YouSaid · the spoken record

Ray Mabus

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2018-06-14

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2018-06-14

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1. “And I think one of the things that other presidents have worried about, rightfully so. The minute you walk into a room with him you have raised his stature. To a world leader because the president of the United States, regardless who it is, In the same room and negotiating with the head of North Korea just gave him a huge prestige bomb.”

   2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “And why would North Korea trust us? If we pull out of the Iran deal. Why would they think their deal was going to be any different that we would change our mind in a couple of years?”

   2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Well, he has been shown that he's a terrible negotiator, both in the private sector and in government. And so that worries me, that you don't have a sense of here's where we need to get to, and here's how you can verify it. Here's how you can make sure that both sides stick to their part of the bargain. You mentioned that.”

   2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “My concerns are that That they're going to continue to do exactly the same thing while playing him. The announcement that they didn't need any more test, that mirrored a lot about what Kim Jonah's father said at one point. I mean, he blew up a missile launcher at one point to show he was serious about talks. He wasn't and went right on doing what he was doing. My other concern is that there doesn't seem to be At least from the press reports, a whole lot of preparation. I mean, the president seems like he is planning to go in there and winging it.”

   2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “I'll answer the first part of that one. The last part of that one first. A war there would be almost unimaginable because North Korea has thousands and thousands of artillery pieces that can reach Seoul. And soul is really close to the demilitarized zone. I didn't realize how close it was until I went as secretary and took a helicopter from Seoul up to the DMZ. And you can see both of them at the same time. You've got a lot of artillery. Lot of special forces. Even if North Korea didn't use a nuclear weapon. Casualties, civilian casualties, would be in the hundreds of thousands, if not in the millions, which is just incomprehensible. And it would almost certainly crash the world's economy if something like that happened. So, I mean, that is... Really is the nightmare scenario. We would win militarily in the end.”

   2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Yeah, I think it's a concern. For all of us, and I don't think this administration is helping at all to try to keep that genie in the Bible.”

   2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “He does that and Iran starts pursuing a nuclear weapon again, which pretty sure they would, and it wouldn't take them long, the way John Oliver put it, is it'll take them 10 years under the deal, zero years if the deal is reneged and zero is less than 10. But then I think you set off really frightening arms race in the Middle East because Saudi, I don't think, could face a nuclear Iran without Seeking a weapon of their own, you would. In so many ways put Israel more at risk because of the potential for spillover. The Iranian military is getting better. They're still not in our class, but they're getting better. If you don't diffuse that in that part of the world, I mean, these sectarian rivalries are ones that it's really hard to negotiate because they're based on religious beliefs and deeply held religious beliefs.”

   2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Yeah, it's, I mean, Saudi has always seen Iran as an existential threat to them. Iran's so much bigger. And has such a more diverse economy than the Saudis. Moran knows that if it tried to close the Straits Formuz, that the U.S. Navy could reopen them. Now it would put a huge dent in the world economy if they did that. The thing that worries me sort of down the road is Right now, this president is talking about ditching the nuclear deal with Iran.”

   2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “And, you know, so this notion that This work's been done, and these people felt safe, transgender, felt safe coming out, joining the military, and then suddenly the rug gets jerked out from under. It's not the way to treat patriots, and it's not the way to build a great military force either”

