YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Murphy

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72
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2016-04-25
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2016-04-25
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  1. “They were governing conservatives. I kind of specialized in governors, so I did a lot of Senate races. And they were guys who came in with new ideas, but the management chops to implement them. So they go invent welfare reform, new tax codes, and Angler and Topstadt kind of a friendly rivalry to who could lower the, they have the lowest employment rate of any big county. And then, of course, Jeb Bush, I did his comeback race after he lost to 94. I did the 98 and 2000 reelect. I always like playing on other turf too. I think offense has been in the other guy's end zone. So I liked working blue and purple states. I did Christy Whitman over in New Jersey, you know, both those races. Because I never thought it was that fun to go to a safe Republican state where you're organized and votes you get for free. And in the blue or purple state, you got to have more of a pitch than vote Republican. You got to go convert and persuade. And the Great Lakes Republican governors were good at that. And we have a little bit of a...”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I'd see kind of dumb strategies coming down, and I would be the picture maker. And I thought, boy, I got to become a strategist and stop being told to make stupid commercials. And then it was kind of the heyday of TV, advertising and statewide. So I had a great run through the 80s and particularly the 90s. Did a lot of the Republican governors.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's always entrepreneurial. Our big rule was one, always and we starve because we never make that much money, but always hire the best production technicians we could. There was this great old cameraman who'd been all over the world with 60 minutes doing everything in Bob Peterson. So we'd always stretch a little on who we'd hired to learn the production techniques and really kind of get into it. And two, I had a couple of good mentors. Arthur Finkelstein taught me polling, who had worked around knickpack or doler. And one of the great kind of wild madmen intellects of the party, but very influential on a bunch of us. Alex had worked for him before. And so I got a good education strategy, which I was always interested in. And later just became my ambition.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'd worked around a little bit in production, but not much, started making television commercials for the National Conservative Pact, NICPAC. And I clearly didn't think I had the production background, but I had all these ideas. So I called this well-known producer who it turned out had made one ad named Alex Castellanos, and we teamed up, and I took a leave of absence, my senior year from Georgetown, which led to lightning bolts coming from Detroit back home and ran away to join of all damn things, a Republican Party. And so Alex and I went out and starved and slept on couches and learned how to kind of do it and became media consultants. And we were never really party guys. We're always kind of our own thing. And we had a great run.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And started asking him about playing Darth Vader in the movies and was really interested if anybody ever got hurt on the set with the laser swords. You know, you could really cut an arm off if you weren't careful. And I look around and I cut the eye of one of the cameramen who's seen it all and we're thinking this knucklehead thinks it's real. And British Army have one of those things. And Prowse doesn't know if it's a joke. You know, he can't figure it out. And I'm looking around and I thought, you know, this political thing, there might be room here for success. It doesn't seem like Mensa. And I love TV and I love film and I love Theater. And I love putting on a show. So I started in my dorm room at Georgetown.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Dave Prowse, who nobody's heard of, but he's the guy in the Darth Vader suit in the original Star Wars. And it was this big bodybuilder who spoke like David Niven from Britain. Very nice guy. And he was on a PR tour because in the UK, he was safety man, which was a thing with a green cross-like outfit about don't cross the street without looking kids. And I think they were trying to expand it to the fertile commerce of the U.S. So he was being interviewed, and a member of Congress who remained nameless came in. From a great Midwestern state.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Right. We set up, well, what happened was being chairman of Georgetown Republicans, I kept an eye on the internships and, you know, inspired by this great city of Chicago, I'd always get my beak wet if I saw a really good one coming by. And I wound up working for three congressmen from California who shared a staffer who would make these little cable TV shows. There'd be three stools in the house studio, and one guy would interview his two colleagues about how great he is, and they'd switch chairs. Everybody wound up with a 30-minute show that we put on these big eumatic cassette tapes about as big as an encyclopedia volume and send them out to California, the land of the future.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I guess so, he's kind of a counter thing. Normally we're seen as the elders and footloose. So I guess in that small way, he's a step forward, but in every other way is, in my view, a step back.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “There was a moment of kind of energy in it, and it was fun. It was very libertarian policy-oriented. And Reagan was kind of a spark to the whole thing. I mean, it was tremendous fun. Not particularly uptight, which is kind of the rap Republicans get now in the pop culture.