YouSaid · the spoken record

Lawrence O'Donnell

lines on the record
79
first
2018-02-19
most recent
2018-02-19
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  1. “And so that's a gift that I know that these people are out there, that these heroes are out there, that this is the country we live in, and that, you know, whenever you're seeing these things happen in our world and in our country, in our politics that you hate, you see something happen in Washington tomorrow that you absolutely despise. I promise you just within walking distance of wherever that happened, there are doctors and nurses doing heroic and noble things that we're not talking about and that if we did, if we could possibly give them the attention they deserve, they would make us feel much better than anything else that happens in our news.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Lives with the weight of all of this on them. I mean, we look for, we always kind of want inspirational stories around us. And what I never realized, I never realized this, because the medical community to me was something I checked in with very rarely, I can't remember the last time I'd been to a doctor before I needed emergency surgery. And I just wasn't. I just wasn't aware of what they do even. And then I realized, you know, every time I ever talked to somebody who came out of a hospital experience, they were all raving about their nurses. And they're all, and I never paid attention to it. I never really connected to it. You know, when I had to say goodbye to my nurses at the end of many, many, many, many weeks of recovery, it was a tearful experience.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You complain about after that. It also introduced me for the first time in my life to these heroes that are all over our world and places like Chicago you'll see them on the train going to work and they're in athletic shoes and they've got backpacks and that might look like somebody who's going to do a delivery job for some company and that's a nurse who today is going to save a life or tonight is going to have to go home with the burden of having watched people die who she tried to save doctors who are every day doing the most important things we could possibly ask of them to do in putting us back together in saving lives and getting and somehow getting through their own”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I was so happy to be alive and happy to be alive is one of our oldest cliches. It's one of those things that we throw around. Happy to be alive. And, you know, to understand what that really means and to feel it is a gift. And I am way too thick to ever have understood the meaning of that and ever been able to walk around with that gift without actually having my life really seriously threatened and me seeing it coming, seeing death coming right at me, seeing that thing happen. And so that lucky to be alive thing, it just changes everything. It changes everything about the way you go through your day. It changes what you complain about. It changes meaning you, there's basically nothing.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “As compared to before that accident? You know, what I get to say, because I have no enduring pain from it, is that it was the best possible thing that could have happened to me. It stopped my life completely. It gave me what felt like a couple of minutes, but was really probably only a couple of seconds or fractions of a second to think about the end of my life because it felt like we were going to die in this crash as I was seeing it happen. And I felt that thing of it's over. And I thought about my daughter. And then when it all ended and all the noise and the bangings of the cars ended and I was not dead.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And who ended up being ultimately the most influential figure in this entire book? I mean, what influence did LBJ have on presidential outcomes after he decided not to run for president? Virtually none was talking about LBJ in 1972. Roger Ailes helps get Nixon elected in 68, helps him getting re-elected in 72, goes on to helping Reagan get elected in 1980, helps him get re-elected, helps George H.W. Bush, and then helps George W. Bush get elected.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That they filmed and then packaged into TV commercials as if they were real town halls, him interacting with people, that really made an incredible difference. Roger Rails met him when he was”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Oh, sure, absolutely. And including, and by the way, it can extend beyond just wives. I'm not talking about just wives. Roger Ayles, you know, comes into Richard Nixon's life for the 1968 campaign. I don't know, I don't believe that Richard Nixon would have been elected president without Roger Rails. When you win a presidential race by less than 1% of the vote and you win it only when the Illinois votes are counted, you know, all we have to do is change one little thing and you're not president. And what Roger Ailes did in what he helped invent about the Nixon television marketing strategy of Nixon, the way they figured out how to take this guy who gets really stiff on TV and make him look accessible and human through these fake town halls.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And I know he would be none of those things, would not have one of those job titles were it not for Liz Moynan? Were it not for his wife. And so I widened the frame of the camera to include what people think of as the so-called supporting cast, but in politics, I think you know David, in politics, they really don't live and operate as individuals. When's the last time we saw a single man or woman advance in elective office to great heights? It's not just for convention that they have spouses. It's not what it's about. It's to do this requires a kind of heat shield and a kind of support system. Without question, yeah, and a kind of family relationship and incredibly intense and truly intimate friendship support systems. Would you say that?”