YouSaid · the spoken record

Rick Santorum

lines on the record
104
first
2017-12-14
most recent
2017-12-14
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1
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  1. “And we turn and walk and I'm walking shoulder to shoulder with him. And he looks over me and says, I just saw you on TV. I said yes, sir, Mr Chairman. I said, I just want you to know. I said, it's not personal. And he just said, we got up the steps, so now on the floor of the house, and we're standing there in the middle of the aisle. And he says, I just want you to know, he said, I want to thank you. And I said, how's that? He said, I've watched you through this whole process. He said, and you've always treated me fairly. And I said, well, Mr. Chairman, I said, I have absolutely nothing against you as a person. In fact, I think you've always treated me well. I said, but I just felt like I was doing what I thought was the right thing to do. He said, yeah, I understand that. And that was it.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “As that elevator door opens to the hallway leading into the house on opposite elevator opens and who walks out, it's Dan Rostinkowski.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And so we're in the midst of this investigation and John Bader and I really are driving it. And I get on his committee. And I'm going after him. And so I'm seeing way down at the end of the diocese and everything. And when it came to my turn, you know, there was always this pause. And he was sending a message even and just, you know, bringing me on. And I pursued it for a period of months To cut to the chase, I get a report from CNN, actually, saying that indictment's going to be handed down tonight. And they'd like me on TV. And so I went on TV on CNN and was asked all these questions about the indictment and what's going to happen and what went wrong. I did the whole thing and finished the interview. We get called for a vote. So I hurry back to the hill, get on an elevator, come up the elevator.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Which ensnared the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, who was from Chicago, Dan Rostinkowski, who was maybe the most powerful man on Capitol Hill at the time. And if I can tell A Rosti story, if that's okay. So I got a point of the Ways and Means Committee when I got re-elected.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Freshman, ingratiate yourself. No, among anybody That's the way business was done, and Republicans and Democrats both threatened me and said, you know, so again, it was not a partisan attack. But in the end, we not only uncovered that scandal, but we uncovered a post office scandal. We lost”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “What's this all about? Investigate it and say, Oh, yeah, they get this report every couple years, and people scream about it, and it goes away. And I said, well, it's not going away under my watch. And it just doesn't seem like the right thing to do. And so we pursued it.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It is, but I had some pretty sharp elbows, I don't doubt. And we went after something that was non-ideological and come back to that point, which is, I mean, I was a conservative, but again, I wouldn't have considered myself, and no one knew me would have considered myself really ideological, wasn't driven by faith very much at that point in time in my life. And so I went in there and went after what I thought was a problem, which was corruption and the house banking scandal. And so I joined with John Boehner. fairly familiar to your listeners. Guy named Jim Nussell, who became the director of OMB and a handful of other congressmen. And we decided we saw this check bouncing scandal. It's just, you know, people writing checks they didn't have money in their”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I said, okay, fine. Go for it. And so I said, I'm not wrong. I'm going to run for Congress. I got elected. They took my seat away. And so I knew very early on I was going to be running and probably, as it turned out, like almost close to 70% Democratic registered district in Pittsburgh. And the chances of me getting re-elected were probably not very high. So I went in there with the idea and that maybe established my persona a little bit that I got two years going to try to make an impact. And so I, you know, which is hard for me.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Oh, absolutely. Of course. Well, this is a campaign, right? And so, you know, we talked about him voting for a tax increase and voting for pay raise and all the things that you would run a campaign on, right? But not necessarily things that would be winning. In fact, they voted for pay raises and a tax increase, the George Bush tax increase, and Democrats picked up seats that year. And so, but it happened to be effective. But the bottom line is that the leader of the House came to me and basically said, look, you either run for the State House, or even if you win this seat, which you're not, you'll lose. I said, what's that mean? He said, well, I'll take you out and redistricting. So we're going to lose two seats. I guarantee you if you don't run for this House seat, state house seat, I'll take your seat away from you.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “A guy named Doug Walgren. Sort of your run of the mill Democrat. I mean, it wasn't anything bad or good about him as far as I could see. He's just sort of a decent guy.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I mean, you know, too many guys who get into the United States Congress at the age of 32 having never been in office before. And so it was a sort of a miracle race to win. And I went there figuring I was probably only going to have one term and I was going to be out of politics because when I decided to run for the Congress, the head of the state house who was a Republican in Pennsylvania, this was, again, 1990, two years before redistricting. Came to me and said, You know, look, there's an open house seat now in your district, in your area. We want you to run for that. And I said, well, I've been running for Congress. No, no, you've been doing a good job. We've seen you. We've been impressed by you. And you're not going to win that because you're up against a 14-year incumbent and there's no way you're going to win.