YouSaid · the spoken record

John Heilemann

lines on the record

103

first

2016-10-20

most recent

2016-10-20

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. “Yes, and she will be even more hated, and this part of this rhetoric has been part of his rhetoric now. So again, it's like the problem that Obama faced, even with Democratic control of the Senate and House, the problem will exist and potentially will exist times 10.”

   2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “About what happened with your guy when he came into office after a relatively unifying election and having gotten McCain's support, you know, and then giving a speech in Grant Park that was magnanimous and big and saying I want ever, I'm going to be, if you didn't vote for me, I'm going to be your president, all that stuff. And then he walked into office and the Republican Party was ready to undermine him from the moment he walked in. About how much worse it will be. Well, the other”

   2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “On the upside? Maybe I'm not saying I think I'm praying though because the truth is, I mean, put aside the questions of are you undermining the fundamental tenets of American, but democracy, which I think he may be in some respects, put aside that. Just ask the question, what's it going to be like to have to govern?”

   2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “What John Kerry did in 2004, what John McCain did in 2008, you cannot imagine him doing those things. I mean, maybe we'll all be surprised and suddenly some...”

   2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “6 million, 10 million, 24 million people. Let's say that 25 million people who believe the election was stolen, that the media rigged it, not even if it's voter fraud, but that the media's constant highlighting of his problems with women. $25 million people think the media was so biased against Trump that they stole the election from him. And they think Hillary Clinton is Satan. That's a pretty powerful market. To start whenever you want to start”

   2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “There's no question about that. And to me, and we're going to talk about this on our show, you know, that seems, is the conventional wisdom, and I think it's right. Like he's been doing this all along. The rigged election argument is clearly an argument to lay down a predicate for explaining away a loss, right? That's clear. The question is in the short term and the long term, whether it's serving other functions in the short term, does he think it's motivating his base? Does he believe, again, that there's a hidden vote out there and that somehow making that argument in addition to the other arguments he's making about Clinton will motivate a base and get a bunch of new voters to come out that no one's counting right now? The pollsters are missing. Does he believe that or not? Again, I'm not crediting that that's true, but is that part of what he's doing? And the other is, is he calculating for the election? Is he thinking about if you can get, he's got 14 million people voted for him in the Republican nomination fight, if you can get 14 million people plus, let's add another.”

   2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “He can monetize through another business venture after this over. Is that his game right now, or does he actually believe that there are all these uncounted millions out there who are going to rise up on election day and prove all the polls wrong? I don't know. I don't think question question.”

   2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Does he know that he has probably lost? And are the things he's doing now designed in a really, really cagey also kind of diabolical way to build an anti Clinton coalition? Maybe it needs next.”

   2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “No, no, I don't think. I'm not sure anybody's ever ready to be a major party nominee, but I do think that it surprised him when he rose to the top of the polls instantly and then stayed there for month after month after month. And then, you know, what happened is what happens to all of them, right? Which is that success reinforces itself and you start to think I deserve this. All of them, all of them have a certain kind of messianic quality that gets built up. Some are better at keeping that in perspective. But when you stand in front of crowds, as Barack Obama has and as Donald Trump has and other people, you stand in front of crowds of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people day after day after day. It's intoxicating and also creates various forms of delusion. I think he now is, you know, I don't know. This is to me the most interesting question is.”