   2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “And for that to be reversed by tweet just out of. Out of prejudice and bias and to rile up your base or whatever. Now, courts have not let it stand. I mean, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a Marine, Joe Dunford, right after the tweet last year. He issued an order saying, No, we're not going to do that.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And they want to serve. We were asking people to lie about who they were, what they were about. And it's just from every standpoint, it's wrong and it's dumb militarily. Now I think that the Don't ask, don't tell so gays, women in ground combat. I think I put women on submarines, opened up special forces. Think those things are pretty much established. The one thing that was still left out there because, very frankly, the Pentagon didn't move fast enough on transgender. We could have solved that under President Obama, but it wasn't done and it was left for the next administration. But we've studied it for a year. In great detail, it was going to cost practically nothing in terms of medical. It was going to strengthen unit cohesion. The numbers are pretty small, but again, these are patriots. These are people who want to serve.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “He said, I've been in for 11 years, and I'm gay. And he said, my biggest fear was that I was going to be found out and kicked out. Now, here's a person three combat tours, and yet his biggest fear was he was going to be kicked out. How much weaker does that make us? How much worse a force does that make”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Yeah, doesn't matter. The only qualification to get a job ought to be the ability to do the job. And I'll tell you a quick story. I was in Manaus Kyrgyzstan. We had a big base there. Everybody coming into or coming out of Afghanistan went through Manaoos for a couple of days. And I made a speech to about 700 or 800 Marines and sailors. About half were coming out, about half were going in And afterwards, and after I shook hands and took pictures and did the stuff you do, there was first class petty officer, Navy first class corpsman medic. And he had just finished his third combat tour with the Marines. He came up to me and he said, I just want to thank you for pushing for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It had just been repealed.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Thinking the same way diversity is a real strength in the military. And the way I approached it was you set standards Job specific standards. Once you've done that, Then gender and race and sexual orientation.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Well, don't ask, don't tell one of the dumbest laws you can possibly have or have had. A more diverse force is a stronger force. And if you look back in history, The armed services were integrated during and after World War II. Same arguments were used against it when the number of women were being recruited were increased in the 80s and their roles expanded in the 90s. Same arguments when the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, which I push very hard for when I overrule the Marines and put women in ground combat armor, artillery, infantry. Same arguments and same thing with transgender. You don't want diversity just for diversity's sake, but you want diversity of thought, diversity of background, diversity of experience, because if you don't have it in a military force, you become predictable. And if you become predictable, you become defeatable. And you don't want people looking the same way. You don't want people.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Because there's not really an explanation of why we need that much more money. Okay, what are you going to use it for and exactly how are you going to use it?”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Bought 10 and paid for nine. It's like having one of those punch cards, you know, buy nine subs and get your 10th one free. And so We drove down the cost usually dramatically of every single ship and ship type and aircraft. I bought 35% more aircraft than had been. Seven years before. And so, you know, Rumsfeld very famously talked about Transformation in the U.S. military. Well, I decided when I got there that the transformation he was talking about was transforming public money into private money. We were just paying too much. We weren't driving hard bargains. We weren't paying enough attention.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Congress has been continuing to build ships. They have sort of ignored the Trump budget on that. And here's the issue I got with a new infusion of money. Number one to what end? What are you going to do with it? Number two, I'm afraid they're going to go back to what they were doing, which is just spending way too much and getting way too little in return. From the time I got there till the time I left, we cut the price or the cost of a destroyer by $300 million per ship. And that's on a $1.8 billion ship. We cut The cost of electoral combat ship in half from a little over 800 million to 450 million and more capable ships. About 10 Virginia class attack submarines for about $2 billion each, paid $18 billion. This is math in public, but Is not 18.