YouSaid · the spoken record

Norm Ornstein

lines on the record
71
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2018-01-18
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2018-01-18
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1
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  1. “And they called because they wanted to have commentators and analysts, and so I began to do some television, and then I began to do more on what was then right at the beginning the McNeill report, and then the McNeill-Lahre report that became the news hour. And I ended up as the most frequent guest in the first 30 years on that show. And so I had a kind of public role that also played into my interactions with people in the political world, and I was unusual as an academic in that I really got to know and spend time with most of the people who were engaged in politics and governance at that time.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Exactly. And I got feedback. And so I continue to do the academic work, but I got more involved with writing things mostly for the post at that point and for their Outlook section over a number of years where I could do a little public education. And then in 1973 when the Watergate hearings began to bubble up 7374, we didn't have cable television. We didn't have 24-hour news networks. And public broadcasting was the only outlet that televised those hearings. And I got a call. Paul Duke and Jim Lahre and Robin McNeil were for those”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And I got like $75. And I'd spent most of my time working on an article for a political science journal, which at the time you would send it in, and maybe eight months later you'd get a letter back saying, we like this, but we want some changes. And then you'd do a little back and forth, and maybe they'd say they'd publish it after a year, and then a year later it would be published, and it would be read by 700 people if you were lucky. And here I was writing something that was read by many, many thousands, published a couple of days after I'd written it, and I got paid for it.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Or you don't do your laundry right. I didn't start it and finish it. Although back then it took a long time to learn. But I just wrote a review out in Longhand and sent it to the Washington Post. And three days later, they published it on the front page of the style section of the paper.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And the Powell Committee was something that had fascinated Andy Jacobs, and he wrote a book about it, a really good book. And I read the book while I was sitting there. And just on impulse, I wrote a review.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, and what's, I would say fascinating some others might not think so. I was stunned when I started to teach at Catholic U in Washington because I had been immersed in politics and here I was. How many political scientists living and working in Washington could just as easily have been in Peoria or Sioux Falls or anywhere else in the country? It didn't matter to them where they were, and it did to me. And I learned early on as well, I was sitting, I was living in a little apartment on Capitol Hill. I was at the laundromat doing my laundry one day, and I had read a book at that point, a former congressman named Andy Jacobs from Indiana, who had served on the committee that had tried to work out what to do about Adam Clayton Powell, who was, of course, this legendary Harlem Congressman, a powerful man who ended up being expelled from Congress and then got reelected and came back, and Congress wanted to expel him again. It was a famous Supreme Court case.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “One of our people I ended up working a lot with at that time on ending the war was a New York moderate Republican senator named Charlie Goodell.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “But I decided I'd go to graduate school, and another mentor, Professor named David Repass, had come from the University of Michigan and pushed it. And so I ended up there. It was weird, but actually, you know, going back to my high school experience. So at 18, I arrive as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. And those years were like a college experience for me. So I at least had that equivalent. And then I came to Washington in 1969 after I'd finished my coursework as a congressional fellow. And I worked for Fraser for the first half of the year, and then I worked for George McGovern doing party reform and ending the Vietnam War. It was a little bit of a lag, but we managed to make it happen.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Daughter, Koki Roberts, quite famous journalist as well. But he taught classes and sort of brought Washington alive for me, and I decided at that point that I would not only, I actually didn't major in political science, I sort of worked through the seams. I had an interdepartmental major so I could focus on a bunch of things and not have to take a lot of these terrible requirements”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So I went to the University of Minnesota, and we had moved back and lived in St. Louis Park, and as the majority of people who went to school there, enormous school, I lived at home and commuted. But I found a niche, and a lot of that niche was in the political science department, and I had many mentors there. One of them was somebody you may have known, Jean Eidenberg, and Jean, who had actually taught at Northwestern and had spent a year as a congressional fellow working on Capitol Hill for Hale Boggs and came back to teach his first job at university.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Emotionally hard. High school was a traumatic time for me. I had to lie about my age. And I have an older brother, three years older, and we ended up in the same grade. And it was tough for him too. Yeah, I bet.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So it was mostly in some ways just an accident of where I lived. We moved to Toronto and in Toronto they had this program in elementary school where if you were proficient at the things that mattered at that stage, math and reading, they would move you up if you weren't. They might hold you back. So I ended up taking fourth and fifth grades in one year. Then we moved to New Brunswick and they had a tiny experimental program of doing ninth and tenth grades in one year and I did that. And then we moved to Winnipeg where the 11th grade was the equivalent of the senior year of high school. And so I just sort of skipped three grades.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “He was extraordinary, truly a giant in so many ways, and I even to this day think that if he had won, if it hadn't been for that whole set of events in 1968 that were so disastrous, including so many here in Chicago, That the course of the country would have been very different, but that Humphrey, who was, as so many before him had been humiliated in the vice presidency, would have been a great president and would have brought the moral standard of this country to a completely different level. All you have to do is go back and read that incredible speech he gave at the 1948 Democratic Convention for Civil Rights, which was, I think, in some ways a speech that if there had been television, would have vaulted him at that point into the kind of position that Barack Obama found himself in after the speech in Boston was that good.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Now you look at the Republican Party in Michigan, in Wisconsin, Scott Walker, in Minnesota, where they have become radicalized, and you realize that maybe that was, and I saw that in Minnesota going back maybe twenty years, a little bit of the cliched canary in the coal mine, that when states like that could go rogue, that you had a party that was in danger of entirely collapsing away from its norms.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “George Romney in Michigan. And I actually had a chat with Millican's son in Washington in December, a really terrific guy. And we talked about his dad, who was another one of those heroes.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Terrifically focused on doing things for people. They were moderates, and there was an ethos in the state that was just remarkable.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I did. And my mother's family, she was one of seven, and her younger brother ended up in the state legislature in Minnesota and then actually ran for Attorney General one time. And I kind of grew up with Humphrey as my family's idol, and I got to know him when I was a little bit older. And I also got to know Walter Mondale and Orville Freeman and a host of others. And my first experience in Washington was actually working for Don Fraser. Who was one of the great progressive leaders who led the revolution in the House that transformed it in the 1970s? So I grew up around an incredible set of public servants. In the DFL, but I would also say that the Republicans at that time were people I admired enormously, the Minnesota Republicans were”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Mark Tresman. We moved to Canada and I went to some parts of elementary school in Toronto, junior high school in Moncton, New Brunswick, and then Winnipeg for high school where I was telling your team I was in high school with Neil Young.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And then we moved around a fair amount. My father basically was a traveling salesman and we traveled and we lived in Minnesota mostly in the little Jewish suburb called St. Louis Park. But I spend a good part of my own. Al Frank and Tom Friedman and the Cohn Brothers, among others, and the former coach of the Chicago Bears.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “His family was Romanian, much And so they came to Canada. He was born there. He moved to Grand Rapids, Minnesota, which is in the northern part of the state and had a little men's clothing store with a partner. My mother, who was in Minneapolis, her family had come from Russia and had moved to an even smaller town called Virginia, Minnesota before moving down to Minneapolis, where my grandfather became a terrific labor leader and actually ran the laundry workers union and was one of the kitchen cabinet that got Hubert Humphrey into politics running for mayor. But my mother had a cousin in Grand Rapids and fixed her up with my father. And they didn't stay there long. My brother and I were born there. Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Known as the birthplace of Francis Gum.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So, my father was actually Canadian in origin, born in Quebec City, and grew up in Thunder Bay, which is right on Lake Superior, moved to Minnesota, Metro.”

    2018-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 209 - Norm Ornstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source