YouSaid · the spoken record

Karen Tumulty

lines on the record: 59
first: 2017-10-26
most recent: 2017-10-26
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

“Right. And you talk to people like Edmund Morris, who was the biographer who looked at every inch of his diaries. The handwriting never changes while he's in office. The thought processes don't seem to change. What's really interesting is she becomes not only his personal caretaker, but she becomes the guardian of his legacy. Most presidents have decades after they leave office to shape and refine their own legacies. Ronald Reagan was deprived of that, and it really did fall on Nancy Reagan.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um, I think this first signs of him doing things like getting lost and confused in places, the best evidence I have found is that it begins to show up in the early 1990s.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She actually sneaks him into the White House residence through a secret tunnel from the Treasury Department into the White House to have a private meeting with her husband to explain to him what the consequences are of this report.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and that was exactly what the White House Counsel's office wanted him to do. They wanted him to do a very sort of complicated legalistic, defiant version of events. I think Nancy Reagan understood from talking to a lot of very smart political heads and also from knowing her own husband and sort of What he was capable of doing. She knew he had to do something very different.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am finding in particular during moments like Iran Contra, she knew sort of where he needed to be. When he went on television, he was going to have to admit that he traded arms for hostages. And there was a lot of resistance in the West Wing. She sort of put the pieces in place so that he would have the space to sort of get to where he needed to be for his political service.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that apocryphal? I think that's a myth. It's really interesting because people who felt betrayed by his transformation from the Hollywood liberal to conservative blame Nancy for that. You get to the White House and the conservatives who felt betrayed by his overtures to the Soviet Union and his not being as aggressive on abortion, then they blamed Nancy for being the secret liberal in the family. I think he was who he was. There's a line in one of Lou Cannon's biographies of him that really sticks with me and that I'm using as kind of my North Star in writing this book, which is that Reagan always had a clear sense of where he wanted to go, but that Nancy had the clearer sense of what it was going to take to get there.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was actually one of the editors at Simon& Schuster, who had been my editor at time, has over the years proposed any number of book ideas to me. But she came to me last year and said, we'd really like a big, good book on Nancy Reagan. And I had just listened to her funeral a couple months before that on C-SPAN. And I had found myself sort of being drawn into it. It's turning out, though, that She's much more fascinating even than I thought. And the degree to which you can find real moments of his presidency that would have come out entirely different if it hadn't been for her. And here is this woman who was the ultimate anti-feminist and yet had such a great sense of her own power. And she also had a sense of not only her husband's strength but his weaknesses.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an interesting thing. I mean, of course, Medicare somehow has, even though certainly all of the exact same arguments were raised about Medicare when it passed in the mid-1990s. and LBJ actually saw Medicare as the first step it was going to be followed by kitty care. He really saw he had an expansive vision of the healthcare system. I mean, Medicare has financial problems, but I think quality problems most people on it really like it.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I can it also get all wrapped around into what people feel about the role of government. I mean, I can tell you I have a number of relatives in Texas who are their own healthcare situations are pretty close to the edge and they are one diagnosis away from catastrophe. But they're conservatives. They're not comfortable with government having that big of a role. They hate Obamacare. Would”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and also as we found out, you know, it's that if you aren't being insured, you're paying the retail prices for a lab test that somebody would pay who had insurance would pay $20 for, we were being charged $3 and $4,000 and $500 for. It was just a nightmare of.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, thank you, but the one thing we're not worrying about because his kidney failure, even though he's not sixty five, his kidney failure has put him onto Medicare. And so as we are rushing around and looking for the very best care that we can get for him, the one thing we are not worrying this time around is money. It's money. It's covered. And so we can actually focus on the things that matter more than that.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we finally found coverage that was sort of stopgap through a low income program in my home county by the time the Affordable Care Act passed, my brother was able to buy into the exchanges. Now he has had yet another setback his kidneys have completely failed and he also has a very aggressive kind of brain cancer.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I went down the rabbit hole, I began to realize no, I was getting trapped, my brother was getting trapped with a life threatening illness in exactly the kind of situation I had written about other people. And one of my editors at time, Michael Duffy, said I was walking around the office just expressing my great frustration. He says, write this. And so I did. just explained one family's journey into this system where you, even if you think you have coverage. It isn't necessary. It's until you get sick, you don't know what you really have.