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And there's a moment in this book when Jackie Kennedy, who was supportive of Bobby running for president once he decided to do it, she turned to a friend and said, you know what's going to happen to Bobby? And she said the same thing that happened to Jack. And she was right. And I didn't know that. Those players who are just off stage in this drama are the ones that in many ways interest me the most. Because the people on stage wouldn't be there without them. And it may be my perspective, since I had that perspective on people in the real world of politics, you know, I can't, the world gets to think about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the great man, the great scholar, the great statesman, the ambassador, the United Nations ambassador, the Harvard professor. I can't think of Pat Moynihan without thinking about Lismo.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “In that direction and sort of stutter stepping in that direction. And, you know, Bobby himself is even more fascinating than I thought he would be. And I came to understand him much better, especially when you set him in his time of the 1960s, because people like to talk about what happened to the ruthless non-liberal Bobby Kennedy of the 1950s. How did we get to this liberal Bobby Kennedy of 1968? And in politics, it's always presumed that this is some kind of fake evolution of convenience. And when in fact he was doing what the country was doing, there was no one in the Democratic Party who had the same thoughts in 1968 as they had in 1960. There were segregationists in 1960 who were segregationists. Segregationists any longer in 1968. I mean, giant worlds of his”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Oh, quirky is, he's so deeply complex and so filled with earned and unearned resentments and And a certain sense of superiority, and then a certain kind of jealousy, and then in fact he actually is morally superior to other Democrats and other people in that crucial moment of making the decision of should I run for president and why should I run for president? And he is the one who says I'm going to run for president because we need to put the Vietnam War on the ballot and it would not have been on the ballot if he did not run. His success in New Hampshire really tips Bobby Kennedy into running. And as I didn't know this then, but I didn't realize Bobby Kennedy had been thinking about running much longer than Gene McCarthy had. And he'd gone back and forth. He'd decided to do it. He decided against it. So I thought Bobby Kennedy was just this guy who jumped in suddenly after McCarthy succeeded in a completely exploitative way. It turns out he was head.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, I mean, and that no one said anything to me about it, that's like one of the things that I could be proudest of MSNBC for is that they let me sit there and just yell at these NBC entertainment executives in Burbank who were letting Trump get away with all this stuff about the president's birth certificate and they were in a position to shut him down on that. They could have said to him, stop doing that. And by the way, they've done that to actors many, many times over the years. Tell them to stop talking about that public issue they're talking about.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, but let me just say the way I yelled at NBC and NBC executives on TV, you're still there in 2011. Did they know about that?”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think greatly, and I am not the person to rise in defense of the way modern media works across the board, including cable news. You were talking about”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Constant seriousness of purpose of the work is what I think the show conveyed and what I really wanted to convey. Because when you are in those jobs, there is never a moment where you ever have to doubt, am I doing something important, you know, which is, by the way, true of every nurse, every physician, every emergency room doctor in the country, there are jobs where you get to feel that constantly. Most jobs you don't. Most jobs you get to wonder, is this important? Does it even matter that I'm doing this? And if I didn't do it, someone else would just do it. And that was definitely.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Of that process. And I mean, Oh, and I do too. I mean, there's nothing I'm proud of, more proud of in my work life than working in government and working in the Senate. And so the thing that I think the show absolutely successfully did was give you the feel of this. And as far as I'm concerned, you can just imagine the interpersonal tensions occurring off screen between the episodes or something, but the feel of what it was like to be rushing down that hallway on something important or making sure this message gets to so-and-so. And”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, yeah. And, you know, but when I look at it, I believe that artistically the whole piece works. And I'm not sure that my vision of it would have worked actually. Never mind been better.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “In my episodes that I'm very, very proud of, that West Wing scholars can detect if they look closely enough, is that whenever one of our people Did the right thing. It was always as a last resort. I always made them consider the cheap way out first, you know, consider can we lie about this? Can we get away? And then they would end up doing the right thing. And in the end, that's what the audience feels. And so they still get that idealistic feeling from my episodes that I wrote. But I wanted to see more of the more the interpersonal tension of the job. I wanted to see people elbowing each other to get FaceTime with the president instead of just walking in like it was a clubhouse and they were all buddies. I wanted to see Josh jealous of Toby or Toby jealous of CJ or that stuff that happens within any workplace that we all know happens.