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “I got the Navy back to 308 ships, which is what we were building toward. They will be there next year, 2019. It takes a long time to build a ship. It takes an even longer time to rebuild a Navy. When he was running, President Trump said 350 ship Navy. That's great. I mean, that's what the Navy says we need. And we and President Obama in his last couple of budgets laid out the way to get there. Like so many other things, this is one thing. They promise big and then just don't deliver. I mean, his budgets have been smaller in terms of the Navy than President Obama's. What about”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “They just weren't building enough ships and they were paying way too much for the ships they were building. And I was there for the same amount of time, so seven budget years, eight years total Instead of 41 ships, I built 86 ships, did it with a 20% smaller top line too. What the Navy and the Marine Corps uniquely give America is presence being around the world, around the clock, being at the right place, not at the right time, but all the time. And when you do that, You reassure allies, you deter potential adversaries, and you're there for humanitarian assistance, disaster relief when these storms hit, things like that. You got to have enough ships to do that. You know, during the 2016 presidential race, and Governor Romney said we needed a fleet of 350 ships. I don't disagree.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “I'll give you some numbers. In 2001, the U.S. Navy had 316 ships. By the end of 2008, after one of the great military buildups in our history, we were down to 278 ships. During that time, the Navy put 41 ships under contract, so they were building 41 ships. That wasn't enough to either keep our fleet from continuing to shrink or”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Sharpen response. Romney said we had the smallest fleet since World War I. Obama said our military had fewer horses and bayonets that we did in World War I.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “A couple of reasons. One, it's the coolest job on Earth. But secondly, it's so big that you can make a difference in so many ways, in so many people's lives, in personnel policies, in energy where we move the Navy off fossil fuels. And we were big enough to bring a market for alternatives in things like rebuilding the Navy and adding American jobs in shipyards.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “You've got to keep, you've got to keep pushing. And I think that this president, this administration has lost a lot of the moral authority to do that, to push people in that direction, that we clearly had the moral. Authority, we clearly had the moral upper hand, particularly under somebody like Barack Obama. And then it just has vanished. I mean, our word is no good anymore around the world and certainly not the values that this administration espouses day in and day out. It's just not something you want to push around the world.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Think that's in the national interest, but I think at the same time, we have to push them to become more open, more democratic. Treat women better because that's in their interest. That's in the interest of stability. And so I don't think there's a disconnect there. I think that we can push. I mean, my notion was when I went. I was there representing the values of the United States to Saudi Arabia, not vice versa. And that I thought it was very important to keep pushing those values more openness, more transparency, more democracy, more equality. And I still think that's important while at the same time maintaining pretty close relations. You don't have to agree, but you've”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Even though the U.S. Navy protects the Straits of Formuz and protects the Arabian Gulf. Main reason I worry about it's the biggest human migration on Earth every year is the Hajj. Where three or four million people from around the world come to Saudi to go to Mecca and Medina. And if you had a government there that was recruiting for terror and was preaching an anti-US, anti-Western message, then I think our lives get more complicated real fast.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “They made that deal a couple hundred years ago. And it did get exported. And it's a real severe brand of Islam. I mean, it's. Wahab, the guy who preached that, said that you ought to practice Islam exactly the way it was practiced in the time of the Prophet. So nothing modern, no movies or cars or anything, telephones, radios. And what the Crown Prince is doing now in Saudi. They've got to move in that direction, or it's going to be bad. From time to time, he undercuts it by buying 500 million dollar yacht and stuff like that or by locking people up without. It's a due process. Yeah, jail's a jail. Some of them are nicer than others, but it's still a jail. Know they've got to move in that direction. And the reason I worry about it. Partly is all, but we don't get much oil out of that part of the world anymore.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “A third of their time is taken up with Islamic studies. 30% of students take nothing but Islamic studies. The economy is still 90% oil-based. So you've got this ever increasing number of young people, often without many skills, coming into an economy that cannot absorb them. But with the fervor of Wahhabi Islam. That's a bad combination”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Oh, yeah. We had an attack when I was there. We had an attack on an American military facility and we lost seven people. Was never clear exactly who funded it, but Osama bin Laden was one of the prime suspects. He was living in Sudan at the time, very close by. And so, yeah, you could see it. Saudi Arabia that I went into had and still does has a lot of issues. I mean, they got one of the highest birth rates in the world. Their social contract is you let us rule. They also owed family and we'll pay for everything, but their population is growing so fast and oil prices have been down. They've got a pretty big dropout problem in high school, but even the people that go on to college and become the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “He was low On that one, but Know we're fighting over. Voting is being restricted Which Meg Grevers died for, and a lot of other people. Died for In the civil rights movement, we're fighting over education and It's going back to us. Separate and unequal education schools are becoming segregated again. We're fighting over the same ground that we fought over in the 50s and 60s that I and a lot of people I think thought had been put behind us and it just hasn't. And until we figure that out and this is about that. He just made it okay to be racist. He's made it okay to be public about it. He's made it okay to not try to hide it, not be ashamed of it. He's just made it okay. And that's going to take us a while to recover from.