YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Dowd

lines on the record: 53
first: 2015-10-05
most recent: 2015-10-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“and so mean spirited, and we watched it unfold in the GOP race really fundamentally. Here's a pope that comes and has things to say, but he does it in such a kind, compassionate, gentle way, with strength, and I think many people think you can't be kind and compassionate and gentle, and be viewed as strong, as some Republican candidates have tried to show the opposite of. I think both of those things, dealing with income inequality problem and the fact that we have way more poor and way more people in the lower middle class than we ever had, and their inability feel that can climb the ladder combined with a politics that has become so mean because people think that's the only way to show your strength.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think these two, the Pope's visit is fascinating thing. The Pope's visit and what's happening in politics have come to a great focal point simultaneously, not only because this great income inequality exists that we have to figure out a way to deal with it, primarily because it drives people to no longer want to participate in the system. If they don't think, if Americans who for years and years and years thought if they worked hard, they could get ahead and they had a shot, if they no longer think that, which in now a large number of Americans no longer think that, that's a real problem for our system if we no longer believe that capitalism works in a fundamental way for their benefit, for the majority's benefit. That's a problem. I think the Pope has spoken to that. I think a number of politicians have spoken to that, but the Pope has spoken to that as a spiritual leader that actually is embraced by many people. I think the other thing the Pope's arrival in the midst of this is done is that our politics has become so coarse and so vitriol.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a great question, David. And this is my theory. I think that he is leading by his disruption nature of that. He's actually not going to cause, he's causing the end of the church as we know it, the hierarchical church that has lasted for 1400 years, 1,300 years. He is actually bringing to an end by what he's doing. He's pushing power out to bishops. He's pushing power out to priests. He's actually saying that our job is not to do, I'll make all these other decisions. It's to sort of serve the poor. And if you're not serving the poor, then you should get out of the church. You shouldn't even have tax status. Basically, he said that in the course of the last two weeks, the tax status that is provided to certain Catholic charities. So I actually think he is not going to cause, in my view, more people to go to the pews or more money to be given to the church as it exists now. He's going to be the, his cause is going to be a reformed church that operates very differently.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“John Paul and this Pope that has actually been a pope that has lived the gospels. And he's most interested in the poor. He's most interested in the lost. He's most interested in the downtrodden. And I think watching that happen and just watching what he's done and who he's met with and how he's done that I think is an incredible thing, an incredible lesson. The interesting thing to me about the Pope, and I've read four or five in the course of the biographies of him, he is a fascinating study in somebody that you would find incredibly holy, but he's very politically strategic. These things he does aren't just, he doesn't dream them up.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was at it, it's been great, another great blessing and opportunity and gift to be able to do what I do and then intersect in that moment, that week where he was in New York and Washington and Philadelphia as a Catholic and a Catholic who still attends mass regularly, who also disagrees with a lot of what the Catholic Church has said and done over the years. I'm a huge fan of the Pope because I think the Pope don't fully understand. They say the progressive people say Wow, why hasn't he done these things on being allowed married priests or female priests or on contraception? It's moving a glacier and this is an institution that has been fundamentally very hard to change. But even in the course of the two years that he's been pope, he's really changed the nature of how people view it. He's actually the first pope in my lifetime, and there's been Paul VI and John XXIII, Paul VI.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think at some point we need to really address this whole issue that we've been talking about, which is we have to change the means of governing, the means of governing is broken, how we govern. The only way you can get anything done now is this either side has to have such fundamental majorities and the presidency in order to get something done. And so to me, our means of governing is broken. And I think like the Pope, actually, a series of symbolic actions, we have to arrive at leaders that are willing to take off the red shoes, right? Take off which represent a certain symbolism and actually say that we're doing it fundamentally differently. I don't think we've had leaders that have done that fully yet.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And accept the problem with it being passed, as you know, by fully by almost one party, is because we're divided now in a country that 45% hates whatever the other 45% is for, our country does well when we have 70% issues and 70% solutions, it does well. It doesn't do well when we have 47% solutions. And I think that's my only thing, and obviously I think the healthcare reform has done a lot of good along the country. My only problem is that it's dropped in and it didn't have the ability of being...”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With having been incredibly frustrated and not able to do much about it. To me the only way that fundamentally changes is if the party structure changes and whether it's an emergence of an independent party, which I think is not going to happen at the presidential level it will happen at the local level or one of the parties fundamentally changes probably has to be the Republican Party at this point.