YouSaid · the spoken record

Kasie Hunt

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93

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2024-09-26

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2024-09-26

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1. “So much about the country. And then I covered labor, which is fundamentally like if you understand the politics of labor in this country, you understand labor and business so much about the politics of everything. And at the time it was card check, which is a bill that, you know, people probably forgotten about, EFCA. Employee Free Choice Act, but it's something that if it were to ever become law, it would have this massive impact on this dynamic that has been foundational to our politics for so long. So anyway, I got to learn so much doing that that I rely on quite literally every day.”

   2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Bananas And I learned how every single member of the House of Representatives was interpreting the politics in their district to decide how Peloponnese was going to twist their arms to get them to vote.”

   2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “I ever could have had because A, they were they were passing the Affordable Care Act, right? Yeah, the politics around that.”

   2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I think it probably did. But yeah, so that's where I started on the hill. And then after I came back from Cambridge. I didn't end up back at the AP until 2012, the presidential cycle in 2011, 2012. But I went to National Journal and to Politico before that, after I came back. So I covered a little bit the tail end of the winning Obama campaign, but I didn't cover the Obama White House. I went back up to the hill, and I did cover the passage of Obamacare. And I was also the labor, so I covered healthcare and labor policy, which when I came back from Cambridge, I was like, man, I got very lucky. I got right in under the wire with the recession, right? Like I had a job before the market collapsed. And then no one could get a job in journalism. So I was very like remarkable, remarkably lucky timing. But I'm sure you know this very well. I also was very lucky to have this beat where I was like, ah, this seems like, you know, I really want to do politics or international relations or any of the things I studied in school, like healthcare and labor policy, how dry it was the best education in covering politics.”

   2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “And it was sort of my first taste of getting to cover the capital. And, you know, and I was writing for the wire. So, and I was getting bylines. And, you know, when you write for the wire, it matters, especially at that time And so I remember I wrote a story about Nancy Pelosi. There was something about the budget. And I mean, I have never, it's funny because I ended up having a long relationship with the aide who called me and screamed at me because, of course, he was there for many years. I won't name him, but I'm sure if he were to listen to this podcast, he would know exactly who he is. Right. So that was my first taste of kind of the impact and the power that you had. I'm thinking like, I'm 21 years old. Like I can barely drink. And like the speaker of the house is pissed because I wrote something in the newspaper. That could.”

   2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “So I learned how to do that at the AP, and then the second six months I was there, they put me up on the hill. And it was a heady time because it was the beginning of the campaign. It was the spring of 2007. And so Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, Senator McCain.”

   2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “What is news? Right. What is new? What is different? You know, initially you start to think, well, I got to get down every single word that this person says. No. A lot of what they say is not important. Your job is to distinguish between what is and what isn't. And get that down”

   2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “It was very helpful, but it also, what happened was that I learned how to pick the quote to start to hear, what was it that Terry was going to ask me for, right? And it turned out that that is the job, right? The job is listening.”

   2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “I dive really fast I learned kids these days are apparently not taking typing classes, and it's a similar thing. They're like hunting and pecking. I could never do it. No, I can.”