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Responsibility to govern. And so what I saw was on the budget committee. I thought, well, you know, budget's a big problem. So we got it. But, you know, our head of the budget committee said, no, we're not going to propose a budget. Why would we do that? All of those criticize us. Well, don't you want to talk about what your purdies? Well, why would I do that? Let's just criticize them. And so I just thought as, you know, that's not what I came here for. I didn't come here to just say no. I came here to try to do something. And so I guess I was, you know, I was 32 years old.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “He was present at the time. We have the president, but as far as any kind of innovation or any kind of ideas or just any kind of activity was just foreign to that group, they were a very dominated minority. They'd been in the minority for over almost 40 years by the time I got there. And there's just no hope that they would ever have any...”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I did, yeah, I would do one minute. But I did a whole bunch of different things. I mean, when I came to the house back in 1991, I mean, I saw the Republican party as sort of a beaten minority. And in the Congress, and that everything was focused on, we've got to win the presidency and whatever we, you know, the president will get whatever we can done. But the chance H.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Which your kids participate. And part of the other thing was travel. I mean, now we have such onerous restrictions in the sense that people say, oh, he's jut-sitting around the world on the taxpayer dollars. Well, a lot of that jet setting was, you know, you went with a whole group of other colleagues. You got to know them and you got to interact. So a lot of the ethics reforms, well-intentioned as they are, do limit the ability for members to interact and develop that personal relationship. So in a sense, you can look at that. You can look at television on the floor of the House and Senate has created show dogs and playing to the crowd instead of having serious debate. I mean, there's no serious debate that goes on on the floor of the House or Senate. It's just everybody looking up at the camera speaking to the folks back home. And so there's just a whole variety of things that just made it harder for people to get along.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Not acceptable stuff happens. And so I just, I never got into that. I mean, I scheduled myself to five or six o'clock. And if I had a fundraiser or a party dinner or something to go to, I'd do that, but I'd go home. I'm happy to do it, Ancillary.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “If I wanted to see my family, yeah, I wouldn't see my family even when I was home. So to me, this was a tough decision because I didn't want to leave my hometown. But at the same time, it wasn't because I wanted to be a father and a husband and I couldn't be. And the other issue is, I mean, you see all these, you know, sexual harassment, sex scandals. I mean, if you're not around. If you're out every night with the guys Stuff happens and stuff that you may both.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It is. Look, I didn't move my family to Washington when I was in the house because the schedule was a lot lighter. They're in really a couple nights a week. In the Senate, I mean, it's a slog. I mean, you're in, you know, three, four, five. Sometimes the whole week and the weekend. And unlike a house district, which is mine was fairly compact around the city of Pittsburgh, I'd go home and I could be at home and go out into my district. I went home. I had to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania, which is a big state, hard to cover.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Because it's transportation. I mean, you just couldn't get back and forth that easily, right? And when you came to Washington, you had to stay because you didn't have, you couldn't hop on a plane when you wanted to and you didn't have the frequency and the ease of air travel.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Or the others. There was always the politics you had to consider within your own party if you went out and just scorched turf the left because you're scorched earthing some of your own people. That's gone. Now there is hegemony, frankly, in both parties, and that has meant isolation. Members are not as friendly to each other on the other side of the aisle because there's no party commonality and there's no policy commonality. There's also no”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, the Republican and Democratic Party were regional parties based upon the Civil War. And so you had moderate and conservative Republicans or liberal Republicans, and you had the same thing within the Democratic Party. The realignment came. And when the realignment came, things got harder and Washington because people didn't talk to each other anymore. You know, some of the best Republican friends that moderate Republicans had were Democrats and vice versa with best, you know, some of the Democrats best. And because you had friends who were of a different policy stripe than you within your own party and you built relationships with them because they were your colleagues in the same party, there was more dialogue. There was more cooperation now and it was when a bill came up, if it was an ideological divide on the bill, it didn't clearly benefit one.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “No, you're right. I mean, governors are more of a manager as opposed to a vote that rallies people. But no, I would say that's probably true of Republicans in the North and Democrats in the South. Up until The nineteen eighties, the parties were, yes, they were ideological. The Democratic Party was a liberal party, But it was tempered. I mean, it was tempered by a whole bunch of Democrats who were in the party who weren't liberals. And so the party was. The party was constrained, and the same was true with Republicans. Republicans certainly became a much more conservative party, but they were constrained also by the fact that you had a third of the United States Senate were moderate Republicans”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Probably not. Although, I mean, you look at someone, for example, like a Tom Ridge, and Tom Ridge probably fit the mold of a John Hines. Former governor. Yeah, but...”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “In a hilltop crash. The interesting thing is, I ended up getting elected to his house seat because he was a house member. And then I took his seat in the Senate after he died, not immediately, but subsequently to that.