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had a health insurance policy. He had, out of his meager earnings, had paid religiously for the, he'd never missed a premium, same company six years. But it was a series of short term policies that, by the way, this current administration would like to make more available than they were. So the company, once he gets sick, the insurance company decides that his initial test that diagnosed him six months before had been under one policy and his diagnosis was under another, so they didn't have to cover any of it. And I really thought I was so smart about healthcare that there was just some bureaucrat if I could just get to the right insurance company bureaucrat, I was going to get this fixed.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was really interesting. I had been covering healthcare since the early nineties when the Clintons tried to get a big major reform package in. Moderated a healthcare forum of candidates in 2007. I really, really thought I knew this subject inside out. And then my brother, who suffers from Asperger's and has in his life mostly worked a series of kind of low-paying jobs, suddenly developed kidney failure. And this was in 2000 of 2008.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know, to have seen Barack Obama's election, John McCain is just a never ending source of fascination. There are plenty of people in politics who are fun to cover. But in the end, the stories that you really, really remember are the ones that were just sort of all yours.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it took me months to find him. Nobody knew his name, but it turned out he had the most fascinating story, the most American interesting story to tell. And those in many ways are the most rewarding stories as a journalist. They're the ones where you're the only reporter out there even looking for something. And you find this treasure. So it's often the more, I mean, there's so many interesting figures in politics. I mean, Trump is how could you get more interesting than Trump?”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know it's sometimes the most surprising people right before President Obama's second inauguration I had heard a story about a man he had run into on an elevator who had given him a good luck charm And I spent months trying to track this guy down because apparently President Obama had carried this luck charm with the rest of the campaign.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the processes just don't even work. I cannot recall the last time a piece of legislation went to a conference committee on Capitol Hill. The processes that we all learned, it's just the actual literal definition of dysfunctional”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, then one cycle later, it's anything but breaking the fever. So what exactly comes along to stop this cycle, this sort of frenzy that we're in? It seems like it would have to be some kind of towering figure emerging on the scene. I just don't see it coming.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find it Hard to. Figure that one out. I remember, you know, during the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama's favorite phrase seemed like it was break the fever, you know, that an election could break the fever. It could sort of reset everything back to normal.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he for there was a point during the campaign where he had announced that nobody from the Washington Post was going to have credentials to get into any of his events. And so what we would do is send reporters and they would stand in the long lines with the public and they would just go as members of the public. But during that time, during that period, my colleague Phil Rucker showed up in an event and the next thing you know, he's being invited to have lunch with Trump. So, you know, it is There's a codependency with the media and Trump that I think is also something that future historians are going to have a lot of interest in.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've just got to read of the front lobe of this guy's brain, particularly in the mornings of every day of his presidency.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's interesting too because I keep thinking for other presidents, you know, biographers in the future have to dig and dig and dig and to get to the sort of essence of the character and what the thought processes were at any given moment. Whoever's the Michael Beshloss of the post-Trump era.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He think he thinks it works to his advantage. And it isn't like these feelings haven't always been there in Washington. I remember decades ago, one time hearing Congresswoman Lynn Martin of Illinois walking onto the House floor and muttering, this place is a preschool where nobody's had a nap. But Twitter gets it all out there. And, you know, it's President Trump has decided that for some reason, for some”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's also, you've got to engage Twitter on its own terms too. You cannot be tweeting things like the House voted Thursday to rename a post office 246 to 132. There's a certain edge that Twitter demands, and I think it is possible to be edgy without being. But the fact is, you know, you've got a body of work in your Twitter feed and sometimes people will just grab one tweet as opposed to, but I've also tweeted things that are critical on this subject.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that is even more of a problem because we have tools now that we can fact check ourselves pretty quickly. You don't have to, you know, Google is there to help us all. I think that the bigger and the more significant mistakes are being made in tone and context and significance.