YouSaid · the spoken record

Ron Brownstein

lines on the record: 71
first: 2016-10-17
most recent: 2016-10-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And I would go one step further. I think for a big chunk of the Republican coalition, the most important priority is stopping what they see as a Democratic coalition intent on fundamentally changing America. Their top priority is negative. They view the Democratic Party as pursuing a set of cultural and demographic changes, for example, immigration reform that is kind of accelerating and institutionalizing this evolution of America away from the way they know it and define it. And what they want the Republican Congress above all to do isn't really to cut taxes, or it's basically to stop what they see as a Democratic agenda designed to accelerate the transformation of America into something they don't recognize.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suburbanist While the long term trend, right, is that if you go back to the 70s and 80s, there were lots of members of Congress from divided constituencies. There were Republicans from the coasts and states that often voted Democratic in the presidential election. There were Democrats from rural districts and the southern districts that voted Republican in presidential election. I think those are the natural bridge builders in Congress. I don't think they're necessarily better people. I think it's in their own self-interest to tamp down partisan conflict. And I think the clearest implication of this election, just like 2012 was, I mean, it's probably going to be further in the same direction. There will be very few people from split districts in the end. And what that does is widen the distance between the electoral incentives are very different. How many Republicans are going to be representing districts that voted for Hillary Clinton? I think it's an interesting question. It could be vanishingly few in the House. And so they're going to be like, I don't feel any pressure to be with her.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For our own purposes, she could win some Republicans that I think most people expect party line, I'm sorry, split-ticket voting to go back up after really four decades of steady decline. Most people expect it to go back up. The question is, does it go back up enough to survive a loss of six, seven, eight points? If it gets up that high, I don't think so, honestly.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I mean, Congress has become a more parliamentary institution. We have the highest levels of party line voting that we've had in the history of the Republic. And it's a quasi-parliamentary system. Voters have responded, I think, by voting in the same way. They vote less. They have been voting less about the individual and more about the party. I like to say the name on the back of the jersey doesn't matter as much as the color on the front of the jersey. The general trend is toward less split ticket voting, more party line voting. And if that holds Republicans will lose control of the House, the Senate, if Trump loses by anywhere near as much as it now appears. Now, I think most people in both parties agree that because Trump is such an unusual candidate and also because Hillary Clinton made a very consequential decision not to try to link him and bind him to the Republican Party, but to say he's something different.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He kind of got a twofer there. And now it is unequivocally a socially liberal party. It's also a more liberal populist party on economics. And Hillary Clinton reflects that. The difference between her agenda and his agenda is the difference between a Democratic is the difference between a Democratic coalition that relied heavily on the votes of really right-of-center white people. And one that is much less dependent on those voters. The price of that is, again, that is what's making it part of what's making it harder to compete outside of urban areas. And it's making it harder to compete in interior culturally conservative states in the Senate.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of that community policing. Right, exactly. But if you fast forward to today, essentially the movement of blue-collar whites out of the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and the replacement on the Democratic side by socially liberal college whites, millennials, and more minority voters explains both primaries this year. The Republican Party has become more populist as those blue-collar whites have become a bigger share of them that helps explain Trump. And the Democratic Party has become more consistent.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prime was the same one, right? We forget they're getting hammered now for super predators But they were getting hammered then for midnight basketball and gun control. The other side. And I covered that. And leaving aside the separate issue, that all of the African, almost all the African American mayors in the country at that point were big advocates of the crime because they wanted more police. They needed more police. I mean, the urban revival of the past 20 years that has millennials on messenger bikes, messenger bags, in bike lanes in every city in America would not have been possible without the reduction of crime that we've seen in the last 20 years. I'm not saying the crime bill was the only or principal cause of that, but it was part of that.