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “And it's the only reason I can come up with for the tremendous shift to the Republican Party in the South. Now, there's this veneer of social issues on top. But at the bottom, I made a speech in Mississippi. Six months ago or so, and I said, We're fighting over the same things, we're fighting over for the last. Sixty seventy years. I mean”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Once the Republican Party figured out that if they got all the white votes and Democrats got all the black votes, they won every time. And it has ripped the fabric of not just Mississippi, but a lot of states apart. And I really thought when I was elected governor in 1987 that Mississippi could lead the country in terms of racial reconciliation, we weren't geographically segregated. Everybody knew each other. And once the laws, the de jure segregation, once the laws against integration were removed and people were going to school together and knowing each other. In a different way, I really thought that Mississippi could be a model of how it worked. Once the politics, though, went And I watched it and all the old segregationist Democrats just moved over and became segregationist Republicans.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “You'll have to have a pretty specific set of circumstances, at least for the next few years. Demographically, it's changing. Mississippi is one of two states that Barack Obama did better at in 12 than he did in 08. If you could get the African American vote to turn out in accordance with its population, which we've never been able to do, even President Obama was not able to do that. Usually President Obama got 32-33% of the vote was African American. If you can get there, you can win with less than one out of every four white votes. which ought to be doable. One of the things that just has bothered me no end is that.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “39 year olds tend to be. And I frankly should have done a better job of explaining exactly what I was up to. I think I lost my brand a little bit.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “I was just going to do that. And I think I was the first candidate to ever make the same speech in black communities as white communities. And my coalition was interesting. It was mainly African Americans and suburban Republicans. That ended up supporting me. But It was a lot of change. It was really fast. I mean, I was impatient. I thought we could.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “But I tell you, the character building aspects of losing election are just vastly overrated. But one of the things that I decided pretty early on. There were some things that I was going to be willing to lose over. And the main red line for me was race, was if I just wasn't going to go there. And I was going to do the stuff like a point. Mississippi's 39% African American.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Of the beds were filled, no licensed doctors at any of them. And by closing them, I could cover 100,000 more Mississippians with Medicaid. But I didn't do a good enough job in terms of explaining to people. Connection and why I was closing these things, and people, even though there were terrible hospitals, said, Well, they have to take me if I go there And Code is election day in history, as far as I know, 100,000 fewer people voted that had voted four years before. The Saturday before the Tuesday election, I was 17 points up and in a published poll by the Claire and Ledger. And it was right. It tracked our internal posts.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “I pushed a lot of change. And some of it was stuff like I appointed the first woman ever head of a highway patrol in the country. First time a woman had ever, my chief investigator when I was a state auditor became head of the highway patrol. When I was running for re election, everybody else running saying, when I get in there, I'm going to appoint somebody qualified at mail. I also appointed African Americans to 40% of the jobs that I had available. And not to quote Traditionally black jobs. It was the head of the state tax commission and head of the Department of Finance and Administration. And that rubbed people the wrong way. You know, I made some knucklehead decisions as governor. Healthcare came back to bite me because we had three charity hospitals. They were terrible. Highest infant mortality, 8%. 8%”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Well, obviously, I don't like it much. And I think I was. I think all things considered, I'm more of a Ford F-150 sort of. Sort of politician, but no, you're right.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Part of the whole thing. And then the second thing we were going to give them was every time they got better, we would take off a state regulation. Until you could reach a thing called lighthouse status, which you had no state regulation, and you just sign a contract at the beginning of the year saying, here's our outcome, here's how our kids are going to do, here's how many, we're going to make sure this percent graduates. And, you know, frankly, I don't care how many school days there are. I don't care what textbooks you use. I don't care what the qualifications of your teachers are As long as the result is good, and we know what to do, I mean, there are about a thousand things you can do to make schools better. We've never had the political will to do it.