   2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Two things were true. The first was we asked him what how likely he thought it was to be the Republican nominee. He said about 30% to be the nominee. And the second thing he said was, if this isn't working for me in a couple months, I'll just quit because I'm not a masochist. Like if the voters don't want me, fine. I'll go back. I have a really good life, right? So I don't think he thought he was going to be the Republican nominee. And I think that he was perfectly willing to walk away from it if it wasn't working out for him.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And he understands also with a degree of acuity that was lacking on the part of all of his rivals, literally all of them, the degree to which the Republican Party had changed. And understanding, again, you could say in a calculating diabolical way, if he doesn't actually believe some of the things he says, which I have some doubts about, the way starting with the birther campaign and then moving its way through the issues, the hot buttons that he seized on, just as a pure matter of political analysis, he understands what the Republican Party is now and how to motivate a large part of it in a way that no one else who ran against him did. And so there's a savviness to that. There's the personal magnetism and all that other stuff. But I think on some basic level, when we first interviewed him the day after he announced in Trump Tower.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “There's a reason he's a charismatic guy, and again, people get mad when you say these things because, you know, well, who cares about what he's like in private? The reality is that you can't understand his rise throughout his life. You can't understand why a guy like this has become what's so successful with the apprentice, was so successful in staging a hostile takeover of a party that he wasn't a member of a couple years ago. You can't understand that without understanding that there is a great degree of personal magnetism around him and that he's been very savvy, and some would say evil, but savvy in understanding better than everybody else who ran.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “It's probably a good thing that I don't have that power. I don't have, you know, he looks like a classic narcissist to me. You know, I mean, again, not having the toolkit to offer that diagnosis definitively. He's a very charming guy up close. That's just the reason”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Think part of the, but again, just not to drag you into this, but I mean, but I do think you guys honed in on that, on some of those, the queasiness that a lot of Democrats had with general purpose clin fatigue and with the specific kinds of compromises. And again, it's kind of just skibbiness that made a lot of Democrats uncomfortable with the notion of her being the nominee. And you guys exploited that. I think Bernie Sanders was less effective at exploiting that, but he tried to exploit it to some extent in the Democratic primary. And obviously there's different kinds of things because you guys once you had won, if she had won, you guys would have supported her and said that she would have been a better president than John McCain. But the core vulnerability that's there is there for a reason and it's been exploited both by Democrats and Republicans. And I think that there's some truth in it, right? That it's there. The vulnerability is not a made up thing.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “and a skeviness to some of the ways in which they practice politics collectively and independently over the course of their careers that makes many people, including many Democrats, a little uncomfortable and a little bit queasy. And the sense of entitlement that they have, which is essentially, again, this argument of, you know, you hear it most clear with President Clinton and the foundation, which is essentially saying, well, we had to do a lot, we got to do a lot of dirty deals in order to get those malaria drugs to Africa. Basically, that's the trade-off. There's a greater good here, and you need to trust us as the arbiters of what the tallies are here. If you guys trust us and understand that we're in this for the right reasons, you will cut us slack on some of the stuff that is a little unpleasant to look at. I think that's one of the things that makes her vulnerable to certain charges that the Trump campaign and others have leveled, including the Obama campaign, about her compromised nature, right? It was a sore spot for her for a long time. And there's tough.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Right. So I was going to get to that. I think those, all those things are true. The things I said a second ago. I also think it's true that she's obviously been politically self-interested and has cut corners in a variety of ways. And one of the things that I find like covering both Clintons for my entire career is that this notion, I think it's deeply true that their view is that they have a view of their own virtue that is inflated to the point where they believe that cutting corners is okay because in the wash, and again they would never put it quite like this, this is my gloss on it, but that in the wash they've done so many good things for the world that it justifies the corners they've cut, the dirty deals they've made, the ways in which they've compromised themselves on principle and on ideology that things they ostensibly believe in, the people they've sold out, the people they've thrown under the bus, they've done all those things, you know, and there's a great”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Let me talk about Clinton first. You know, some of these things will be banal observations, right? She's really smart. She's a really dedicated. She's been really dedicated her life to public service. She knows about policy. She's incredibly well prepared. I don't think very many people think that on the merits she's unqualified to be president of the United States, even though some people.