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Clinton totally reframed the whole issue by saying we're going to invest more in education and training and childcare, but we're going to require you to work. And that, you know, the polling on welfare reform in the 90s was 90% support. And it was about bridging what Democrats wanted to do with an electorate that would allow them to do it, creating an election. Now, you're...”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Majority of all the voters in 1992 and non-white voters were 13% of the electorate. And he felt, and also coming out of Arkansas, right, where he was kind of marinated in that environment, he was constantly looking for ways to bridge what Democrats wanted to do with what those voters would accept. And I think the paradigmatic, the two examples were balanced budget activism. He tried to be, he wanted the federal government to be activist, but he also felt that he would have more room politically to do that if he did it within the context of balancing the budget. And of course, above all, was welfare reform. And the idea of opportunity and responsibility, Democrats wanted to invest more money in training and education for welfare recipients, which Republicans had successfully attacked for years as essentially a giveaway.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clinton in 1992. Nothing better reflects the changing Democratic Party than the difference between Clinton 92 and Clinton 16. I mean, Bill Clinton in 1992. It is unfair to say he was only tactical, that it was all, quote, triangulation, a phrase that was really applied to 96. What Bill Clinton was trying to do was reconfigure the Democratic agenda in a way that would allow them to advance their traditional goals in ways that would permit them to actually win power to do it. I mean, he tried to figure out new ways of thinking about issues that would bring back in his famous formulation, you know, too many of our voters no longer trust us to spend their money, defend their interests, or reflect their values, what he said in the 1991 Cleveland Democratic Leadership Council speech picketed by Jesse Jackson. And there were versions of that in his big speeches in the 92 campaign. So Clinton, though, was operating in a world in which non-college whites were still a”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next to Donald Trump. And so he went further. He touched those buttons more directly. He had more media attention. And also, frankly, that side of the party has gotten bigger. I mean, that's the reality. And we usually see part of the problem Republicans will have in 2020 will be if these college Republican-leaning whites vote Democratic this time, do they go back into the Republican primary in 2020? Or is the Republican primary more blue-collar, more evangelical, more non-urban, more less to work with for a candidate like a Romney who wants to build a coalition that includes Oakland County, Michigan?”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he also look Rick Santorum in 2012, who lost to Romney, ran on a very similar agenda to Trump without quite as much racial animus, right? It didn't have that hard edge of their criminals, their rapists, but it was reducing immigration and erecting trade barriers. It was kind of that blue-collar populism. In fact, Santorum, I think to this day, believes a Trump crib from him and his book. But Trump was vastly bigger, vastly, you know, it was vastly, he went further. I mean, Pat Buchanan seems euphemistic.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, it tells you everything you need to know during the primary. The results in Northern Virginia during the primary where he was plastered by Marco Reeve by Marco Rubio, you pretty much see what you're seeing in the general election, where Heartbreak Hill for him is Northern Virginia and Oakland County, Michigan and the suburbs of Philadelphia and the suburbs of Denver. What happened was that no one consolidated that white-collar side of the party, the way Romney did in 12, the way McCain did in 08. And until the New York primary kind of broke everything open, Trump was having trouble in the primaries getting above the low 40s. The same problem he's had in the general election getting above the low 40s. So I don't think it's impossible for someone to win with a more center-right, economically focused, less xenophobic nativist message, but they have to be big enough to bring all of that together. Well, and it all depends on...”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exacerbated, but it would probably exist even without it, I think. But yes, definitely exacerbated by it. I mean, if Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote, Democrats will have won the popular vote in six out of seven elections going back to 92. That's never happened in American history since the formation of the Modern Party system. In 1828, no party has ever done it that fast. No party has ever won popular votes six times in only seven elections. I mean, you get hit by the 2x4 enough. Certainly sooner or later it's got to catch your attention. To answer your question, I don't believe it was for a day that Trump was guaranteed to win. I mean, Trump consolidated the nomination. He consolidated the blue-collar side of the party tremendously in a 17-person field, in the combined exit poll. He won 47% of all non-college Republicans. That's an incredible performance. He has connected viscerally with that segment of the electorate and society. But even in the Republican primary, he only won 35% of college-educated voters. If you look at”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, you have a democratic majority at the presidential level that cannot implement its agenda consistently because it can't win the House consistently because of the way it's distributed. I mean, that's really what we have.