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Jack was the first guy to fly around the country and really, really organize the National College Republican election. He outworked everybody, but he was a very kind of tense guy. You could tell he was on a mission and you never know those mission guys which way it'll go.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “From Massachusetts and Jack Abramoff, who ran for chairman in those years. Yeah, yeah, I was on the anti-Abramoff slate. We were always fighting him as a loyal opposition, but he outorganized us and did well.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “There was a guy got elected in the state house in California. The guy I remember was a friend of mine was this wild frat guy from Georgia who always had liquor, was bouncing off hallways. You know, we'd have to chain him to the radiator in the middle of the night like Shecky Green to shut him up. He was a lot of fun named Ralph Reed. It was before, yeah, Ralph and God decided God needed representation. But Ralph was a hell of a lot of fun back then. And he was like from Georgia. And Grover Norquist was around back then.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, there was a guy just before me named Frank Lavin, who wound up our ambassador to Singapore and was on the National Security Council and then was an undersecretary for commerce. He was very close with Carl, who was of the generation before Carl Rove, yeah. And there was Frank Atkinson who went on to do things in Virginia.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Georgetown was always a power national college Republican politics because all the Republican political nerds around the country want to come to Washington and we were locals so we could always pack the hall with delegates so all kinds of shenanigans with guys many of whom are still in politics now I was the Georgetown chairman I remember that and then I got an internship on Hill Similar.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, I was in the College Republicans there, and this is, remember, right after Reagan gets elected. So it's a terrific time to be a college Republican. It was fun. It was popular. Yeah, even in DC. We would go down and protest the Russian embassy and get thrown out. You know, there's all kinds of trouble to make. We'd be in all these wars with the Yaff chapter on campus. And because Georgetown was in D.C.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So it was just kind of around. And I always knew he kind of had the ambition for my dad because he was always volunteering my dad to do things like join the army, put him on a teamster truck for two years in the Hoffa's local, went to night law school. You know, I think the judge had a plan. And my dad loved politics, but he never wanted to be a candidate.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, yeah. He was alive. He was still the judge. Oh, so yeah, yeah, the Black Cadillac, you know, the police chiefs at the house drinking on the weekend because it was the old Irish machine that ran Wayne County and half of which was Detroit and half of which were the other industrial cities and then the western suburbs. So it was an interesting time. And I remember kind of soaking up a little bit of that atmosphere.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “They knew in high school there were bad signs. And though my mom was. A real committed Democrat, probably she would say pretty progressive. My dad was more the crusty Scoop Jackson, and he'd been around the business growing up. I think my grandfather elected judge always had a theory that my dad would wind up in Congress or something because right after. Your grandfather.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “It was a very kind of classic formula. Yeah. So they would say rebellion. I would say Jimmy Carter. Because I, you know, I was in high school during the 70s, I was class of 80, and I was very interested in international relations and foreign policy, that sort of stuff. And I'd see our president being chased by a rabbit in a rowboat and, you know, Soviet imperialism on the march. So that was what I was interested in. And it took me to the Georgetown Foreign Service School. So that's really what got me. I love the theater of politics, so I love the conventions. And it was a very political. It drove them crazy. I was a Republican. I didn't quite have the Alex Keaton briefcase. When did you come out?”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Oh, yes. Yeah, Joe Murphy, judge on the probate court. 36 years, six elections. Anyway, they pulled my dad off the door-to-door team because he refused to follow orders. All he wanted to do was find people marked hard for Edwards, go to their house uninvited, and argue with them on the stoop. So he was removed. But yeah, yeah, no, I grew up in a totally political family.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And I'll never forget this my father got removed from the caucus team. He is a very political guy, had been a lawyer for many years of general counsel of the Blue Cross plan, very involved in politics from a political family. My grandfather wasn't elected in Wayne County, Detroit.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “That's my dan's joke that I fell out of the stroller because they were both Democrats, and my mom had talked my dad reluctantly into being in their first Iowa expedition for Howard Dean. They had the glow in the dark hats and everything.”

    2016-04-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 44 - Mike Murphy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source