YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Perriello

lines on the record: 93
first: 2018-04-26
most recent: 2018-04-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Problem was people were just starting to say, okay, we have this Cold War history, and anyone who does work overseas knows that we still deal with that legacy. But then when George W. Bush chose to fight the so-called global war on terrorism in the way he did, he was the first president really to move backwards on that project by putting torture back on, by the neocons actively undermining the idea of getting international legitimacy behind these efforts. And it basically became a new Cold War, right, where the principles around RCT strategy trumped any of the other values or other things we were putting forward. And, you know, there's a certain fool me once, you know, fool me twice quality to that that I think allowed Putin and his like to emerge. Because in understanding Putin, it's not that he hates democracy and human rights. It's that he doesn't think they're real. He thinks they were always a farce. He thinks they were just...”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it was convenient and opposed it when we weren't. So then there was this period again between the fall of the wall and the fall of the towers where it seemed like maybe all this stuff wasn't just Hokum. Maybe there was like a real, there was truth to this progressive project that we're going to take a certain set of things and make them off limits chemical and biological weapons, genocide, war crimes. Now the war, the crime of aggression had of course always sort of moved to the side that had been part of that vision.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand, I think it is really important in my mind to remember that those of us that saw George W. Bush as kind of an existential threat to the world order were not wrong just because Trump is even worse. In my mind, the reason one of many reasons that George W. Bush's presidency was so tremendously destructive to the international order was that we had just come out of a period during the Cold War period. If you look at the great sort of 1945 vision of some system where we moved away from might make right, from atrocities being okay, it was a set of principles that were honored in the breach, partly because it immediately fell onto a Soviet versus US axis. So we came out of the Cold War with an American narrative that we had been on the side of freedom and liberty, but almost nobody else in the world saw it that way. They saw a chess game between us and the Soviets where we backed democracy.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think on the upside for the Bush administration, their engagement with Africa, particularly on PEPFAR, the HIV AIDS program, was far more than anything Clinton had done and arguably more expansive than a lot of what President Obama did on the continent.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's easy to say, okay, but who cares in Liberia? But both because of some of the blood diamonds and timber and other things, there have been some linkages there. So here you had a situation where, and I think this is something that continues to haunt progressives in a way, which is that we see so much foreign policy through the lens of the data point of Iraq that it can tend to lead to the conclusion of disengagement rather than saying, okay, wait a second, there are some things that have been human rights and international law related that we have been a part of that have actually done tremendous good. The other thing that I think I learned from that...”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, it was an incredibly important case study that gets almost no attention. And there were a lot of lessons I learned from it. The first was sort of a geopolitical point, which was this was happening about the same time as George W. Bush's disastrous regime change strategy in Iraq. And here you actually had two separate things that ended up producing regime change, one of which cost a trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives and the entire stability of the Middle East. We were able to get Taylor out of power without firing a single bullet, without troops on the ground, with the not just cover, but actual driver of international law and with regional support. And ironically, Taylor actually had more connections to Al-Qaeda than Saddam Hussein did.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't tell you how many people who lost with me in 2010 came up to me during the lame duck session and said, well, if I knew I was going to lose, I would have voted like you. But, you know, it's, first of all, people have different roles in movements and in parties, and everybody is going to have to figure out their own moral calculus with that. It was also true that I was 35 years old at the time unmarried with no kids. And there were ways in which it was probably easier for me to be the sort of, I don't know, sacrificial lamb, whatever you want to say, the person who went bold on those issues. Now, we also outperformed the people. We didn't just.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go. And it was an example of sort of understanding there were ways I could use my white privilege constructively. But it was an incredibly dynamic experience there, and it was a country that was completely written off by everybody as hopeless. And not only did we get a peace deal, but it has never returned to war. And I remember I was Skyping with one of the civil society folks when the Ebola crisis hit, and Sierra Leone was one of those very tragically hit by Ebola. And I remember him saying to me, he was like, can you imagine what the death toll would be if we were still at war, if we had not dared to believe that peace was possible? Not only would it have been tens of thousands of deaths there, but would have been much harder to contain across the region. And beyond. So as hopeless as things can seem, I think when I've been in struggles since, including struggles in Congress, where people were like, oh my God, that's so courageous. I was like, are you kidding me? Like, losing re-election in Congress is not exactly a...”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I helped some Sierra Leoneans open a clinic, and I've told this story before, but it really was a turning point for me. When I went over there third year in law school, I actually had a signing bonus to go to McKinsey. I don't know if I was ever going to go, but I had it. And I was sitting under a tree with this woman who was the main civil society leader who'd risked her life so many times. And she said, look, Tom, you got to tear up that check and come move to Sierra Leone. And I said, what the hell am I going to do here? She said, we got 12 months where we could get a peace deal. We could disarm the child soldiers and reintegrate them. We could get a truth commission. We could hold our first elections. It's literally the question of whether we'll be in perpetual war or break the cycle. And I said, that's all well and good. But, you know, how can I be helpful? And she said, well, if you're standing next to me, I'm less likely to get shot. And that would be really helpful, which I thought was the best job pitch I'd ever had. And sure enough, I moved in.