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “For Yeah, yes. And it was as idealistic as it felt because that was Aaron Sorkin's vision. And it wasn't mine. And so, you know, when you assemble a writing staff for a TV series like that, there are a lot of different views about how to do things. And within any given episode, sometimes there's two or three menu items and you debate them, you argue over them, and you lose arguments. And so you go, I wish we'd done the other thing. And so a lot of us can have those kinds of thoughts about it. And so I differed from Aaron and from most people there on this idealism that the show was emanating. I wanted to make it more realistic. I always wanted to make it more realistic. But it was Aaron's show, and I was working in service to the author. And he had the authorial view of the way this should be. So one of the little things that I did.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I did not direct. If we had gone another year, I would have directed. I did one acting turn in the West Wing. Yeah, that was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. And it was all luck. You know, people think, especially a lot of people in show business think that these things are earned. Aaron Sorkin wrote this great pilot for NBC, the best pilot I think that's ever been written for NBC. And NBC called the West Wing, and NBC rejected it. They weren't going to make it. I read it right after he turned it into NBC because my agent heard about it and sent it to me and said, wow, if they order episodes on this, they're going to have to hire you. So I read it and I thought it was great. A year later, a year later, NBC made that pilot only because one of the executive producers involved had the muscle to force them to make the pilot, John Wells, who was running ER, their most important show, a Chicago-based drama. He forced them to green light the West Wind.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Is an actress. Right. And so it just became impossible for me. I think luckily my daughter was very conveniently born on a Saturday afternoon in New York City. And on Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. I had to be in the Oval Office and I was.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, and there was that, but there was this much more important reason. And it was a reason that I had never previous believed previously believed until I used it myself. And that was for family reasons. Whenever I saw someone was leaving political office or leaving Washington or leaving in some way for family reasons, I just assumed there's some horrible disaster going on. And my daughter was then a year old. She was born June 11th in 1994, right in the thick of when we were trying to legislate Hillary Clinton's health care bill. And so she was about 18 months old when I finally left. And it was really for that. It was really because I could.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It's the entire message. NO, that's the whole message. A lot of them said more words, but that was all it was. And so that's what I call, that is not a complex legislative environment. All you are is no. That's all you are. So trying to stop something is not a complex exercise. It's the word no. And we've seen Republicans do that when they're in the minority. We see Democrats do it when they're in the minority. When you're in the minority and what you're saying is I want to I don't want to do what you want to do. I want to do this instead. And you actually get that across the finish line. There's virtually no models for that.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yes, and therefore, oh, the messaging was terrible. The messaging was terrible, but Democrats will always fail by the media's scorecard at what they call messaging in a complex legislative environment. This is an extremely complex legislative environment. I'll give you a situation where democratic messaging worked and was very clear and very simple. And that was the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. What was the democratic message in the repeal of the Affordable Care Act? No.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Is next to impossible. And so they actually did make something happen. They got chipped. Now they're going to try to get the other thing. They're going to try to get DACA. And that's going to be even harder to do.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Other way. So I take chip and I run with it. In fact, what Schumer did was better than that because he said no, we're going to go all the way if we have to into shutdown. And what they got from shutdown was not just Chip, but they got one week cut off of this funding process that the Republicans were asking for. They moved it from February 16th to February 8th. And so they kept the game going and they closed the calendar into a tighter spot. People now seem to believe that the minority in the Senate can actually legislate because of the so-called 60-vote threshold rules. They can't. The only thing they're actually empowered to do is to block things. They can say no when it comes to a 60-vote threshold. But to try to... Actually, make something happen as opposed to just say no is”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I thought was pretty smart all the way through the process. In fact, I might have, I mean, you never know, as you know, David, you never know unless you're in that room and you've been in that room. You've been in the majority leader's office where you're sitting there trying to strategize the next move. And you know the reason you're in that room is there is no good choice. They wouldn't need you in that room if there was a good choice. So here are two bad choices. One is, you know, allow a shutdown to occur. The other is, what if we just drop our 60-vote threshold and see if they can pass this on their own? And I got to say, I might have leaned toward that on Friday night of shutdown nights in order to avoid a shutdown because if they pass it, I get chip. And I'm not going to get chip.