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Well, it's more, it's just more unpleasant. I mean, it's just kind of like having to explain to people that our job is to be tough, our job is to challenge people on the facts, our job is to hold people accountable. But in the end, to do so in a respectful way that tries to get the relevant information out so that the actual people whose job it is to decide who's president, which is the 150 million people or 120 million people or however many it's going to be who vote on election day, can decide. We should be tough with everybody, but in the end, our job isn't to tear down the Trump campaign or the Clinton campaign. Our job is to let all the information out there and let everybody else make a decision.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “100%. And again, I mean, I'm not, my life is great, and I'm not saying this in a whiny way, but it's weird the extent to which there are many partisans who think that if I'm conducting an interview on television with someone from the Trump campaign, that they wouldn't put it quite this way, but this is true, the effect of what they really believe, which is that I should be yelling at that person, essentially through the entire interview. That's my job, is to yell at that person, denounce them, and expose them as a fraud. And vice versa on the other side, that if you conduct a respectful interview with a Clinton surrogate or hard.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “There's a big fisher there. But you can see the difference is Trump being headquartered in New York. The Republicans who don't like Hillary Clinton in New York don't think that she's apocalyptic in the way that Democrats in New York fear Donald Trump. So there's a different kind of just as a cultural thing. It's slightly different. It is clear out in the country that there are many, many Republicans who feel the same way about what would happen to the country if Clinton got elected as Democrats feel if Trump. Donald Trump slash Hillary Clinton from being president. And if I'm not doing that, I'm failing the country. It's really not my job to stop anybody from becoming president. It's not, right? And people, but people.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “100%. I was just going to say that. I was going to go to that and say, although it's a little different because I think Trump Tower is not a proper campaign in quite the same way. So they don't have this army of people who go home and talk to Republicans in Manhattan who are saying that kind of thing.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “They believe that if Trump were the president, that the country would be destroyed. That's their view, right? And they hear it every day. So that creates a particular environment.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “At the Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn, right? I live in Brooklyn, but you go up the road to the Clinton headquarters. What you find is something that's totally intuitively obvious and something you never experienced with Barack Obama in either one of the elections that you were on, which is that people are there working under extraordinary pressure of a particular kind, which is the pressure of going home every day and hearing from all of your Democratic friends that it's up to you to stop the apocalypse. Like if you don't stop Trump, this will be apocalyptic. I'm not crediting this argument. I'm just merely saying that is what they hear every day. And so when Hillary Clinton was going into that first debate, I think the pressure on them was really, really high because they do hear this reinforced over and over again.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “No, I think you'd have a freak out. I mean, there's a, I mean, the thing that's different about this election is the apocalyptic nature of it on both sides. And one of the things that's most Clear if you go spend time in Brooklyn, one of the things that's clear is that they.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Since 2012? No. Well, Trump has obviously taken it to a totally different place by calling out the media and calling them disgusting and calling them, saying that they're rigging the election Hillary Clinton and saying, I mean, he's been doing this for months, even before in our current moment where the rigged argument has become much more prominent and venomous and I think deleterious to a lot of things that we care about in our democracy.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Yes. Right. Well, and I didn't see it in 2012 either, to be honest. I mean, like in that same way where there was kind of like you're like a little weirded out by the fact that there are 50 people who've turned on the press riser and are yelling. Now it's happening with some routiness.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Right, but that was the first time in the paling context was the first time I heard people not individually saying nasty things to me or to reporters, but mass at events turning on the press and yelling at the press risers, you know, where there was hostility. And again, a crowd exhibiting that kind of hostility. I had not seen that before some of those Palin rallies.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Not just when McCain confronted that woman in the crowd, but that went on for days after that. Like it was red hot and things were happening at those Palin rallies that people were discomfited by. And I don't mean just Democrats, but everybody. It was just a little scary. And the stuff that's happening now with the press started to happen then. And again, we of all, for the course of my entire career, dealt with the fact that Americans are skeptical of the press and that the mainstream media's criticized often and that conservatives in particular think there's liberal bias. And if people will come up and, you know, say nasty things about you being in the press, whatever.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Yes. And looking back. Yes. I mean, I had never seen anything, you know, I had never seen anything quite like that at the time. There was ugliness in those crowds for some period of days towards the end. And I remember being in an event with you guys maybe in like Ohio, somewhere like about a week before Election Day and your security had been upped. There was like there was notable. You could see that the way that there was more Secret Service around than there had been before. And I remember talking, maybe not to you, but to some sources on the campaign and saying, this looks like more security here. Is that what's going on? Because it was in the moment when this stuff was.