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And everybody's unwilling to go outside of the media that only reinforces what they already believe, and each side can do that. And then there's no opportunity for conversation. If each side has their own set of facts, that's unfortunately where we've been. I think that we're on the cusp of a real revolution or a real disruption in our politics where there is going to be a new party emerge somewhere, whether it's another party or a party that actually falls and like has happened in the history of the United States, where there's one party just completely changes and even though they have the same name, they're a different party. We're on the cusp of that because I don't think the American public is going to tolerate for much longer the inability President Obama and President Bush or two presidents that have served that will have served the last 16 years, both basically with a fundamental, the same fundamental goal, which was how do we get past all this divisiveness and this bickering and this stuff in politics and both are coming away.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Congress. But I think that part of it has become an infrastructure party problem that we have and there's a media driven where everybody gets siloed in their media.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think this unfolds most negatively at the presidential level, interestingly enough, because I think the appeals that have to be made, I agree with you completely. I believe about it.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I agree with you completely. I mean, I'm a huge advocate of infrastructure spending and the spending by the federal government in ways that actually move and change things as opposed to way too many promises on too many things. I think the federal government, the government ought to be involved in many different things. And I think the power of a president is the power of convening and persuasion. That's a huge power that they have to bring people together and to try to solve this. Not necessarily by an administrative action, but a convening power and an oratory power that a president has. But I think we've made, we've used the federal government in the presidency as way too much of a band-aid on every single ill of the country. We can slap some pixie dust of the president on it and it'll fix it. And I don't think that's been, I don't think that's benefited the country.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think you and I have played a part in that, obviously. I mean, we have played a part in that because it's not just the media and it's not we've why the voters believe that they didn't like start believing that. They believe that because they were told that by candidates like I can solve your problem. I can fix this for you. I can do this for you. Don't worry about it. And I think that's actually not served us well. I think it would serve us much better if we were more realistic about it. And we told them instead of promising that we're going to fix all their problems and everybody's going to have a job and all this is going to go well and all this don't worry about it. It always doesn't turn out that way. I think that's we've not served, I think, that well by not being more realistic and more real in what we can really get done as a president.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or a state official actually has more power to move change than in many ways a president does. Though it's the top of our profession to get there, I've come away with the idea that the power that really we have here in America is really resides as locally as it possibly can. That's fundamentally the power. So I've gone all the way up the ladder and I've learned that basically when you go back to start to the beginning of this, the real manifestation of real politics and political power happens locally.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, bigger broadly, I understand the citizens. I'm at cynicism that people have and all of that. I've actually, you know, I've seen things that I wouldn't like to see, I've seen behaviors of certain candidates that I think were bad, but I'm actually a huge believer in the process of politics. I think most everybody involved are well-intentioned on both sides of the aisle. They believe in the idea that they can improve America, improve their community. I did come away with a bigger, bigger change, which is you get up to this height of a president in a presidential campaign, and it's heady, and you think you're going to fundamentally change things. And what you realize is the changes that you're going to be able to make are really small and it's really hard. And I have come to the belief that the most power that exists in politics exists as local level as you possibly can go, that somebody that's a city councilman or a mayor.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So my perspective on that, as you know, the Swift Boat Veterans stuff was disconnected from the campaign. It was being done by whatever the third party or whatever that we had no say over. I was actually opposed to it. I thought it was distracting us from the real issues. I thought that it was raising a, it didn't, in my view, when I looked at all the polling, interestingly enough, didn't have hardly any effect on the race at all. I thought it distracted us. It was a tough time, and it was a tough time, I think, for many of us in the course of this, me personally in this. But I think it was very tough. And obviously we learned in the aftermath it was a national security election. I had to go through that process and come out the other side, and I came out the other side much more opposed to war than I went into it.