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Right. Now, I have never worked on a presidential campaign. I have never run a presidential campaign. And this may surprise people, but if you were to go to look at my record of public comment about presidential campaigning, I have never once second-guessed a major presidential campaign run by serious professionals like, say, David Axelrod because I don't have the experience to know that there's a smarter way of doing what I'm watching them do and what they're doing makes sense to me. So also with, I mean, if you want to Senate strategy is possibly even more an inside game than a presidential campaigning and has incredible weights on it that are not comprehended in the outside world. And so what I watched Chuck Schumer do”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Well, you know, and I'm sure this amuses you too, but there is a certain level of expertise involved in various pursuits that people recognize it. For example, you don't hear an awful lot of second guessing of neurologists or neurosurgeons. You don't hear people tweeting saying, I think they're all wrong about this particular brain disease or something because people know that they don't know anything about neurology.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Chairman, whoever it is is getting all sorts of income from the right and the left and everything. It's not like it was smooth. It was difficult.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Certainly And I can't tell what it was like for me to watch Orange as the chairman of that committee who used to be a very reasonable Republican member of that committee when I was working on that committee to watch him completely surrender his job as finance chairman to basically to Mitch McConnell who now functions as the chairman of all the Senate committees. It's a horrible process to watch, but it means I can't miss my job because they basically abolished my job not that long after I left it just became dysfunctional and a lot of this I mean I think the last time we saw committee function in a way that we used to recognize it was probably the Affordable Care Act and the way Max Bacchus for example took it through the Senate Finance Committee and you know by the way when that's happening”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yes, and the entire Hillary Clinton healthcare crusade had to come through that committee. Welfare reform was moving through that committee because it has jurisdiction over virtually everything. And so it was real. I mean, there was nothing Hillary Clinton was going to be able to do with her bill without coming through this committee. And now it's not the way anything is done in Washington. They don't even go to the committees. The committees, the chairmen are puppets, especially on the Republican side, they don't even pretend to function in that committee.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Oh, yeah. And you know, that's the sad thing about the way it works now, David, is I cannot miss my old job because my old job doesn't exist. They don't govern. The committees don't govern the way they did. Everything had to go through committees in those days. So, you know, I mean, in that first year of the chairman Moynihan running the finance committee, me running the staff of the finance committee, we had to do NAFTA. We had to do the World Trade Agreement. We had to do the big budget deal, which was a tax increase, and I'm proud to say, the biggest tax increase in history at the time. And because if you're going to do one, you know, and so along with...”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And I end up going down to Washington all the time and different things. Erupt out of nowhere, you know, like the confirmation process for Clarence Thomas, and I just rush down to Washington and spend a few weeks working our way through all of that. And then he gets me in there full time in the Washington cult. And I end up so deep in it. It's crazy. I end up being the staff director of two committees, Environment and Public Works and then the Finance Committee, which, as you know, raises 99% of the revenue and has control of about almost 65% of the spending. And that's real governing. This is not some”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Right. Or Jin. He means this in a very old fashioned Tammany Hall way. What do you want? You know, and it's like, well, I didn't go to law school, so I can't have a federal judgeship. And I don't want anything, right? And he says, well, why don't you come into our staff and you can be housed in the Chrysler building in our New York City office? You don't have to come to Washington. We'll call you the senior advisor and makes up a title on the spot. And you can come to Washington as needed if needed. And I know what he's thinking. He's thinking something like he's trying to give me a sort of associate professor job, you know, at a university that's a couple of days a week so I can continue my writing, but I can pay my rent. And he's just thinking that way, right? And so, and I think that's kind of in the spirit of the way it begins, but we end up talking to each other constantly.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Well, to my shock Senate committees, including Senate Finance. Well, yeah. So to my surprise the day after Election Day, 1988, Senator Moynihan takes me to lunch and says, what do you want? And I think, you know, well, I don't know, maybe I'll have the salad. And he means this in a very whole.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “So the campaign was the cheapest campaign in America if you did it as dollars spent per vote, right? It spent about $3 million to get elected in New York State. And he wins 68% of the vote. Mrs. Moyhan's the campaign manager, and I am the other guy. And there's no one else there. There's someone who's doing fundraising. And that's it. So you were in all-purpose kind of at a certain point, but I don't know, three months in I was reading the paper and I saw this title in an article about the Dukakis campaign, director of communications. And I went.