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is also a you know it becomes little kids soccer because everyone can see what's getting read. Not only can you see which stories are getting the clicks you can see people are reading two paragraphs into this story and then they're leaving for something else that the feedback is immediate and it is not conducive to saying we're just going to let this one slide and if you have One headline on a subject that everybody wants to click on, then you ought to have two headlines and three headlines and four headlines and six headlines. And so sometimes you will go under the homepage of major news organizations and you will see seven different stories about basically the same subject.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing is that I think we're all being drawn into the argument. It's really hard to stay out of the shouting match that politics has become. The immediacy has a lot of advantages, but it is also again, you become just part of an echo chamber. My real problem, I think, is that I think we've lost a sense of proportion. I think that in this digital era has a tendency to make big things look small and small things look big. Proportionality is really hard to maintain.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. Sometimes you feel like Inspector Gadget out there. It's different kinds of pressures, and you've just got to hope that there come these times when you can kind of make the space for the kinds of stories that at the end of the year you're going to really remember. And that's getting harder and harder to do”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then a year after that, Jeff Bezos bought the paper. And I think between the kind of leadership we have now and the kind of resources that are available.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because Kevin Merritta, who was then the national editor at the Washington Post, came to me and said, I want you to do exactly what you're doing for time, but I want you to do it for us. And, you know, the financial pressure on the news magazines was becoming very clear. I think the Time Bureau, when I got there in 1994, if you count support staff and everybody would have had over 30 people, it was down to under 10. And so it wasn't like the post was looking like that good of a bet at the time either, but I felt like if I was going to cover politics, I might as well do it for an audience that... Was really obsessed with the subject. Shortly after I got there, the post hired Marty Barron, who I'd known from the LA Times. In fact, he'd been best man at my wedding. And then a year after.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he was traveling on a six-seater jet and he wasn't letting any press travel with him. This let you know about the resources. At one point, the Washington Post reporter, then Lloyd Grove and I actually had to charter our own plane to follow him. But it was getting really difficult. And so I somehow let drop that the editors were thinking of putting him on the cover, which is something that had never happened in Newt Gingrich. And the next thing I know, I get one of the six seats on his jet. And I said, I was kind of mystified because I'd been covering for years at the LA Times. And I said, so why did you let me have a seat on your debt? And he was able to tell me from memory how many time magazine covers Richard Nixon had been on. And I said, how do you even know that? And he said, well, they said it at his funeral.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, it was even before that. I was at time for all of three weeks at that point. I got there in October of 1994, and it was looking like something was happening. It's right before.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even the news magazines, when I first got to Time, if you were working on a cover story, that was a really big deal, and doors would open to you.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I It was really, you know, it really took a lot of work. And the current, you know, the schedules and the resources don't permit that as much as”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is so true, and in 2013 I decided what now feels like a very precious story. I decided to go figure out what was going on in West Virginia. And I was really grateful because I would come back to my editors and say, I don't think I quite have this yet a blue state was turning red. And ultimately, the Washington Post sent me to West Virginia six times. And I practically could have registered to vote there by the end of it. But it took that much time to really get past the fact that there were a lot of remote parts of the state where if I introduced myself as a Washington Post reporter, the wall immediately went up and it took a long, and you don't get that long.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was funny, Margaret Warner, who had been at Newsweek at one point, pulled me aside and said, the transition is going to be so huge. She said, when I got to Newsweek, it couldn't have been any more of a culture change if they had told me to write my stories in Chinese. At the beginning, at least, that was it. You had one big deadline a week. You would be there on Friday nights and sometimes till 5 a.m. on Saturday. You had to pace your reportings all week long so that it would be for that one big deadline. By the time I left time, however, in 2010, we were still putting out the weekly magazine, but I had a blog, I was tweeting, I was writing for the web. I do think that the differences among the different types of media are no longer as pronounced as they used to be. We're all expected to do video now. We're all expected to just have”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And traditionally, and there have been exceptions, obviously Hillary Clinton had secret service before Obama for specific circumstances had secret service early, but traditionally the candidates don't get the Secret Service until after New Hampshire. And at that point, everything changes as well. At that point, you also have a distance between them and the voters. They can't move as fast. They can't be as close to the voters as well. So you really, it is so crucial to be there for those first few contests.