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's every four years, it goes further in that direction. The eligible voter pool is two points more non-white every four years. I mean, that's just the way it is. Millennials in this election for the first time will equal baby boomers as a share of eligible voters, probably not of actual voters, but by 2020 they're going to be the biggest group in the electorate. I think at the presidential level, it's very clear they have to find a way to talk to more people. The problem Democrats have is that their coalition is not very well suited to winning the House in particular because it is a very urbanized coalition. Obama won a higher percentage of his total vote from his 100 best counties than any winner in at least the past 100 years. I mean, he won the 100 biggest counties in America by 12 million combined votes. He lost the other 3,000 by 7 million. And where that plays out on the House is that even before you get to redistricting, as you move outside of the urban areas, Democrats simply can't compete because in those places there is no workaround. You have to win more blue-collar white voters than they are.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I think there are two questions. Let me just say the second one real quick, which is that the Democrats have the kind of inverse question, which is that it's pretty clear that the current Republican coalition cannot win the White House a normal times without finding ways to talk to more people. It is just simply not a majority of the country. But it's also true that the...”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“North Carolina. You may not think things are perfect now, but there is no mythical, again, you are trying to get back to. Life was not better 50 years ago for people like you. So I think the message is going to be that you cannot win on that agenda. And the paradox is you have two candidates. The only reason it has been the closest, the race is the closest that it gets when Clinton comes down. She's got lots of problems, people or lots of hesitations about her. But I think the evidence is pretty clear there's a ceiling in the low 40s for the Trump persona and message”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His troubles. But the question is whether for each one of those votes he gains, does he lose a vote among college-educated whites? He's now at risk of being the first Republican ever in the history of polling going back to 1952 to lose most college-educated whites. And you'd have to say today that's almost certainly going to happen. So, you know, I think the message of this is that it kind of goes takes you back to the autopsy, which is that Republicans have to find a way to talk to a changing America. You can't, as Trump has done, in essence, run against it and say, you know, like I, you know, we talked about this. I think the key word in the Trump lexicon is again because it implies there was a point earlier in American history that was better for people like you. I think if you're a 32-year-old Hispanic lawyer or a 27-year-old African-American architect or a 40-year-old white professional woman or a gay couple in Charlotte.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Ted Cruz is already blue collar, evangelical, non-urban. Trump is the end of that assembly line. But the big message of Trump is that there is no secret earpiece. If you run on an agenda and message that is provocative and polarizing enough to truly energize this culturally conservative, and there are millions of white non-voters who respond to a message like that, the problem is that for each one of them you gain, you not only risk losing minority voters, which was the obvious problem that everybody saw a year ago, but what has become abundantly clear as the campaign has go on that you have equal risk of alienating college-educated white voters who hear that as bigotry and or economic kind of ostrich head in the sand on the protectionist side. So Trump is running extremely well among blue-collar whites, even amid all of”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Analysis entailed, they kind of grabbed onto another theory, which said the problem was no, no, no, no, the problem is that we don't get enough minority or millennial or socially liberal whites. It's that we do not turn out enough of our culturally conservative base, whether it's actually Ted.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the answer is no. I think the answer is clearly no. And it was no even before the last few weeks. And to some extent, one of the problems Republicans are going to have is that the message of this campaign if Trump loses is going to be somewhat confused and obscured by the cascade of personal problems that have beset him, whether it was that bad performance in the first debate, the tax revelation, and certainly the Access Hollywood video. I think the underlying agenda, the message of the real important message here is that Trump, to me, is the embodiment of the missing white voters theory. You know, this argument that this was the argument that Trumped the autopsy after 2012. Initially, as you said, Republicans of the autopsy, they said, hey, we've got to reach out to a changing America, Mitt Romney won a higher share of the white vote than Ronald Reagan did in 1980. He lost by 5 million votes. We've got to talk to more people. And instead, because so many in the party did not want to go down the road policy road, that that”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that's about the coalition, the evidence is the coalition of transformation is bigger at the national level. It just is. I mean, that is how Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the past seven years.