YouSaid · the spoken record

Eli Attie

lines on the record: 87
first: 2016-12-22
most recent: 2016-12-22
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

“And that trio of debate performances by Hillary I still think is the highlight of her campaign. I just think, especially the first debate, and you know, you can't, I don't know exactly how much of that is Hillary and how much of it is Ron, but Ron is one of the truly brilliant people that I've worked for. And the intersection.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chief of Staff, who I had known a little bit, I'd known him a little bit when he worked for Dashle and I worked for Get Parker.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was an exciting, chaotic, super intense year of my life. And after one year, I thought, you know, this thing that had been my dream working in the White House a few years earlier, at least, I thought, you know, I've done this, and it's a rough lifestyle and a lot of, you know, people were changing at the beginning of the second Clinton term. And actually, a political consulting firm offered me a job. And I thought, you know, maybe I'll do that for a while and try that. And it was more because I just was maybe burned out. And right as I was out the door, Ron Clain invited me to lunch.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Short version of the story is about a year later when the reelection campaign was in high gear. This is shortly before you and I met, actually, I realized now it was all about this campaign. And I called Don Baer, who had been promoted to communications director, and I said, you know, I don't know if you have a job, but I kind of would like to come there. And, you know, it took a little while, actually, for me to get hired. sort of in the last few months of the 96 campaign, I started in the White House as a kind of a communications aid to President Clinton. Not an important, I mean, sort of an aid to an aid, really. I'd be occasionally in these Oval Office meetings, but more to whisper in the ear of my boss if he forgot something.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's funny because about a year into my job for Gephardt and I worked for him for a couple years, I was offered a job as a White House speechwriter. I guess I just got to know some people. The then chief speechwriter called me and I went down there first time I ever went to the White House was I was called down by Don Baer and I turned it down which was amazing because a year before I was desperate to get a foot in the door and I just thought I'm involved in something now that seems more important actually and so”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, first Clinton term. So I ended up Getting this job offer from DICAP part and kind of on a whim saying, you know, I'll move there for a year. I'll just kind of try this out and I can always come back to New York. And I was, you know, leaving Manhattan for Washington. It was a bit of culture shock. I mean, you know, these giant streets with these monolithic buildings and nobody walking on the street is how it felt to me. I felt like a nuclear bomb had hit the city when I first arrived. And I grew to really love it. And very soon after moving to Washington, I made what are still some of my closest friends in the world, Tony Blinken and Jay Carney and all the people we sort of know in common and Gruda really loved Dick Gephardt and he was so much fun and of course very soon after I moved there we lost control of the Congress and I felt like Congress was where you wanted to be and not the White House. It was actually a very vital effort to kind of stop this Newt Gingrich Revolution.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, Dokkin Trum. We're working on that campaign, and Bob Schrum said Dick Gephardt's looking for a speechwriter, and do you want to, you should interview for it? And I wasn't actually very interested because I thought David Dinkins would win re-election. I was happy in New York. I just didn't think of myself as I thought of Washington as this kind of sleepy town. And actually, interestingly, I then started to think to my, I went and I met Dick Eppart and I liked him a lot, actually, but then I thought to myself, well, gee, if I'm going to go to Washington, maybe I should try to get a job in the White House. And I tried through Harold and a couple other people and just I wasn't able to break through or get anybody's attention.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so what happened was I was working for David Dinkins and I was very happily living in New York and having a great time right after college. And David Dinkins lost his re-election campaign and I had gone from being one of the sort of city hall speechwriters to being his main speech writer on that reelection campaign. So that brought me into the sort of world of political consultants and strategists. And I met Harold Dickies and I met Bob Schrum and I met David Doak and all these people who really were Washington people kind of dipping a toe into New York politics. And so as the campaign was ending, I guess Dick Gephardt was looking for a speechwriter and Bob Schrum.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know he just felt, and I think that's true that as a speech writer, you know, you can express your opinion, especially when asked. Sometimes you get a chance to weigh in on significant things in the dark of night, but you have to be a booster, a cheerleader, a friend, a supporter, get inside their head, tap into the idealistic strain that some AIDS won't even notice.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would always like to use the phrase self-government more than government, and you would not catch that in a speech most of the time, but to him it was this kind of very animated concept that made the whole thing come alive to him. And being a speechwriter, you know, and there's so many different ways to be a speechwriter, which is to say some people don't consider their speechwriter to be an important staff person, some people consider it to be their closest confidant. But it was actually Ron Clain, our friend Ron Clain, who hired me to work for Gore, who said to me, because I used to talk a lot with Ron about, well, if I think this, should I bring this to the vice president or should I push back on that? Or do you want me to bring up this uncomfortable thing with him? Or would you rather do it? And I remember him saying to me once, he didn't want me to raise a difficult issue with Gore and that he was going to do it because he said, you know, your relationship with him has to be kind of like priest and penitent.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's a funny thing. I think that I've worked for some politicians for whom, and I've written a lot of speeches, some that you and I have worked on together, for people I didn't work for. Worked for a lot of people who don't really care that if it seems good and punchy and rises to kind of a presidential level or whatever it is office that they're seeking, they'll just sort of take it and go with it. I think the great politicians are incredibly particular about language. And small things like the placement of a comma or a phrase to describe something in particular that no one will recognize as the speech goes by becomes so meaningful to them. And so I think the best working relationships I had as a speechwriter, that was definitely true without Gore, were based on a deep kind of accumulated knowledge of how they like their sentences to flow and subtle things in the sentences. It's funny because just as an example, it always comes to my mind, Gore.