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've often joked that if you ever really want to get any decent access to a candidate, it has to be before they start winning because once that happens,”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I would argue that your guy Barack Obama also was kind of a pioneer in that. He went, I don't know how many years without giving a sit-down interview to a beat reporter of the Washington Post, but you would find him between two ferns and on the view. And you guys were very creative in getting your message out. I'm not saying it was a smart decision to do. But it's a new kind of challenge for us because we've got to find new inroads into what is the essence of these people and new ways to explain them and to understand the constituencies that are driving them”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it started, I think, with the presidency. You mentioned the boys on the bus, that book. This idea that you had a whole bunch of reporters sitting around in a bar drinking with presidential candidates, that just doesn't happen anymore. Campaigns are, they sort of like put the candidate and shrink wrap. You can't get anywhere near him or her. The opportunities to see a real human being are much fewer than they used to be. And they have many more ways of getting their message out that don't involve a reporter for a large news organization.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And members of Congress, and I don't know, I'm not up there as much as I was, but it used to be, for instance, I remember Tom Daschle when he was a, you know mid nineties, you know, so he's not really high up in the Senate leadership. I decided to go home with him to South Dakota to sort of look at rural health care. He was very heavily involved in the issue. Well, it was two days of me and Tom Daschle in a car with a roadmap between us, and he would just say, well, there's an interesting town over there. Why don't we go see how the local pharmacy is doing? The kind of access that you can often get to members of Congress, or at least that you've used to was just extraordinary. And by getting access to them, you got access to their constituents.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I had been on the business staff in LA for a couple of years and an opening came up in Washington to cover the California delegation, which was, it was great. First of all, Congress was and remains my very favorite beaten Washington beach. Because they can't get away from you, they can't not talk to you. They have to come out of their offices devote. They have to, very often you can go home with them. You can see their parts of the country through their eyes. It's just not an opportunity I ever got, for instance, when I was a White House reporter, where you're kind of at the mercy of whoever decides you're worth calling back that day. You can't just wander the building.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are just supposedly all these real, and I'm, you know, really smart political scientists who come up with these models that almost suggest that people don't matter in politics anymore.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, and you also got the sense, you know, Selena Zito, they took him seriously but not literally, this idea that they didn't care. Kind of seemed to want somebody who would not keel over.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not just because news organizations don't have the resources. I think there has become this sort of fetish in political science that has kind of infected the media, which is this idea that the quality of a candidate doesn't matter that nothing really matters except this kind of set of statistics. What's the state of growth in personal income? What's the average of the polls? This idea that somehow you can get a truer picture of what's really going on in the country and in the electorate by studying numbers rather than talking to people.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There weren't as many women in business, and certainly in business school in my class, it was seventeen percent women. We still had urinals in the ladies' rooms. So it did feel like a lot of women, not a lot of women, but enough women had gone ahead of me and really pushed down some of the really hard barriers. It was interesting, though, too, that sort of being on the bus by the time I got to the bus, I began to realize that the, you know, on the bus was not quite the prestiges. The prestigious political reporters were the ones who sort of wandered in at the big moments and got to write the big stories as opposed to those of us who were sitting there just waiting for a candidate to commit a gaffe or You know, keel over or something”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I really think there were there was a whole generation of women ahead of me, just not that far ahead of me, but there was a point at which, for instance, women couldn't join a lot of the professional organizations in Washington. I believe at the National Press Club, women would have Roman reporters would have to sit in the balconies. I mean, blessedly. That sort of thing wasn't happening. It wasn't so unusual”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Somebody turned off the light. And so it occurred to me, though, that I You know, the one part of newspapers that seemed to be growing were their business sections at the time and that maybe if I could go, I was doing a little bit of business writing, if I could go and kind of really learn the to be fluent in business that I might be able to make the leap to a much bigger paper. So I went back and got an MBA and then moved to the Los Angeles Times, was there covering business for a few years and then moved to Washington.”
2017-10-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 185 - Karen Tumulty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source