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It didn't change his heart, which was a blessing because he's a really good kid. It changed his perspective on, he used to be a big believer that the military was somehow efficient, more efficient than the rest of government. He came back with the idea that the military is just as inefficient as the rest of government. He came back with the idea that he said that we're going to cut all these other programs in government, but not cut the military because he says that he thinks that somehow it's effective. He said it's just as inefficient as any other program people want to cut. So it affected him that he's actually like a libertarian. He's pretty much a libertarian these days, actually.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think we should have some level of service that everybody has to do, whether it's military service or some level of national service, so that I think every single person, whether you're the daughter, son or daughter of a billionaire or the son or daughter of somebody that's unwelfare, every single person ought to have some stake in the country. I believe that. And I think it would change the way decisions are made by both presidents and Congress in the midst of it. It affected me. He said he did two tours in Iraq. Thank God he came back, all fine.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We too easily make, I think Washington makes these decisions to go to war way too easily because we have a volunteer army, as you know.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“20 year old or 20 year old kid at the time and then drove back to the campaign thinking that I had just dropped my son off and I was about to reelect the person that was going to send him to war. That is a tough thing. It's a tough thing for any parent to be. And I think that moment and those moments got me to really think about the whole war perspective. I have a big belief that people need to have a stake. We need to have politicians have more and need to have more of a stake in the ground when they make these decisions.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The oldest Daniel was the oldest, and he had done it, he finished a year of school in Texas. He was finished with his freshman year, called me up in the summer while I was in Washington working on the reelect in 2004. And said, I've decided to enlist, and I'm going to join as in the Army as an intelligence specialist, and they're going to send me to learn Arabic in California at the Defense Language Institute. And so I have a few months. So he came up actually and worked for me on the reelect in 2004. And I remember like it was yesterday when I had to drop him off in Arlington to take the bus to go to boot camp. This was a week before Election Day in 2004.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the idea of war, but I sort of said that Saddam is a dangerous person with open source and mass destructions we should do something about it. My son On his own decided to enlist while I was in the midst of the province.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like most Americans, you believe and you want to trust the national security team and all of the evidence that was being presented and all of the things that were being said about Saddam Hussein, obviously me like most other Americans believe that we needed to go into Afghanistan and deal with the most immediate threat there. And then, of course, Iraq felt disconnected from it, but then all of this evidence and all of this stuff is presented by our leaders that we trust saying that there was a huge problem with weapons of mass destruction, which of course turns out to be totally not true in the aftermath of it. I would have believed that. I had questions about it. I've always had questions about war from a Catholic perspective, about whether or not war really achieves any good. I mean, there's a whole theory, obviously, of a just war.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the aftermath of the Rec. That didn't happen. I gave it some time and I thought, well, we got through the Rec. I thought we were going to do all these things that we said we were going to do. We didn't do them. And at that point, I felt the need to say something.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great, great question. And I always strike to talk about in Kinzo. It's any relationship you have, as you know, with a candidate at that level is very deep and is like a relationship, right? And you're willing in the course of a relationship to sort of say, no, they kicked the dog. They didn't really mean to. They had a bad day at work. Or no, they came home, you know, drunk. They had a rough, you know, some rough problem in their family. And you do that a number of times and do that a number of times and do that a number of times. And then you finally, because you say, no, it'll change six months. It'll be better. It'll be better. That's not really a person. Then at some point you say, maybe this person isn't the person I thought they were. Or maybe what they said they were going to do wasn't going to do. And that's what happened to me. I thought I had these questions in my mind before actually the re-elect, but I thought we get through the reelect as many times, and then we can really do the things that we say we're going to do.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said I could make money off of it, and how Bush broke my heart and all that kind of stuff because I thought I'm going to speak my piece and then I'm done. And that's what I did.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I told him. I told various people in that. And I communicated a lot of my Dissatisfaction in the course of this along the way, in the year and a half or so leading up to this, which others in the administration would testify to. But I had to answer, you have to answer the question of, are you loyal to a person or are you loyal to what you believe is the truth? And that's a, you know, it's a tough question in any moment you have in your life. And I think I ultimately said the truth was that it didn't turn out the way we said it was. And I felt like that my loyalty to that was deeper to that truth was deeper than that to the person. I did it in a way. I didn't write a book about it. It didn't make money off of it. I did one interview. I mean, I should say did two interviews. I did an interview with the New York Times, which it came out of, and then I did a short NPR interview in the aftermath. It turned down every other interview, turned down every other thing, turned down every other opportunity that people...”