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did. So at the time, West Africa, Sierra Leone, West Africa was ranked as the worst place on Earth in the UN Human Development Index. The life expectancy was, I think, 36 years old at the time. It was about the ninth year of the war. And it certainly had that. And our country had managed to make it worse. The Clinton administration, through sending Jesse Jackson over there and some other dynamics, had actually really kind of extended the war through a combination of getting played and some other things. So here was a situation where it felt like, you know, if there was something I could do, I should do it. I just didn't know if there was anything I could do.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He would had not just been, you know, that was when we were sort of changing the myth that he had been reluctantly pro-slavery or other things and that in fact the scholarship shows later in his life he was becoming more entrenched on slavery. So how is it that this person with all of this talent could be not just complicit in but actually one of the great architects of evil? And what will people look back 200 years from now and say, how the hell did they think that was okay? How did they propagate it? So for me, that was just, that was sort of one of those things in high school that I said, I am determined to be at least not complicit in these things people will look back on. And I think the idea of, you know, crimes against humanity and genocide is certainly one of those, along with”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was actually, you know, spent quite a bit of Monticello of time there. And I was always struck by the idea that this person who was so much smarter than I would ever be, more talented than I would ever be, and had arguably done more to expand the idea of liberty than most people in the world.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Versus not. I mean, one of the founding things from my youth that we didn't talk about is actually Thomas Jefferson, because Charlottesville, I grew up in the shadow of Jefferson, everything's Jefferson.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DC, which was when I was in college, and being deeply affected by that notion of never again And so, you know, during law school, there was a very good program that helped go to some of these areas. And the interesting thing about Argentina and Chile, as opposed to some of the experiences I then had in the Balkans and elsewhere, was it seemed the cycle had been broken. So it's easy for us to get fatalistic and say, oh, well, once, you know, these people have been at it forever. They've been killing each other forever. It's just got to be thus. But as they say in the mission, thus have we made the world, thus have I made it. And I think in this case, looking at the way transitional justice, which is that notion of a combination of truth commissions, accountability, whether that's prosecution or otherwise, memorializations have helped certain countries to break out of a cycle of repression and violence. And that, for me, was the combination of both the dystopic, you know, this terrible stuff's going on.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rwanda happened when I was in college along with the wars in the Balkans, which obviously continued further on. And so there was a sense of us having failed at this great moment on multiple continents to live up to that idea of never again. I remember going to the Holocaust Museum when it first opened. In D.C.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think it was, there were a number of things going on at that point. It was this very heady moment between, you know, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the towers when there seemed to be not just a moment to take the promise of atrocity prevention and human rights, the sort of great progressive project of the 20th century was this notion of putting certain things off limits. It's one of the reasons the chemical and biological weapons red line is such an interesting one is that was a progressive line. That was not a conservative line. That's something that was probably the central global progressive project of the 20th century was to say certain things in genocide was one of the”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly. You have environmental justice or environmental racism issues here in the US. You see them globally and the issues of climate change relate to sexual violence as women and many poor countries have to walk further and further each day to be getting into the firewood or the water that they need in an incredibly vulnerable environment. So these issues can certainly reinforce each other. I think my frustration after a couple of years was that I didn't feel like the environmental movement was interested in using its perhaps more establishment. Prowess to get at some of those other issues is a real priority.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that you can have sort of a donor class and suburbanites interested in this that we can get at some of the issues of, say, urban design that drive inequality in ways that are very different than saying let's start with a busing conversation.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a convergence of, you know, I was an Eagle Scout, grew up hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We had a pond on the farm and would go fishing and there was a strong sense of spending a lot of time in the woods and in the mountains. There was a sense of this being God's creation and that we had a moral obligation for stewardship. Climate change was really our global warming at the time as we understood it was really that threat was real and getting more serious. So it was, and I'll admit, I mean, there's a certain bouginess to the issue too. And from my background, it was sort of a natural thing. And then as I became in college more increasingly focused on issues of racial inequality, racial justice, you know, poverty and other things, then the hope was, oh, environment can be the boomerang issue.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, that was definitely some errors along the way. I had one of those classic things where I was calling people to be, I think we were helping finding captains to get people to the polls or something. And I mean, I forget which town it was, but it was something like, you know, are you, will you be the captain for Warchester or something, like completely mispronouncing the local names and just be like, you kidding me, right? And so I may have done more harm than good, but it was a good campaign.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I spent two years working helping to run an environmental nonprofit, but I went up, I was seconded to the campaign just very late for the last few weeks to help do some stuff around the environment. So it was kind of a campus green vote. And it was a group called Center for Sustainable Economy that later got collapsed into a different think tank that was really looking at market-based environmental reforms. How do we overhaul tax and trade structures to build sustainability? But ultimately, it was very clear to me, even though I didn't like politics that much, that everything I cared about could only move forward if certain people won and certain people lost. And Kerry was obviously a great champion on the environment. He was up against Bill Weld in that race. It was a very serious Senate challenge.