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “HBO. HBO. And, you know, they were interested. And people were, again, it was a very, it was funny that when we wrote the book, you know, the subtitle for the book is Obama and the Clinton's McCain and Palin and the Race of a Lifetime. And I now, after now experiencing this campaign, I'm like, look back on that and go, wow, Race of a Lifetime.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Larger than life and pervasive in American culture in a different way. And we said, look, if you could really strip back all of everything and just get to the core of who these humans are, these kind of amazing characters and what it's like to go through running for president in 2008. And you could tell that story in a really interior way.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “But we thought if we went to a publisher and said, these are incredible characters, right? Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, John Edwards, like just those people. They're like different. They're not like normal candidates. That's not like Al Gore or John Kerry. These are like Hollywood celebrities already, you know, and they're all super, you see them on stage with Oprah and you see them on the late night shows and they're pervasive. They're larger than...”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “One of the great books ever written about politics, but it had been kind of from the publishing industry's perspective, it was like a proof point that these books did not work. They took too long and they were, no matter how great they were, they didn't sell. And there were other examples of that more contemporaneous, more recent, I should say.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Commercially viable. And they had the Richard Ben Kramer experience of what it takes, and it took him six years to get the book done. It's a great book, an incredible book.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “It was horrifying, right? And we got in the car and I was, I said, you know, someone should be, this is another one of these moments where this should be a movie. And we gradually talking through the fact that we had no experience writing screenplays and that we had no experience writing novels. We sort of backed our way into the one thing we thought we could actually do, which was to do a nonfiction narrative about this. But to your point, the key thing was to us was that the reason there was no other people doing this that year and that was the publishing industry had decided that these books were not.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Like some of the speech and he sort of stammered and staggered through it, and there was whipping cold wind and there were like eight people, eight like old Annapolis grads in front of him.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “I did, literally. It's true, under the influence of really, really good skiing experience and some other substances. I spent the entire time just thinking about that. Like, why was no one writing a book? Why was no one making a movie? Why was no one doing a Romana claying out like a primary color? It's like we knew that there were none of these books. None of this was in the works. And this campaign had been incredible already. And this was still months before we even knew who was going to win, although we kind of knew Obama was on track to win. It was months before Sarah Palin ever appeared on the landscape, but it was still incredible, right? McCain. Anyway, I got to Mark. I flew to DC, got in a car with Mark, drove out to this event in Annapolis, and it was one of the worst political events I've ever been to. Like we got there expecting McCain in front of 30,000 screaming midshipmen, and we got there and he was at the Annapolis football stadium with an empty stadium behind him standing on this kind of rotunda above it. So the backdrop was empty seats. And he had a speech that like the telegram.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “There was about a four-day period in that Pennsylvania run-up where I thought I could probably get a few days off because I'd been working like without vacation for a year. So I went skiing and then flew from Aspen to Washington to meet up with Mark to go to one of these McCain events at Annapolis. And I had been thinking the whole time I was on the mountain about the fact that it was crazy no one was writing a book about this election. And I understood why they weren't because you listen.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “So we met up right when John McCain went to do his biography tour, which you may remember, we went around to all these places to remind people of what his life had been like. I had just, during the middle of the Pennsylvania primary where there was like six weeks, if you remember that, between.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Well, we had not, I had known Mark for a long time, and we'd been friends and friendly for a long time, spent a lot of time on campaign trails. And we did not sit out in 2007 to write the book, and we had no plans to work together or do anything together apart from having the occasional dinner and hang out a little bit until In April of two thousand eight”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Yes, yes, yes. And so I was not surprised. I mean, certainly after the convention speech, you knew he was going to run, at least you said in your gut, you suspected he was going to run for president. When was he going to run? Would he run in 2008? That was the bold thing you guys did. The boldest thing was to say, fuck resume, fuck the Senate, fuck doing all the stuff that people think you're supposed to do to have enough experience to run for president. You got lightning a bottle? Let's go.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “And then, like with an asterisk that said, you know, of the first quarter crump fundraising numbers. But the announcement.