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worked for the Republican National Committee partly into two thousand six, and I had that's when I'd done Arnold Schwarzenegger's reelect. And so about a year out from the break. Eight months out from the break, I stopped working at all for any. Did you tell them?”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I didn't hear from George W. Bush in the aftermath of that. I gave it a lot of thought. I had begin after the 2004 reelect, which, as you know, I was the chief strategist on, and then I went back to Austin after that and then started spending a lot of time thinking about where we were. And I had a belief, as I said, that I thought we were going to go to Washington and change the tenor and change the tone and bring people together. That ended up not happening. And so in the course of my sort of thoughtfulness on this, I decided, one, it didn't turn out the way we thought. I kept thinking it was going to change, thinking it was going to change, and it didn't. And then because I was such a public advocate, I'd been on television, you know, in the 2000 campaign and in the 2004 campaign advocating, I thought I owed it. I couldn't just disappear because I was such a public voice on it.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After that, I really like the guy, and I have to say for the rest of my life, he gave me an opportunity in my life by asking me to work on his campaign, a presidential campaign, that I may not otherwise have had. So where I am today and what I've learned and where I've gotten in my life, I have to give some due to him because he was the horse and he asked some of us to be around him. And that's a huge opportunity.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I feel the same way about him. And even though I had that, as you know, that very public break on the front of the New York Times with the”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. Every encounter that I've had with both of them and then watching them is George W. Bush made the decision, makes the decisions. And I think it's way too easy for people to say, even on the mistakes that he made, to say, well, George W. Bush wouldn't have made the mistakes but for Dick Cheney. George W. Bush was the deciding factor. And George W. Bush was a very strong, it wasn't just like, oh, I'm going to learn from this and somebody's going to tutor me. And Professor Cheney's going to tell me what to do and all of that. He had an outsized influence. That's definitely true from what I could tell. But he wasn't a puppet master pulling the strings. George W. Bush ultimately made the decisions.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true. That's true. Why did Dick Cheney get picked? Well, I mean, I learned actually a lot reading some of the books about it. Most of us in the campaign had no idea how it was all getting done. Even people at a high level of a campaign didn't really know. It was very, it was kept very tight. It was kept very close circled. I was unaware that Cheney was simultaneously trying to help himself, as you learn from some of the books and deciding who is he going to vet on the other candidates. I don't know if Cheney in the end started out the beginning saying, I want to be vice president. He certainly didn't push back, in my view, hard enough, that it would have stopped it from happening.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I thought Connie Mac, I thought a pick who was a popular politician in Florida, Woodben would have helped us carry Florida. In the end, we probably would have been benefited with either one of those, but Dick Cheney ended up on the ticket.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't involved in the choice. I gave suggestions. I gave suggestions on who I thought it should be. And the two that I thought it should be was one, one for political purposes and one for who I believed in. One was Dan Forth, Senator Danforth of Missouri, because I thought he would send a message that we want to be a different kind of party. He's a very thoughtful person. He's a pastor, very spiritual person, really embraces the idea of governance in the model that I think we want from Missouri. That was the sort of spiritual or sort of thoughtful pick. The other one I thought we should have considered, because at that time when we were looking at this in late 99, 2000, I thought Florida was going to be the Florida, a year out was going to be the decisive state in the election. And so I thought it was...”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As well. And I think there is an infrastructural structural problem in Washington that doesn't allow it. But for me, and I like George W. Bush personally, I don't think for me that we tried hard enough, that we put a big enough stake in the ground and tried to cause people to rally around it. I think we did certain things, but we didn't do enough. I thought there was much more symbolic actions that George W. Bush could have done. You can argue over what are all the reasons for that. My guess is, when I look back at it, one of the first things that I noted that took us off, which I only noted in aftermath, was the pick of Dick Cheney as vice president.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In ninety nine, after having served for the Democratic Lieutenant Governor as his advisor, with the idea that we were going to go to Washington and as a former Democrat at that point, we were going to change Washington, make unify Washington, get past the polarization, get past the divisiveness, reach across the aisle, do all those sorts of things. It ended up not turning out that way. For many different reasons, I...”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes, isn't it? No, I think there is. I think there is issues, and I think that's one of polling is actually a perfect example of this. I think most campaigns and most candidates, as you know, David, the best use of it is not to find out your position, but find out the best way to talk about your position, right? And find out what are the veins in the public that allow you as an authentic candidate to succeed. That's the best use of it. The worst use of it, the nefarious use of it, is to pull on an issue and then change because the poll said you should be this position on this issue. 