in a way that people just get excited about, right? I mean, people don't pick candidates kind of based on lining up white papers and policies. They pick candidates based on.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the house campaigns around the country weren't running around talking about impeachment or Donald Trump. They were talking about fighting on behalf of working families. I would hope that it would be possible to have a period again like the 2009 and 2010 period that you were part of in which you could really have a kind of activist government trying to make a difference in people's lives.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I retain some optimism though because if you look at polling, if you look at the results of referendums in different states, there really is a majority of people in this country for an economic program that would address these issues. A majority of Americans want the federal government to play a bigger role providing affordable health care. They want a higher minimum wage. They want, you look at these sort of referendum results in red states, on the minimum wage and Medicaid and all these other issues, should tax rates on companies and rich people go up, there's huge majorities that say yes to these questions. And so I actually do think on economic matters there is a progressive populist majority in this country. I think social and cultural issues, the country's closer to a half and half divide. But if politicians can figure out a way to tap into that, and I think actually the Democrats did a pretty good job of it in the midterms.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the biggest worry is exactly that, right? Which is people are frustrated. They look out, they see government can't solve these problems, and they essentially say, well, nothing can, right? Or only a strong man can. I think that's the big work.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I guess I would say when you think about that pattern, it's really hard to argue that economic frustration doesn't play any enormous role in it. I agree racism plays a role for some voters as well, but I just don't buy this notion that I know is popular on parts of the left of it's all racism and only marginally economics. I think it's both.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, another way I would think of it is you have a significant number of voters in this country who swung from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016 to the Democrats in 2018, right? You know, it's only a few percentage points, but it's enough to make a difference. Enough to make a difference.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And particularly by race, right? And race, yeah. So I think the answer is clearly both. There's this quite, I actually think it's important too. There's this quite interesting debate, right? Is it economics or is it race? And to me, the answer is it's clearly both, right? Why is it that Trump's appeal to racism seem to work so well to me in part the answer is the kind of frustration that people are feeling about their living standards, right? That frustration is real. And if you look at all of history, Andrew Churlin, who's a sociologist at Johns Hopkins, makes this case as well as anyone, these things have always interacted, right? This idea of nativism and racism, what sparks them the most common spark for them is frustration in people's lives. And so I think this long-term stagnation that we have seen”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And to me, what's so striking is even though in relative terms with such a successful response, it still wasn't enough. Yeah, right.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was an unfortunate phrase. Look, I think in fairness it's important to say the combination of the Bernanke Fed, the very end of the Bush administration, and most importantly, the Obama administration, I think conducted what is arguably the most successful response of any major economy to a financial crisis. And as you pointed out,”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I don't question, I don't think you guys could have gotten the larger stimulus. You were there, first of all, right? But I really don't. To me. The mistake came, and it was actually even worse at the Bernanke Fed, but the mistake came not so much in 2009, but in the kind of optimistic hope that in 2010 there were green shoots. And I thought parts of the government, parts of economic policy was a little bit too eager to see those green shoots.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On STEM, on mass two-year or four-year college education. And so we haven't got paced. And then I guess the final thing I'd put on the list is the government essentially has stopped even trying to push back against a lot of this. We've massively cut tax rates. I mean, I know there have been ups and downs, right? When you were in the White House, you guys raised tax rates on the rich. But the net effect has been to exacerbate these trends. And then the financial crisis comes along and it takes these sort of long simmering trends. And am I mixing metaphors here? Turbocharges them, right? I mean, it really, it just makes them much, much worse. And the history of financial crises are that they cast extremely long shadows, both politically and economically. And obviously we're living with that right now.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're right. I mean, right? I mean, they deserve to be able to think about their own lives, right? They deserve to have that kind of path that we're talking about at the beginning of feeling like their families are making progress. And then I would also put on the list the real, the fact that our education system doesn't work as well as it used to. So we used to be the most educated nation in the world, and we're not anymore. We were the nation that pioneered mass high school education. We're not the nation leading the way.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd put on the list globalization, which opened up markets. And let's be clear, has huge benefits, right? The rise in living standards for Asia and Africa and Latin America is a good thing. It's just created some real problems for rich countries.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes And as hard as this is to believe, the middle class had got bigger pay increases than the wealthy in percentage terms, right? So inequality fell. And then since the 1970s for a complicated mix of reasons, basically we've had slower growth and much more inequality. And so most people's living standards have risen, but only a bit, right? Only modestly, much more slowly than used to be the norm. And what the funny...”