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Than you did Harvard. Yeah, that was the longest thing I'd done at that point, and he's also a guy who understands Tammany Hall. He grew up shining shoes in Times Square. His mother was a bartender. Hill Kitchen. He was from Hill's Kitchen. Yeah, so his range of human experience was really quite vast.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Or reading his books. Once I started hanging around with them every day, he was so much more impressive backstage. That's the surprising thing. He has, there's so much, he has, when you read the 800 word op-ed piece, that's the tip of the iceberg of what he knows about this subject, you know, and so it was always like a very, you know, a graduate level Harvard seminar every day of hanging around with him.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Oh my god. A gigantic character. And Charles Lawton, and as impressive as he always was to me from a distance of reading his op-ed pieces or”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “About Right, and it's an Edwin O'Connor novel. And what's wonderful about it is it's told from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about politics. It's the mayor's estranged nephew who is just kind of wandering around. And so he has that eye that the new observer has for these scenes backstage. And I'm thinking maybe I can get a last hurrah out of this. Maybe as a writer, maybe there's something interesting to observe.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “It was a Harvard connection. He was a professor there when I was a student. And so they invited me into the reelection campaign. And I absolutely did not want to do this. And in fact, Liz Boynehan says that I still haven't accepted the campaign job because I never actually said yes, but what I did think was the last hurrah. I did think, what if I go and hang around there? I wonder if I can.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “The paycheck was everything for about six months. It was my darkest secret that I was working on the Moynihan reelection campaign because, you know, it takes so long to establish yourself as a freelance worker, especially if it's in the arts, you know. So for people to believe you are an actor instead of a waiter who thinks he's an actor, that takes years and years and years, right? For people to believe you're a writer and it's a real job and you're not available to help them move their sofa 24 hours a day, that takes years and years and years, right? So I'd gotten a few articles out there and I'd gotten a book out there and we turned the book into a TV movie and done all this stuff. And then the writers guild, the Hollywood Writers Guild, by that time I was working in script work in show business, they go on strike for six months. And I knew the Moynihans for years and Mr. and Mrs. Moynihan.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “By the way, that book, Deadly Force, is going to be reissued in March of this year. I've been trying to get that reissued since its first run in the 1980s, but it's coming back with an updated...”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “How much punishment the police officer gets? I think there's a wide range of punishment that is relevant, including possibly just losing your job. They do make mistakes and they live. And when they make these mistakes, they don't have any process by which they can actually admit they've made mistakes. Because for them, the way it looks is if I admit I've made a mistake, I am going to be sued for millions of dollars. I am going to go to jail. And, you know, we need to find a system that says not all of these things are the same.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Exactly right, yeah. And he was onto this subject. And he said to me, and I quoted him in the book at the time, a police officer can do something in a second that sours a community for a generation. And so the fact that the overall numbers might look better now, especially in certain cities than they used to look, the problem is that each individual case of this carries gigantic societal ramifications for and sometimes four decades, as we've seen. And so for me, the issue The real thing that we need is that we really have to care about is how are these cases treated after the fact they're going to happen. There's going to be pilot error. There are going to be plane crashes. And if you look at the plane crash model, you could not have a better system for aftermath investigation of plane crashes. We really have said we need to know everything. We don't really have that same protein. We don't do that. We don't do that here. And look, to me, it's not about...”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “That sentence holds word for word to this day. At the same time, we've made a lot of important progress. Some of the jurisdictions that had the highest shooting rates now have the lowest shooting rates. They've improved tremendously. And so we have certain departments, New York City has improved just incredibly on this in those decades. Boston has improved very much. And there's a whole world of progressive police administrator out there in places like Boston and to varying degrees in places like New York and other jurisdictions. And so the overall story has improved. However, it has always been an anecdotal phenomenon, meaning there's a wonderful police officer from Chicago. Captain Howard Saffold, I believe is his name.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “It was the first thing I ever wrote publicly, and it was the first article The New York Times ever published about police use of deadly.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “No one hates Boston cops more than revere cops. And no one knows how bad cops can be better than their wives. She was with him all the way. And so that's the kind of thing. That's the kind of lawyer you needed in this kind of case.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source