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It's all about being there and doing the work. And I would show, you know, there were lots of people signed up to help different campaigns at the Republican Party. But I was only what showed up every day and looked up the phone numbers, literally looked up phone numbers and, you know, and put them on the street list and matched all the basic things that you did back then, you know, 40 years ago. And one day the guy who ran the Heinz students for Heinz campaign across the state showed up at the headquarters. I happened to be there. And they say, hey, we're looking for someone that could run the effort here. And so the county chairman walked down and said, this guy shows up. Bring him in. And so all of a sudden I'm president of the students at the Penn State. Did you”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I used his ketchup. I'm a big Heinz Ketchup fan. And so I went and showed up. And here's what I learned in politics. Politics is all about showing up.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “General, I should tell you about the primary. No, no, no. This was the fall of 1976. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was Carter vs. Ford, and I just, neither of them motivated me to get involved. And Hines was a local Pittsburgh guy. And I'd known him and seen his face for years. So I thought I'll go help him.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And so I went down to the Republican headquarters notionally because they gave me a list of all the candidates that were up for election in 1976. And I didn't like either the presidential candidates that year. And the two Senate candidates, the one guy was from my hometown was from Pittsburgh, and I knew his name. And so I thought, I'll go work for him.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Well, I was a feisty kind of guy, I guess. And so I went to college and I liked elections. And so I thought I'd take a political science course, not knowing anything as freshman in college. I just took an entry level then. And one of the things that required was that you had to work in a campaign.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “It was. Oh, my dad never voted until the 1980s. My mom voted. She was a Republican, but we never, ever, ever talk politics. But I was always interested. I liked elections. I found that to be exciting.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, I mean, we went to church every Sunday. I mean, that was just, you went to church. And I was an altar boy. I participated as a kid. But, you know, when I got out of high school and went to college, I just got full of all the things you get full of when you go to college. And that's a lot of beer, a lot of beer, a lot of other things. And sort of drifted away. I didn't really find a circle of friends who were engaged, involved in the faith and any faith to that matter. And so you just sort of ran with the pack. And so my life went like that for probably I went to grad school right after that, went to University of Pittsburgh and got a master's degree in business and then went to work for a, as a chief of staff or a democratic, for a Republican state senator in Harrisburg.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Yeah, well, look, I always can't say ever walked away from my Catholic faith, but I certainly was not actively practicing it and it was not an important part of my life when I was in college. What about your family?”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Provocative, of course. I made that in my provocative years. But it was to drive home the point that there needs to be room for both. There needs to be room for really giving women choice, real choices and affirming the choice affirming the decision when or what the decision is and not to bias it one way or the other. And then I don't think that's... In my mind, that's why I call it radical feminism, not just feminism. I wasn't critiquing feminism. I was saying those who only see feminism as you have to do this to be a real woman as opposed to you have to honor women and the choices you make.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Yeah, you take a quote like that and it looks like, oh, you know, Santorum wants women to be barefoot and you add the frame.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “But it doesn't make it any easier than when you're out in the cocktail party or you're out even at the baseball game and someone asks you what you do and, you know, well, I'm a broker for this or I'm a lawyer at this and I'm a mom and then you don't get, oh, that's great. You know, what do you do? And so”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “And so she's, I won't say she had a chip on her shoulder, but she always felt like she was not given the same kind of respect that she would have. And it's been, and it's been an issue, you know, for her. I gave this up. I gave up the affirmation of my, you know, of the world and of my colleagues. Now, she wouldn't trade it for the world.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, my point there was. That we need a culture that doesn't pick one side or the other and say, we'll just affirm you if you're this. And I said that because my wife, who we've been married for 27 years, Karen, it was a neonatal intensive care nurse for nine years. She saw all sorts of medical ethics issues. And so she got interested in the law and decided to go to law school and would put herself through law school. She always commented because she decided to stay home and raise children that she always felt when she was in the circles that I traveled in in politics. And, you know, you'd go to the fundraising events or everything. Elsin, of course, she would be there. And they say, oh, you know, what do you do? And she said, well, I'm home raising kids. And all of a sudden, there was this deathly silence. And it was like, you know, well, let's move on and talk to somebody else who's interesting.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “That delivered the mom in Japan. So yeah, he came back and really would not have gone to college but for the GI bill and for World War II and having fought in the war and went to a local college, St. Francis College in the hills of western Pennsylvania ended up going into psychology and went to work immediately to the VA, met my mom at the VA. She was working at the VA. She was a nurse. She was a nurse. And it was the unusual situation. They were both late in life. They got married later in life. My dad was in his late 30s and my mom was a couple years older than my dad in her late 30s. And it was always an odd situation that my mom, they worked at the same hospital. And my mom was always the senior person. She made more money and had a”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Barb was no better in the 1940s than it was here today. They beat fascism. You got to give them that. They give him, oh no, they did a heck of a job. But his big story is he was put in the Pacific. Now whether that was because he was Italian and was from Italy and they put him in the Pacific theater, I don't know, but they did. And he actually worked on the Enola Gay and was. Yeah. So he was there during that time.