   2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “And basically, my job was to be a typist, right? So the bureau chief at the time was famed for being just insane about how fast you had to type if you had the job that I had. And that was like basically all that mattered. And I was like, this seems ridiculous. Aren't there other things that I know? It was very important that I, and I learned how to do this as a reporter, got the quote down accurately and that I knew based on how fast my fingers could go and whether I could keep up where the accuracy started and ended, right? Because eventually you run out of, you know, you're not catching up with someone talking so that I could take that and when the writer sitting in front of me said, you know, give me the quote on X, there it was. I had it. I didn't have to go back to listen to tape. I knew it was said.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “But I learned what I learned was news judgment because I was watching some of the best in the business. And this, again, obviously the internet has shown up by this point in my life, right? In all of our lives, this is 2006. But social media was not yet what it was. The way that information was moving was still much more controlled by large organizations and the decisions that they made had, I would argue, a larger impact. And so the person that was writing the AP lead every day had an incredible amount of power to shape how things were thought about. And so I got to sit behind Terry Hunt, you probably knew, legendary White House reporter for the AP.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “That's what I grew up in. Yeah Yes, a lot of it. And in fact, that first stint at the Associated Press was after I graduated from college, but before I went to graduate school at Cambridge, I spent a year as what they called an editorial assistant. It's a junior reporting job. And for about half that year, I was on the news desk. It was an incredible way to learn. I did not realize at the time how much I was learning as I was sitting there.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Who I had gotten to cover very briefly in the Senate. I think that the main difference, or at least it feels to me like the main difference is just that there seems to be some, you have to kind of get over this hurdle of having people care first about that, right? And I think right now the first thing that people think about when they think about Kamala Harris is not necessarily that she's a woman. Like there's other things that matter more That's progress.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “And the way that Know she did it. I was there in 2016 as I covered, I was started on her plane after Bernie Sanders was clear Bernie Sanders wasn't going to win the Democratic nomination. And so I switched over from him to start covering Hillary's campaign. And she was still doing this in 2016. And I know you were there in 2008 with president, you know, then Senator Obama.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Impacted her campaign. And I did a semiotic analysis of the Sunday shows. Now that I understand how the Sunday shows are pulled together, I'm sure I would write it completely differently. But it was an interesting exercise. And it also, it's part of what helped me. I had studied abroad in London when I was in college and I just fell in love with. I went to a debate at the Oxford Union and I thought to myself, I have got to come back here. This is just something I have to do for myself. I mean, it's just such an incredible place. And it was such an incredible life experience to go and do it. And so I had the opportunity to do it. And one of the things I learned was that I didn't want to get out of the game of being a journalist and covering US politics.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “The woman that the advisor that bought my thesis actually ended up going on maternity leave, and I ended up with a different advisor and I ended up writing about, and to your point about it being a divergence, I of course became obsessed with the presidential campaign that was going on in the United States. So I ended up writing about media coverage of Hillary Clinton and how gender in particular impacted”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “This path Well, so it's a little complicated. Basically, the way that the universities over their work, I found there was an advisor in the sociology department who was going to supervise. I was going to study the way that social media in particular was putting fuel to the fire of extremist groups, particularly terrorist groups. So that was, so the way that just happened to go into the sociology department, right? Like if you're going to study at any university.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Again, I think it's the thing about journalism that I love is chasing the story, like finding out what is going on and figuring it out before anyone else is a bonus. But sort of there is an adrenaline rush to it when it works. I mean, you know, you're a reporter. Yeah.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “And I was working on first read, which was an early morning product. I was getting up at, it was practice for what I do now. I was getting up at 4.30, 5 o'clock to like get the metro to get to Nebraska Avenue in Washington by 7 in the morning.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Yes. Institute of Politics. That's wonderful. Yeah. So Mark hired me at NBC, and I worked with him. It was a very sad election season. It was 2005. So right after presidential election, we had an election in Virginia, an election in New Jersey, and that was about it. But he taught me a ton. He had me reading the Des Moines Register every morning.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Yeah. So I worked briefly for Voice of America. My aunt had worked for Voice of America, which is obviously very international focused, which I enjoyed. And then I... My resume got picked out of a pile, which I'm still kind of remarkably amazed about to this day at NBC News. And that was my first kind of like full-time internship in politics. And I worked with a couple people, or Stilt Mark Murray is still over there, who's dear friend. And he was a great fan.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “The generation of people that fought those wars are very much people that are my contemporaries and who kind of wore the damage of that. So I wasn't sure what I wanted to do exactly. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go to work for the State Department or what, but I knew that I wanted to study what was going on in the world beyond us. So that's what I came to college to do. And I did with maybe, well, maybe I want to go be a war correspondent or something like that along those lines, but I ended up being just a little bit too young for that, right? And then I ended up covering getting assigned to cover presidential campaign.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “But you know what? It worked out well for me. And the reason that I ended up at GW was because I knew I wanted to be part of whatever it was our national life was going to be, right? The things that were happening in the world, the current events that I wanted to read about, like I wanted to be part of it. I wasn't exactly sure how or what it was going to look like. I just knew that I couldn't look away and I didn't want to be outside of what was going on. So I came here, I studied international relations, the war in Iraq was launched the year that I graduated from high school in 2003. So that was a very animating debate, again, for all of those reasons because it would be the young men that would fight our wars. And ultimately, I would go on when I was in graduate school to be very well acquainted with a number of people who served in our armed forces and end up having friends who had lost, you know, we lost friends, lost limbs, all of those things, right? I mean, it's very much that.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Yeah, it was absolutely part of it. I mean, and that's why, you know, I actually ended up choosing between GW and the University of Michigan. There are definitely times when I think, oh, I really missed out not going to the University of Michigan and seen all those games at the Big House. Yes, exactly.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “People were writing about the end of history. The currency divides in Europe were falling. Europe was unifying. There was this sense that you could kind of go anywhere and do anything and that everything was always going to be good, right? And that it's just remarkable to see the degree to which that has changed. And that's a little bit about what the speech was about because 9 11 really was a puncture moment For that sense of security that we had all grown up with, that we never thought would be punctured”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Years where people stepped back and kind of enjoyed what was going on. It was a little bit like the post war period. Well, it was.