99 times out of 100 if a campaign does that, it's usually bad for the campaign. A switch merely for the win vane result is usually a bad result for the campaign. There are ones like that. I went to work, George W. Bush is a perfect example. I went to work for George W. Bush.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get attacked from either way, I get attacked on this from the Democrats or the Republicans on this. I actually think we should allow, we should be better at allowing people to evolve. I mean, whether somebody all of a sudden evolves completely for political expediency, we can make that judgment. But I think we're a much better, more compassionate society, both personally letting people change and evolve and become who they want to be or they're meant to be or whatever their intention is. And I think we should do a better job of that in politics and not necessarily criticize people for adjustments or changes in their positions. I think that's how the world works and you should be able to let people move to different positions and not think it's some problem of authenticity.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have no seat. So here's my approach, and it's on politics and basically my approach on life, which is that there's, I don't believe in stagnation. I don't believe in a stagnant position on anything. I believe you have to be authentic and genuine it. I grew up in a Republican family, became Democratic in college, and did Democratic campaigns for years and years, and then got temporarily out of it. And then George W. Bush, who was then governor, and I had worked for the lieutenant governor, who was a Democrat, I liked him, liked him personally, and then did basically two Republicans races and then ended up becoming an independent in the last seven or eight years.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So I was still supportive of them, liked him. I actually, there was a meeting I actually had with Joe Biden back in 1987 when he was running. He came to Austin. I was actually, here's a 26-year-old who had done some campaigns. And I actually thought Joe Biden had such a way with a crowd, actually. I just noted it by that. But in the end, he ended up dropping out for a variety of reasons.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I went down and ended up going down to Austin to graduate school and worked on some elections in Austin in Texas. And that was 88, I think the first race he had. Yeah, yeah.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was in St. Louis, and Dick Kephart was a Catholic relatively at the time conservative Catholic, debating, I remember, sitting in his office as an intern slash semi-paid, and he was debating at the time when I was driving around his district with him whether or not he wanted to stay the years and become speaker or run for president. And obviously he decided to run for president.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have a few hundreds of Smithsonians. So, yeah, that's how I, you know, and then I work for Dick Gephardt at senior college. And then I went up”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was kind of a progressive, very much a progressive. He came from as head of AMC, and he was a big time. He'd be a liberal Republican today, probably couldn't survive, probably couldn't do as well.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I actually caddied at the country club George Romney played at. It's interesting. He played at Bloomville Hills Country Club. I caddied there. And funny story is they used to call him the ghost. George Romney was called the ghost because George Romney would go off without a caddy before sunrise with only six clubs. He'd only carry six clubs. And they call him the ghost because no one see him. And the only thing they would see was his footprints in the dew. So they called George Romney the Ghost and I caddy there. So I, you know, I had some.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My family was Republican. More populist, actually, because they didn't come, they weren't of wealth, and they had no mission.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a congressman in Michigan named Broomfield, who was a Republican conservative congressman in Michigan outside of northern Detroit. I volunteered on his campaign. And then I volunteered when I went to school in St. Louis. Governor Teesdale, who's a Democrat. It's like many people, they switch allegiances when they leave their family.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the Watergate hearings when I was 12 years old. And I was always interested in it and watched it. But that watching the hearings, we went up to summer vacation up on northern Lake Michigan. And I remembered the Watergate hearings watching them while everybody was else was playing on the beach and doing all the things they do and just being completely entranced by it. And from that moment on of watching the Watergate hearings, just the whole idea that we were having a president, his cabinet was being questioned by the Congress. The media actually had exposed it. Journalism had been a huge part of that. The whole thing, the whole meetings of all of those powerful players unfolding in the American public was such an interesting thing to me. From that moment on, I decided I wanted to be in politics. And from then on, I went and volunteered on campaigns and then I majored.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right there. It is. I learned actually the art of building coalitions in the middle of 11 children. I was supposed to be actually the priest. It was in many Irish Catholic families if there's a lot of boys, somebody is supposed to be the priest. And I think my mom had tagged me. That didn't work out well because I sort of was interested in girls. And the church wasn't as progressive then as it may be getting today. But I actually got attracted to politics in the summer.”
2015-10-05 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 2 - Matthew Dowd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source