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I've said this to you recently, actually, that as crushed, especially now as I am that he's leaving the White House, I admire him so much and I love him so much. The small silver lining to that cloud is going to be a truly great book by ex-president.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I realize now that I did. I realize now that I loved kind of observing the weirdness of a room or thinking about the odd personalities and trying to analyze them. It's something that we all do, I think, working in politics is we spend hours just sitting back and analyzing the complicated psyches of our bosses. Because the people who get these jobs are very complicated. You know, the number of, you know, nights you spend over a whiskey talking with your other friends who work for the same senator about like, can you wise the senator like that? That was the beginning for me, I suppose, of learning to get inside. We'll get to go later.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just flying over Queens in a helicopter with the mayor of New York into some tense white ethnic enclave. It was the unreality. I think that maybe that was the beginning of my thinking as a screenwriter in that I was always going to say that.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the right stripped down punchy language you could really make a difference in his presentation. And I was a kid and I didn't know anything about policy or anything and I didn't have any political wisdom. I wasn't at any strategy table or in any of those conversations. But I developed a good relationship with him and with lots of the other people, Deputy Mayors. And so as this kid, I was kind of suddenly in the mayor's office for all these meetings and flying around on helicopters with him sometimes. And so I was liked and valued amazingly, even though I didn't have any wisdom or experience or anything like that. And I just was addicted to, I have to be honest and say that I was, I became really addicted to the absurdity of it. In addition to helping to do something and helping to advance a cause that I liked, I mean, just the situations I was in were so weird.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. You know, I think I was just saying that. It was my David Dinkins could sometimes lapse into a kind of legal ease, you know, when he was holding a, you know David Dinkins, when he was holding a press conference or when he was just even reading a prepared speech. And I learned the hard way over a couple years of working for him that”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You work anywhere in the government that will have you, and you're free for the office that you work in, but the deal is they can't make you do entry-level work. And somebody introduced me to a guy who's a friend of mine to this day, a guy named John Siegel, who has been very involved in New York politics and is a lawyer, but he was the first chief speechwriter for David Dinkins. And I met him, and we kind of said, look, why don't I work for you? And if you don't like me, I'll leave in a few weeks. And if I don't like it, I'll leave in a few weeks. It was just very casual and loose. And I started doing research for him, and he assigned me a speech. And it's a funny thing because... David Dinkins, who I'm very fond of and still in touch with”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so specific, and so many people find themselves doing glorified clerical work and hate it. But fortunately for me, I decided to take a year off after college and apply to law school during that year off. And I worked in New York City government for David Dinkins when he was the mayor. And that was the year that changed my life in a couple ways. have a great time and enjoy what you were doing without a graduate degree. I just looked around and so many people working in politics and just in New York in general were thriving and having so much fun and they didn't have graduate degrees. And I thought, why do I need that? But the other thing was I stumbled into political speechwriting and I wasn't something I set out to do. I think I was even aware there was such a thing, but I was in a program that still exists called the New York City Urban Fellows Program. And the way it works is you're paid a very small”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is really ridiculous because law is so specific, and you and I know 8 million lawyers, and most of them are pretty unhappy if they're working as lawyers. And it's a little bit like saying, you know, I'm a generalist and I could do a lot of different things. So I think I'm going to go to dental school.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. I did start right out of college. And in terms of being a writer, you know, I actually wanted to go to law school when I was in college. And not for any reason I could explain now. Just other people were doing it. I was kind of a generalist. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. That's what people.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I never was involved in college Democrats or anything like that. But I did hang around the IOP. And interestingly enough, I got a grant from the IOP to help me research my senior thesis, which was about the Reagan's invasion of Grenada. So I think even though I didn't necessarily get involved in campaigns or things like that, I followed politics very closely. All my friends did. We all were sort of frothing at the mouth, you know, liberal Democrats, and it definitely was always a big part of the conversations I was having, I would say that.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I did. Actually, I didn't do anything formal with the Institute of Politics. I was on the Harvard Crimson, so I was kind of a student journalist, so that was a little bit of a form of activism. You were a journalist. I don't know if you consider that a form of activism. You were a professional journalist.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Punctuation is gone. Capitalization is gone. But it's funny, I was just thinking about, you know, The novelist Charles Bukowski once said something that I think maybe explains my career as a writer, which is that he said, I write not because I'm so good, but because everyone else is so bad. That's my mind”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and nobody did that for me I just feel ripped off. No, but so I started to realize in college that most of the drafts of papers that people were bringing me in this counseling center were so bad and they didn't have the foggiest idea of even the basics of how to structure an argument or what the professors were even looking for. So I wrote, I guess my senior year of college, a kind of, through that writing center, you know, with their sort of support, a kind of a guide for mostly grad student teaching assistants, for how to even just structure an assignment for a paper in a way that gave the students some idea of how to structure their argument in the paper. There just was nobody helping teach writing. There were some expository writing classes that you would take, but you would think the people teaching you day in, day out would care about it, and then they would get back these very incoherent papers”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm so appalled now where I have friends whose kids are in private schools and they just have armies of tutors who very often write the papers. And I just think that's so horrible.