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When Reagan got reelected. So the way I've described it is we have a coalition of transformation, Democratic coalition that is fundamentally comfortable with a changing America, and a coalition of restoration in which Republicans are drawing their biggest vote margins among voters who are the most uneasy about many of the changes that are happening, whether it's bigger immigrant populations, press seven for Spanish, gay couples holding hands on the street. These are the voters who are most uneasy with all that.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The primaries. Not that many people would have considered them plausible presidents at that point. But I think they have developed such a sense that the conventional political leadership has failed them, that they're more open to possibilities that they would not have considered before. And look, I mean, there's no question that there is kind of a convergence, I think, of economic frustration and demographic anxiety that has created the opportunity for Trump. But in terms of the alignment between the parties, you know, the Democrats do have a white working class piece, but it's much smaller than it used to be. Half of Bill Clinton's votes in 1992 came from whites without a college education, according to the Exopo poll. By 2012, whites without a college education provided only a quarter of the total votes that Obama won, and the difference was filled by college-educated white-collar whites drawn to the party more on social issues probably than on economic issues. They tend to be”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Losing around economically. Exactly. And who feel both economically and culturally marginalized and have grown more radicalized in their view that the political system is failing them? And I think that certainly when I first started covering politics, I don't think there was any way that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump between them could have won 5 million votes. People would not, not that many people in the presidency.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The electorate. And then the second thing that happened was that all of the same wedge social issues that were driving blue-collar whites away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans, once Bill Clinton eased the fears of white-collar whites about the Democrats on the economy, that he wasn't going to be a crazy big spender, that he was going to demand personal responsibility. It allowed their more liberal social views to kind of come forward and Democrats began improving among college whites. And we had what I've called the class inversion, where now Democrats consistently run better among every election since 2000. They've run better among college-educated whites than non-college whites, reversing the pattern that existed at least from the 50s to the 80s and probably from the 30s on.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as the population evolved and the partisan allegiance evolved, Democrats began to become more competitive for two reasons. One is that the minority population grew. We went from 13% of the vote being non-white when Bill Clinton was first elected to 28% when Barack Obama was re-elected. And as I, you know, as we've often talked about, it's one thing to give up 80% for Republicans to give up 80% of the minority vote when they're 10 or 12 percent of the electorate. It's another thing to give up 80% when they're pushing 30%.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around civil rights. Civil rights busing, later affirmative action, and then all of the social issues as they kind of piled on, abortion, guns, peace through strength versus diplomacy, welfare. They all push at the same seam. I mean, the phrase, you know, when you were starting out and when I was starting out was wedge issues. It was Republicans who Lee Atwater and his generation of Republican thinkers were constantly looking for issues that would drive a wedge between working class white America and the Democratic Party, and they found no shortage of them. They found lots of them. Many of the racially tinged issues aimed at the blue-collar ethnic populations in the North, crime, welfare, and then more of the social issues aimed at the evangelical blue-collar populations in the South. They succeeded in doing that. That's what allowed Republicans to dominate the period from 68 to 88 when they won the popular vote five out of six, average 420 electoral college vote.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, I think that the fundamental dividing line in our politics has moved from class to culture, that we had a class-based political system from Franklin Roosevelt through somewhere in the 1970s, probably certainly the 60s. I'll say 1968. We had a class-based political system from Franklin Roosevelt through 1968, where essentially the Democratic Party was the party of working class white America plus what was then a pretty small African American population. at least for most of that period. And the Republican Party was the party of white-collar, more affluent America. That was our politics. Every Democratic nominee from Ali Stevenson in 1953 through Carter in 76 ran better among whites without a college education than whites with a college education. They're the party people who work with their hands. And that world began breaking down in the 60s.