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Was, you know, I cover the Clintons for a long time. So I was very with some guidance from people like you and others, but I was very aware, I felt very for the beginning that she was very vulnerable to the kind of argument and the kind of person that he was. Not necessarily that he was the frontrunner because he wasn't. She was the most likely Democratic nominee and the most likely president of the United States until the night of the Iowa Caucuses. But for a long time, I sort of looked at that and said, you know, there's something interesting happening here. And you may remember that after you guys won the first quarter fundraising battle in 2008, we put Obama on the cover of New York magazine with a piece that I wrote that was the headline of which was The Winner.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Well, like everybody else, but maybe a little bit more than other people. Again, I've always made really clear to everybody, Barack Obama not a close friend of mine, but someone who I like, you know, he literally lived a block and a half from us in Somerville, and so we would, you had to walk through the divinity school to get to the law school or the Kennedy school. So, you know, we'd see him all the time. And I played in a couple poker games with him and I was on the court with him a couple times. But he was because of the things that I described before, if you were interested in politics, you were paying attention to Obama. Like just from a distance, like, okay, oh, he's running with the state senate now. Okay, that guy, you know, over there. And then, of course, the 2004 convention speech, we all, you know, pay attention to. I, as you may remember,”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Yes, right. I moved back right after in the summer, literally the summer after 9-11, and started to work for left the New Yorker, Adam Moss hired me at the New York magazine. I thought they were doing something kind of exciting there. And so I started working for Adam and writing the political column there and also doing long features for the magazine both. And really 2008 looked like it was going to be a great race. I know one of the things we've learned about is that every other presidential election is amazing and the ones that are not the every other ones are like, you know, incumbent elections are like a little bit of a snore. But, you know, 1992, incredible election with Perot and, you know, 2000 recount, incredible election. 2008 looked like it was going to be incredible, especially when you started to see that Obama and Clinton were lining up to running against the judge. What did you think?”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “So to pick up the thread you dropped, after I finished doing all this doing this gate stuff, I basically said it's time to go back to the East Coast where all my friends are. I moved to New York and I started working for New York magazine and wrote about the 2004 campaign from there and wrote about started to head into 2008 as being.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Because Microsoft is now, I would say, and in my book, I got a lot of plaque for this at the end of the book back in 2001. I said, you know, Microsoft is over. It's not important anymore. And it may exist for a long time and produce a lot of revenue and make happy shareholders. But IBM is still around and no one cares about IBM. It's not a powerful company. It's not a feared company. It's just a big company. Who cares? I thought at that time that it was obvious that with the rise of the internet that Microsoft was going to be eclipsed by more powerful forces, it's now obviously true that that's the case. No one cares about Microsoft anymore. Again, that's not to say they don't make good products or make their customers happy, but Google and Facebook are much more the environment that we live in. So will people write 20 years from now, 30 years from now and Gates is passed on? Will people write about him? I think obviously his role in the beginning of the digital revolution is epic and historic and important. But the kind of work the Gates Foundation is doing and has done already.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Had an enormous, look, I mean, when the history of Bill Gates gets written after he passes away at some point, you know, I don't know what the lead will be. I mean, Microsoft at that point may be...”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Those motivations that were the same kind of motivations that motivated the earlier robber barons, but it's clear that he was a very young man. And unlike Morgan and Rockwell, they got rich, but he got rich, he got really, really, really rich, really, really, really young. Much like President Obama leaving office still at a very young age, right? So the big question for all these guys is once you've become, what do you do? The ultimate Titan of the information age or president of the United States and you're 50, what do you do next? And I think Gates, both because he thinks it's he's a first class intellect and I think he thought that the challenges that could face a well-run philanthropy were intellectually interesting. I think also he's become someone who going through that crucible of the lawsuit and the threat to break up his company became more, he learned, like he matured as a human being, at least from what I can tell, and started to realize that he had this obligation to give back in a greater way.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Yes, guilt over their guilt, yes, G-I-L-T, right? Over there, robber barren-like behavior, their monopolistic behavior, their crushing of workers, et cetera, et cetera. And they were trying to, in some ways, buy their way into heaven. Those interpretations are not mutually exclusive. But I think Gates, his interest in philosophy, in philanthropy, came about really in the cauldron of the trial when he was, people forget how pilloried he was and how much he was turned into by his own words from an important deposition that he gave in that case that was videotaped, from his behavior, the way the government portrayed him. He had gone from being one of the most admired figures in America in the 1990s to being a hated figure at the end of the 1990s in the early part of the 2000s. And he then really started getting involved. The Gates Foundation had just sort of started up in that period. And I don't, I think they're probably there was some degree of both of them.”

    2016-10-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 89 - John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source