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I guess that's right. I worked when I went to Harvard College and there was a writing center there, which was a place where students could go get help on papers from other students. And we were trained in how to do it. And it was a very kind of non-directive peer counseling center. It was actually a really cool place where you would come in with a paper and I would look at the paper and not tell you what to do, but ask you questions about it and try to guide you to your own realizations about what you were trying to say and whether or not it was actually in the thing you'd already written because we were really instructed. You can't do people's work for them.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. You know, the funny thing is this is the funny part of sort of looking at my career now, which is that I never set out to be a writer and I never really had any particular I didn't think of myself as a writer for a long, long time for whatever reason that I can't describe it wasn't that I had an interest in it. I always from the time I was in elementary school, junior high school was able to write these little one or two page papers that you would have to write for school easily and it just felt like I could express myself in that way, not in some deep poetic way. I didn't do much creative writing, a little bit here and there. But it just was easy for me, easier than taking a test. So as I went through high school and college and started to be able to pick classes, I would always pick the classes that had a lot of papers as opposed to a lot of tests. It just was more comfortable. It was just easier.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to be principal, you have to be progressive, but there's also a place where rubber meets the road. And so my mother really, even more than my father, has sort of taught me, you know, you stick with the person who's viable. You support the beleaguered incumbent even in tough times. I mean, there were times when I was, you know, working for Al Gore not to skip ahead here in our story. When I was very dispirited by Bill Clinton's”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I grew up in a very partisan Democratic household. My father, I would describe as a kind of a New Deal Democrat. And FDR was his hero. And I also, when I was a kid and growing up, my parents were huge Nixon haters and Reagan haters. And staunch progressives. But the interesting thing is that my mother in the late 1960s, I guess she was very angry at Hubert Humphrey for the Vietnam War. And so she didn't vote for Humphrey in the Democratic primary in 1968. She voted for Dick Gregory, running a sort of a Jill Stein Meets, Ralph Nader meets Pat Paulson kind of weird third-party candidacy. And to this day, she Thinks she helped elect Richard Nixon. So I kind of grew up with this belief that like”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For all of Brooklyn. Absolutely. And when it was still, it's funny, you look at these pictures of Brooklyn in the 1950s and it's multi-ethnic and there's African American kids playing with white kids playing with kids with turbans on the street. And ironically, New York is so wonderfully diverse. Brooklyn Heights is like the whitest place in New York City today. But this book came out last year and wonderfully got a lot of attention and has sort of revived my father's name a little bit. Did you?”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was fourteen He died, and he was in his 60s. He was older than my mom, but still very young. Know was a very wonderful, actively working commercial photographer, photographed a lot of interesting people and things, and then just nobody really lifted a finger to keep his work out in the world. So the book you're referring to a few years ago, I started rifling through his archive just to kind of find interesting things. I don't really know if I had a clear goal even and found incredible portraits he took of Truman Capote in the 1950s and portraits of Bobby Fisher taken right before he became the world chess champion and the rock group, the band at their peak in 1969 taken in Woodstock, New York. And my father was not a celebrity photographer. So by happenstance, a publisher became interested in these copote pictures and also pictures my father took of Capote's Brooklyn neighborhood in the late 50s. He lived in Brooklyn Heights at the time way before it was as hip as it is today.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he started as a commercial illustrator, and then he became a photographer and was, I think, phenomenal photographer who died when I was very young.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's not seen them live because they really haven't played on the East Coast, but we're hoping actually to get them to play her next opening in New York. So if the Daddy Added gals are listening.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because, you know, she's a member of the National Academy and has been, you know, gotten all kinds of great grants and is in the Whitney and MOMA collections. But everything like that that's ever happened to her, she has all these friends who've had the same thing happen to them. And this is the only thing that's unique to her”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, both my parents, wonderful, gifted artists, my mother, Dottie Addy, still very actively working and showing her work and is in many museum collections. It's great stuff. She's terrific. She some describe her as kind of a feminist painter. She doesn't really like to be categorized. I mean, her attitude is as long as people write positive things. They can call her whatever they want. But the interesting thing about my mother is who's had a great career and still does. We learned a few years ago the family kind of by accident that there's actually an all-girl punk rock band in Portland, Oregon named after her.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She would tell us our homework assignment in the first grade would be to go home and watch a cello concert on PBS. I mean, it was very unusual.”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me too, actually. And my brother is a couple years older than me, and he went to PS40 before me and had her as a first grade teacher, and I was assigned a different first grade teacher. And my parents actually went to the school. Megdan insisted, and it was hard to do apparently that I be switched into her class. She was phenomenal”
2016-12-22 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 107 - Eli Attie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source