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think all of that has made it worse, but it's always been there. I mean, look, the first three words and news are new. And it's not great for the news business, but unfortunately in politics, often the most important thing is watching the paint tray. And even a campaign as tumultuous as this is operating within very clear constructs that go back for a very long time.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you go inland. And that alignment kind of fascinated me, you know. And I think that by then I could kind of see in prototype where we were headed or maybe I didn't see it fully then, but it kind of struck me as something important. And I kind of stuck with it ever since. And my main critique of political journalism is that we act as if the world was started anew, not only each campaign, but almost each day. And in fact, most of the stuff, I mean, there are exceptions, obviously, but a lot of the stuff that we write about, we tremendously overrate the impact of. And that even a campaign is tumultuous.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Paul Pete Wilson ballot initiative that he sponsored in 1980 in 1994 to cut off all public services, including public education, to undocumented immigrants. And the story of California from the mid-80s to the mid-late 90s was essentially, I think, what we are living through nationally here.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was living in California, especially around the early 1990s and Prop 187. I had moved back to DC by Prop 187, but still covered it.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“White women, especially stay-at-home moms. And yeah, so you have to go out. And celebrities kind of give you a little ability to go outside the normal channels because they get covered by different outlets, both in print and on television. And again, Mark Melman as Democratic pollster said to me in 2004, I think he was calling for carry. The paradox, the frustrating paradox of presidential campaigns is the people with the most power, often those with the least information and are also the hardest to reach.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A friend of mine who worked on the Romney campaign said that if they lost Ohio, which of course they did, he was going to blame it on Judge Judy. He called it the Judge Judy election. All the Obama ads on Judge Judy aimed basically at blue-collar right.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today It does not. And one other thing about the celebrities is, and I'm interested in your thought about this, is talking to people in the 80s and 70s and 80s, they were seen as a way to expand the bandwidth. I mean, there were only so many people who watched the evening news and who read the New York Times or even who consume normal channels of political news. If you have a celebrity talking about your candidate or your cause, suddenly you're in us magazine. You're more likely to be in the beauty parlor than you were. You're more likely to be on entertainment tonight or Access Hollywood.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think if you think about Bono or George Clooney or Matt Damon or Angelina Jolie or many of the most politically active celebrities today, they're less likely to be in a campaign than setting up their own nonprofit, do something in the world. Obviously, a lot of people still campaign. I mean, there's no shortage of that. But that was something that probably would not have occurred to the people 40 years ago, although eventually they got there too. I mean, Newman and Redford have created important institutions as well. So there is definitely an evolution, and it's certainly here to stay because in any society, the ability to attract attention is a form of power. It just is. I mean, right? In any democracy, especially if you can get people to look at you, they are more likely to hear, you know, hear what you're saying.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First generation were the people who sit on stage and waved mostly or entertained. You know, mostly that's what they thought they were there to do. The second generation were kind of the activists within the political system, like Paul Newman and Warren Beatty and Robert Redford and many, many mores into the 70s and 80s. And the third generation are people who kind of moved to direct action.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, she was. She was. Absolutely. They loved him. I talked to her. But they didn't like, they were less likely in those days to kind of feel like they had to share their views. I think what happened in the 60s, the combination of the erosion of faith in all institutions. I mean, we forget pre-60s how much deference there was to kind of, you know, the experts, the people who were running the country. But also the rise of television. Suddenly in the 60s, you had people like Paul Newman saying, well, why is a politician any more inherently legitimate, have a legitimate point of view than I do? And they would go out and campaign against the war or kind of express their view. And I think that was the turning point. And really, since the 60s, stars have become much more assertive about kind of putting forward their own views. Probably the most politically successful celebrity of all time is Bono, I think, you know, and George Clooney is similar. What's interesting, I kind of see a third generation.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They wanted Adley Stephen to be president, especially Lauren Bacall, they were Madley for Adley, but they didn't think they had a president.