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Is she? Yes. She graduated from Dearborn High School. My grandfather had worked for General Motors. And so that was clearly something that was a big part of kind of that era. The country had been very divided, right? In the 60s. Yes. And then we were now facing, I mean, and if you think about like, and I think about this a lot today, actually, the years in which I was a child and growing up were very sort of prosperous.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “And she was mostly at home but did also, you know, women played kind of remarkable roles on the home front during the war. So that was kind of her challenge. That was what I talked about there. And then my mom was a little bit later. There was obviously the Vietnam era. She graduated from high school in 1972, I believe. It may have been 73.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “So that speech, and so that graduation speech, it would have been in 2003. So it was a couple years after 9-11. I don't remember how much I touched on 9-11 in the speech directly, but I do know that I did in that it was a speech about history. The sort of device I used in that speech is that my mother, my grandfather, my grandmother and I were all born exactly 30 years apart. So my grandmother was 30 years old when my mother was born and I was and my mother was 30 years old when I was born. And they each sort of had their own kind of era of historical challenges. And my grandmother obviously was part of the World War II generation, the greatest generation. My grandfather, who she married after the war, was 19 and 44. I got drafted, went over one ridge in the Pacific, got shot, and came back out. So he earned a purple heart.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “I'm not. I'm not. It was, you know, it was just one of those moments, I mean, and now that I do know that I do work at CNN, I have an even deeper understanding of this. But when something like this happens to all of us, when there is a thing that happens to us, that's one of the first things you often do is turn on CNN. Yeah.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “I watched it, yeah. I mean, we went home early from school that day and I watched, I believe, I'm sure I was watching CNN that day just endlessly, you know, from beginning to end. You're not just saying that because you're.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Well, luckily, he had not either not gone to the office that day or like it was discovered fairly quickly that her grandfather, who was actually a very remarkable man, he was involved in the development of the nuclear technology in the 1940s. He was a scientist, but he was not there at the time, which we were able to find out pretty quickly. And we didn't really have anyone in our immediate community who...”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Over the loudspeaker, and they say that one of the towers has fallen, and class continued after that, but then once one of my friends had a grandfather who worked at the towers every day. She was my best friend, and if my memory serves, she was in the class with me. I think we were in that same class. If we weren't, either way, somehow we found our way together and we had gone down to the main guidance office because she wanted to call her family to try to see. And then we were standing there and watching TV when the second tower hit. Right, so at that age, and”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “But there are now, I remember it was some years ago now that there was a tour group of the Capitol and most of these kids come when they were in eighth grade. I worked on Capitol Hill for a long time as a reporter. And the kids were looking at one of the statue displays and saying to the docent, the tour guide, that they don't remember. They didn't remember 9-11. For them, it was history. And that for me was one of the first moments where I realized like, wow, I have grown and aged into a place that is different from the people who had come before because for me, for such a long time, 9-11 was something that unified literally everyone that was alive as this sort of incredibly difficult moment in our history that kind of changed everything. And I think for me, because it was my junior in high school, it's a really formative time in anybody's life. And so for that to happen right as I was coming of age, you know, I remember I was in Spanish class, my junior year, and they come.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “So it pains you to say that, David. I mean, I have to say, this is one of the things that is first, you know, I'm not yet 40. I'm 39. And so I'm still young. I mean, I think I'm young. Yeah, you are. Let me certify that.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “You know, I think that's part of why it still is something that sticks out to me. It's a relatively early memory that I have of news because it was something that was so difficult. And I think when I was younger, I had an easier time, or at least I thought I had an easier time processing some stories like that. And then you grow up and you suddenly start to realize what those things actually mean. And it becomes harder to deal with.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “It was, yeah, it really was. I remember waiting for time in particular to show up every week and then just kind of devouring it from cover to cover.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “We could get the Philadelphia Inquirer delivered, which we did, I think, on the weekends. But I remember waiting every week for time actually. It was a great paper then.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “You know, I'm not sure. I think it's this thing where I always wanted to know more than everybody else. I wanted to be, there was a little bit of a competitiveness to it. I'm a pretty competitive person. I always have been. But I remember that in fourth grade, they finally started letting us do what they called current events, right? There would be current events conversations. And I remember that year actually was the Oklahoma City bombing. And I remember taking the photograph of the firefighter with the child in his arms, you know, into the class, into the classroom and having it be a subject of some consternation that I had done that. But my parents, when I was young, bought for me because I wanted one to subscription to Time magazine, which the Newsweeklies were huge at the time because obviously this was before the internet became a household thing.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “I didn't realize we were going to be doing this. I love this. So we didn't not talk about politics for sure. It was something that I have always been interested in, especially the news, like as long as I can remember. Why?”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Born and where our family still is, in large part. But that's where I grew up, and it was a really nice place to grow up. I did spend probably too much time at the King of Prussia Mall. Because that was the 90s were the era of the mall hangout teenagers.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “about Wayne. Sure. Well, I used to joke sometimes. It's a very well to do area, as you know. But, you know, my family is not from there originally, which is where, you know, a lot of the sort of right side of the tracks thinking would come from. I sometimes joke you'll find maybe a Ferrari dealership on the actual mainline. We've got the Lexus dealerships on the upper main line, but everybody's there to use the really good public schools instead of going to the very, very well-to-do and very, very good private schools on the lower main line. But it was a really lovely place to grow up. I mean, suburban Philadelphia is just, it's idyllic. I mean, the roads were horse carp paths and the forests are beautiful. And I grew up right down the street from Valley Forge Park. And, you know, I had a great family growing up. My one sister, my mom and dad, my dad worked for, we moved there was, he was working for Unis. My mom's family's from Michigan originally, which was where I was.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “It means the world, actually. Truly, you are one of the greats, and I can't imagine you would have ever said that about me. So thank you.”

    2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source