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have not recovered from the crisis, and I think that one of the mistakes that we make is looking at some metrics like GDP or the stock market, which have recovered and pretending that we've recovered from the crisis. But if you look at what to me are more meaningful measures like Americans net worth, like the percentage of people employed in good jobs, we have not recovered. And so the way I think about the crisis is we essentially, after World War II, we've had roughly, and this is overgeneralizing, but there's a point here. We've had two economic periods. We had the period from right after the war until the mid-70s, when we had not only rapid economic growth, but broadly shared prosperity. Right.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to me, so the shifts and the things like that on the analytics are part of the yin and yang of competition and strategy I actually love it. I don't love the fact that baseball is now about so much about strikeouts and home runs. And I actually think that the league needs to look, they've raised the mound before. They've done all kinds of things. I think to me it's time. The league is talking about banning the shift, which I don't think is a good idea. But I do hope they come up with some things to make the process of watching a game a little bit more dynamic.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. And I love it when I see there have been actually Anthony Rizzo of the Cubs, I think. There are some sluggers.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think baseball does have an excitement problem right now, but I actually put the blame in a slightly different place. To me, it's simply the fact that pitchers now throw so hard and teams have realized that if they bring in one pitcher after another, they can get many more strikeouts. And this is a matter of preference, right? I'm not going to try to persuade you to like the shift more than you do. But to me, the shift is kind of fun and interesting. And batters can always bunt to try to beat the shift.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a business writer, I think I might hold the record for the section that I was hired to work for closed most quickly after I started. So this is almost impossible to think about today. The New York Times had too much classified advertising in 1999 for its Sunday classified ad section. So it had to start a spillover Wednesday classified ad section. And to make it, or the New York Times, we don't just want to make it about ads, they splashed one 800 word story on the front of that section.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, led to the times an old friend of mine from college named Seth Giselle had been hired by the Times. And Glenn Cramon, the business editor, as I've heard the story said to him, you're great. Where can we find other young reporters and Seth gave them a bunch of names, including mine? And there was sort of a long path between Business Week and the Times because the Times has to act a little bit like a magazine in its business coverage because of the existence of the Wall Street Journal. So I started at the Times in 1999.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in part because of my interest in math and in part because in the nineties business journalism was the growing field where you could get a job, I kind of ended up drifting that way.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a much more intense version of it than I had, but this experience of you're calling one cop shop after another and saying anything going on. And covering murder trials, which just watching the profound sadness that people have to grapple with.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sprite. That's a good point. No, you're right. So at the Washington Post, I was covering crime, which I essentially would encourage all young journals to do, right? I mean, it's just the rawness of the human experience that you see covering American.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know what I'm doing. And I ultimately got a couple of offers, one at the Raleigh News and Observer in the Durham Bureau, which if I'd gotten immediately, I would have taken in a second. But by then, I'd also applied to magazines in New York, and I'm a New Yorker, and I was 22, and I was choosing between New York and Durham, and I chose New York, and I went and worked for Business Week magazine, and had a great four years there. But it was given that I write about the economy, it was a useful experience to not simply have employment as a given and to have to grapple with the idea of, hey, you know,”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was hard. I mean, it was, so they were great. There was a whole class of interns, and they hired the right intern. They hired the best intern that summer was a writer named Rajiv Chandra Sakaran, who went on to a long career there. He was clearly the best of our internship class, and they hired him. So there was no injustice here. But it was disappointing. And they said to me, look, apply, forget the number. But they said something like apply to 20 papers. You'll get five job offers. You'll go off. And then in a couple years, we'd love to look at you again. And I applied to 20 papers and I got no interviews. I mean, it was the mid 90s. I'm sure some part of it was some weakness in my application and some part of it was the secular trends in newspapers that jobs were less available. It was really quite disappointing. And there was this moment where I was, wait a second, my internship here is going to come to an end in a month and I don't know.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. It was just a great experience. And the one part of the experience that wasn't good was I very much wanted to get hired there. And look, I think I was 22 and hadn't had a lot of experience with failure. Yeah, I was.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I had an internship at the Boston Globe. And then on the city desk of the Washington Post. And it was really a phenomenal experience. I learned a huge amount. I got to cover the negotiations to build what is now the downtown sports arena where the Wizards and Capitals play.”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I did this sort of, I actually don't know whether it still exists, I probably doesn't to the same extent, but 25 years ago, there was kind of an internship circuit. I taught junior high school math in New Haven and then went when that workday was over at 3 o'clock and wrote stories for the New Haven Register to get clips so I could then get another internship. I'm sure you remember this whole”
2019-01-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 303 - David Leonhardt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source