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that in the first decades of Hollywood's involvement, they kind of saw themselves as bit players who were there to provide maybe a flash of glamour. The idea of a Hollywood star having an opinion that they felt necessary to share with the world was very limited. Orson Wells did. I mean, Orson Wells thought he, you know, Orson Welles wrote a column. He debated Tom Dewey once for Franklin Roosevelt. He wanted to run for Senate. But Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Baccall never really thought that the world cared what they thought about Adlai Stevens.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blacklisted. I interviewed people who knew Melvin Douglas and were friends with Groucho Marx. And it was, first of all, an incredible introduction to LA, driving around, whether it was the people who had retired to success like Philip Dunn, the great screenwriter, who was living in this beautiful house on the beach in Malibu, or the ex-communist screenwriter John Bright, who was nearly blind living in a tiny hovel apartment in Hollywood with newspapers piled up, you know, like kind of pack rat hoarder. And it was just Evelyn Keyes, who was married at one point to John Houston and played Scarlett O'Harrow's younger sister. And that was the title of her memoir. So it was a great introduction. And to me, like the turning point was, what really changed was as television moved into politics and politics inexorably developed more of entertainment or the ability to communicate at least became a more important role. Hollywood really changed its view, which”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I feel like having written this book, it was great because when I wrote it, I wrote it in the late 80s, I was in my late 20s. And at that point, it was early enough that there were still people alive from the blacklist era, from the 30s, from the popular front era. I mean, I interviewed some of the Hollywood 10. I interviewed people who...”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had only been in Washington, you know, seven years out of school. And I felt like if I didn't get out, I would never get out. I would just kind of stay and just see that, which is fine, but I wanted to do something else. So I moved to California. And I wrote a book, spent the first three years I was there, mostly writing a book, which was a history of the relationship between Hollywood and politics. Interesting. Going back to the 1920s called The Power in the Glitter. And while I was doing that to kind of make ends meet, because shockingly, I did not get a six-figure, much less a seven-figure advance. I wrote a lot for the LA Times. I wrote for the magazine. I wrote for the Sunday opinion section. And so when I finished the book, The Great Shelby Coffee is now the head of the museum and was the editor of the LA. In Washington, yeah. Yeah. Hired me as a national political reporter based in LA. Covered the 92 campaign from California, a lot of miles, and then moved back to Washington, where I spent the next 21 years. Most of them with the”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like asking. Yes, I do. I feel like ASCII would have been one of those candidates who would have had a banner with an exclamation point. Ask you like Jeb and Lamar. Yeah, so I did that and then I did that for a few years. And then in 1986, it was a real kind of turning point for me because I've been a national journal for a few years. I had job offers from the New York Times and the LA Times at that point.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wrote 6,000 words. I still remember the lead. From now on, it will be Walter Mondale and that Harry Truman that Underdog Site as their patron saint”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emerson and heart campaigns respectively from down the hall at Manat Phelps, the law firm of Chuck Manat, who went on to be the chair of the Democratic. And they like my story and they said, you know, write another one and write another one. And by the fall, I was the chief political reporter for the general election. Let me tell you though, one of my responsibilities in that election back in the old days was a weekly magazine. I had to write the story that was ready to go into print if Mondale won.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went to a national journal. Yeah, I went to the National Journal, and a great reporter named Mike Wines, actually go back a step. There was a great old school front page editor named Dick Frank with the mustache and the recently passed away. And he had designed the coverage for the 1984 primary so that he basically divided the country into regions and gave a different reporter each region. And they were responsible for everything that was going on. And Michael Wines was a great reporter, was part of the national journal team that included Michael Gordon, Joel Havaman, Robert Samuelson. It was really an A team. Michael Wines got hired away by the New York Times. And I was 25 years old. I was covering regulatory agencies. And they said, hey, kid, go to California, write about the California primary. And I went to went out to write about the 1984 California primary between Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and Jesse Jackson. I met Mickey Canner, John Emerson, Maxine Waters, and Gray Davis. Mickey Canner and John Emerson were running the Mondale and”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do, and certainly it's not true. I mean, you know, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton represent really different futures for the country.”
2016-10-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 88 - Ron Brownstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source