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Instead of measuring just student achievement like no child left behind, just testing. We did it Said, we're going to measure a lot more things, so test scores, but also teacher attendance, student attendance, community involvement, percentage of money spent on classroom education versus administration. And if a school got better compared to itself one year to the next, we were going to give it two things. One was money, thousand dollars for every teacher, and $500 for every other person so lunchroom workers, custodians school bus drivers. And there were only a couple of requirements. One was that 70% of the money they could give to themselves, but the rest of it had to go back to the school. And nothing could go for sports. Everything had to go for academics. That was the most controversial.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “No, I thought sales taxes were pretty high and they were pretty regressive tax. Income tax Frankly, just wasn't going to raise enough money. Do it. And not a single state that touched us had a lottery. Now they all do. There was a lot of provision in our Constitution, so I had to get a two-thirds vote. Passed it twice in the House and once in the Senate and lost it the second time in the Senate. Interestingly enough, after I left office, the legislature put it on the ballot by the lottery and it passed, it got 60%, even though they've never implemented one. Along the line, mostly Republican governors have funded best until Probably more than half of it is now. Instituted and in law. Now they don't say where it came from. They certainly don't give any credit. But a lot of the ideas, and I still think the ideas, I mean,”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “It's the only way up. It's the only. Only way that I know to dramatically improve life and outcomes, you look around the country today and the places that have the best educational systems are the ones doing the best.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “They're telling him they're going to vote against me. They're going to go in that voting booth and they're going to pull the lever next to my name. That's what happened”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “And when I was walking around shaking hands, I met these three guys sitting on a park bench out in front of the courthouse. Know, I ask him, I said, I'm Ray Mabis, I'm running for governor, I need your help Talk to a minute. One of them right before I was leaving sort of motioned me to Lean in, and so I did. He said, keep kicking them in the ass, son. And when I left after I made my speech, I waved to him and they were standing there talking to a guy running for local office. They acted like they'd never met me, never seen me. And I said, you know.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “It was. It was. So I ran for governor four years later. And in the Democratic primary against eight people, got the biggest vote anybody's ever gotten in Mississippi. As I said, everybody told me I was committing political suicide. Seem like the right thing to do. And the story that when I knew I was going to win, because we were doing all sorts of polling as you do, and the numbers just looked... Too good to be true. But I was in Ripley, Mississippi at a rally the Saturday before the Tuesday vote in the first primary. And I didn't like rallies because the only people that go were relatives of people running. And usually you don't get many votes there. But I went because a good friend, a big supporter, asked me to go.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Operation pretense Early one morning, the FBI arrested. About 70 supervisors. And my auditors went into every courthouse in the state and seized the books. And didn't lose a case against them. Removed, and I think basically changed the way government was run in Mississippi, or at least at the local level. When I got to be governor, we changed it legally to keep these folks. Make it more transparent and to make it more responsive To people in less able to steal.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “The person that we were investigating tell them we need to see you, bring your lawyer, bring your accountant, and we'd lay out what we had found and ask them if we were wrong and what to do about it and if they couldn't, then I demanded the money back. I had a press conference. Every senior Democratic official in Mississippi called me to explain how I was. Committing political suicide, that these county supervisors were the most powerful people in the state, and that I had a bright future if I had just learned how to play the game. And that probably in 20 years I could probably run for governor. The FBI and I did a sting operation.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Nobody had. The auditor hadn't gone after anybody for misspending money or stealing. And I decided to do it. I got up and spoke to the county officials association three days after I was sworn in and I said if it's a law I'm going to enforce it. If you think it's a bad law get it changed but don't ask me not to enforce it. And we started. Really aggressively auditing people, and when we would find problems, and they weren't hard to find. I mean, people were pretty open about stealing. Everybody knew in Mississippi knew that folks were stealing, and they just didn't think anybody would be dumb enough to do something about it. Would call up the”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Nobody gave me a chance. I got out, spent five to one, and I won in a landslide. I got 51.3% of the vote. And that's the one election. If I'd known then what I know now, I never would have run because I couldn't have won. But it was a great office. And I think a lot of good. And you became a huge.”

    2018-06-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 251 — Ray Mabus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source