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “He was. Yeah, he came over when he was seven years old, and he spent the first seven years of his life in Mussolini's Italy. Didn't have very fond memories from that, but came over. My grandfather was a coal miner and came over to the hills, the coal fields of western Pennsylvania, and lived there, grew up there. And then when the war came around, he was eighteen. He was born in 1930, so it gives you an idea. He was, you know, 22 or whatever it was. No, excuse me. 1930. 1923, excuse me. He came over in 1930. He was born in 1923. So, you know, he was 18 when the war started. And so he enlisted and was in the Army Air Corps, was moved from one assignment to another assignment. He basically worked on airplanes after trying two or three other things that they trained him for, and then they realized they didn't need anybody. So they trained him for something else. And he tells a pretty funny story about all the different things he was trained for that he never had to do because they find out they didn't need that. So they trained for something else. But the efficiency of the defense.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I saw that. Yes, I saw that. Oh, I tie you to Chicago for obvious reasons. I've been there so long that everybody assumes that.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “That means a lot of folks stayed home on the Republican side. And that's going to happen. It's absolutely going to happen. We're moderate Republicans. And even, you know, he did well among evangelical conservatives, but how many showed up. So the ones that showed up voted, but how many didn't show up? And if you look at some of those counties, a lot of folks didn't show up. And I think part of it was because of Moore's personal issues, but it just goes to show you that character issues matter to a lot of people. And they mattered about Ramo Moore, and they will matter about Donald Trump.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “It could be overcome by that. But if people are not feeling good about their president and about the country, it is going to have, as we saw it, Roy Jones got Roy Moore. Roy Moore got his almost as many votes as Hillary Clinton got.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “I don't have any doubt that this will have electoral consequences. And it can be overcome in part by success. Obviously, they pass this tax bill and it does what Republicans hope to do. And the economy, which is chugging away pretty well right now, thanks in part to some of the regulatory reliefs that the president has put in place.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I would say right now, I think it's unacceptable. I think it's unacceptable on very many levels and is doing real damage to him, to the country, and to the things that he and I jointly believe would be best for the country. And that's why I'm not shy about saying it on a repeated basis, and we'll continue to say it. I'm not sure he's going to listen.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “And that's my point. And so when I see a president who I don't see as a role model for the lessons of life that I want to impart on my children and the people that I care for in this world, that's bothersome to me. It's one of the reasons that I constantly harp at him on the air to stop behaving this way because I think it's harm. It's not just harmful to him and it is harmful to him. It's not just harmful for the things he believes in. And it is, but it's harmful to have a generation of Americans see that this is the way people of responsibility and power and influence behave.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “No, I mentioned, I think off air that as you grow a little long in the tooth and your hair gets a little grayer, you think about what your impact is on the lives that you touch. And whether it's your children or their friends or the people that you work with, are you imparting just by”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “The thing that's actually helping him right now, oddly enough, is the blowback of this investigation and it's drug on for a while and there's still he still wasn't any smoking gun out there and so he's getting the benefit of now some bad hires by Mueller and he had to fire some people and let some people go. So it calls into question the investigation. All of this has created more noise, but probably favorable noise to trump at this point. That's all going to go away at some point, probably within next month or two. Mueller's going to probably come back with something and we'll be on to the next phase. But if he continues the personal stuff, that noise is going to continue to hurt him.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Personal problems, whether it's Twitter or whether it's his speeches and the way he talks about people and talks to people, create a fatigue factor and an erosion of support for him. Whether they support his policies or not, they're just tired of the continual controversy, right? The noise.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I haven't seen the final details, but they did get some out. So to get back to the larger point, I think the presence approach on trade, I think the presence approach on economics are actually very popular among Middle America. And I think he could do very, very well. But his personal antics have just overwhelmed the accomplishments of this administration and the efforts that he's trying to put forward. And if that continues, if the president continues to try to bring out his personal peeves with whoever happens to insult him the day before, you're going to have an exhaustion factor. Many of my friends who are, you know, you focus last night, I think wisely on suburbanism. Urban moderate Republicans. And suburban moderate Republicans are less and less voting for Republicans, right? But they still strongly vote for Republicans.”

    2017-12-14 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 201 - Rick Santorum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source