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do everything with gusto, you know, whether it was intramurals or debate or philosophy or politics. Know, love it and embrace it, and that was encouraged there. And I think the campus, my niece is actually going there in the fall, my niece and goddaughter. And, you know, I think she had the same reaction there. So I think they do a good job of cultivating that kind of spirit there.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In humanities, yeah. I had a great experience at Yale, actually. I particularly coming out of a very, you know, very conservative Charlottesville at that point, certainly culturally. And to be in a place that took justice seriously. But most of all, I just remember, you know, we had this, we used to call it the Mellon Mediocre attitude in high school. You were supposed to kind of be too cool to care about anything or try too hard. And that just wasn't really my style. And you was the kind of place where you were just supposed to.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's hard to go back. But, you know, I fit central casting and all of the race class engendered components of that. And I happen to also be a smart kid who could ACE tests in my sleep kind of thing. And so, you know, that meant I got started to get put in front of crowds and was very comfortable in front of crowds and therefore felt like, of course, I should be speaking in front of large crowds and speaking first in the classroom. But partly, I think, because my parents had come from very different backgrounds, there was a sense of making sure, you know, I had all those opportunities but had some sense that not everyone was getting them and that created some obligations to do something about it”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me about how I'd be president someday, and they weren't saying the same thing to the other kids. And I knew how smart they were. And so that sense.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, youngest of four. And no, I caught that bug early on the environment and on poverty issues. And I had a very strong sense of the world not being a fair place and that I was on the right side of winning the lottery. Every morning, I literally crossed the tracks. I went to a public school where we were part of a small neighborhood of six or seven families that was an old farm that got turned into a subdivision. All white kids, the bus would pick us up at the end of long driveways and then we'd cross the tracks into a neighborhood that was all African American and range from solid working class to houses that were falling apart. And we went to the same schools and it was very clear that teachers started talking.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I'm sure it was a little precocious, weren't you? Yeah, no, I was going to go for Endearing, but I'm not sure that's how my siblings would describe it. No, there's a lot of family. You were the youngest, so I.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and I think it goes back to our point about service. I think one of many things that have shaped Pope Francis and their books being written on this, including one I'm very interested to read from Ross Duthart, that's, I think, just come out, he spent a lot of years really after he was kind of a rising star in Argentina and he got very close to the highest levels of power during the junta period and had to do a lot of kind of negotiating in a way that somehow maintained credibility on all sides. But by most reports was really an experience where he wanted to go to Cordova and sort of spend some time riding the bus with the poor and in those communities. And I think grounded him in a way that is rare for someone reaching that level of influence.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is why Pope Francis is such an interesting and, I think, transformative figure, and hopefully we are only seeing the beginning of what he might do because there's a certain appeal to all of the sort of pomp and circumstance, but then a guilt given it's not just the opulence, but the continued structural issues, particularly of sexism and other things involved in that. But again, you have a sense of someone who seems to be calling the church to its best angels. But, you know, and they're still...”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and there was tremendous courage from the priests on the ground to stand up for these human rights folks who were being tortured and jailed. And, you know, by having that sort of power of the institution of the church behind it has probably prevented the country from descending into civil war, though it's still in a very fragile situation. And getting to go to meetings at the Vatican. And there aren't a lot of things that give me goosebumps anymore, but I admit, you know, getting racing down the vestibules of the Vatican and going up usually to meet with their equivalent of the Secretary of State does give you that sort of cinematic.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Burundi Rwanda. And that's a place where the Catholic Church has been a massive force for good. Not just on delivery services, but you're.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But at the time, back in the day, massive resistance, which was the white supremacist movement to block desegregation, shut down schools in Charlottesville. And people that I knew, elders, had lived through that. This was not in the history of books. This was still there. And those were often led by religious leaders. So for me, faith was very much something I saw in the liberationist tradition. And of course throughout religion, throughout history, there's been both a strong liberationist liberal tradition and a more repressive and reactionary tradition, as with any other great force in humanity. So, yeah, no, that was a big part of my identity has continued to be a complicated relationship with the church now. One of the great joys in the last job I had for President Obama was serving as his special envoy for the African Great Lakes, which is Congo.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you could be a Catholic and not be a Democrat, you know, in a way. I mean, obviously, you know, this is coming of age in the 80s and sort of the emergence of or really ascendants of today's religious right, which is now neither religious nor right. But identity was very important in terms of a life of service and a sense of privilege. Growing up in Charlottesville, two of those big influences were a Catholic church that really reinforced the social justice message and the civil rights tradition, where Charlottesville seen now as this blue liberal town, which itself is a bit of a charged narrative given issues of race and inequality we're still struggling with.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has. How long's your podcast? No, I grew up in a Catholic church, which I didn't realize at the time, a Catholic community, was a bit anomalous because it was a very, very progressive Catholic church that was talking to us about nuns being murdered, raped, and tortured in Central America, backed with our government backing rightist guerrillas. If you weren't trying to eradicate poverty and torture, you were probably going to burn in hell and eternity. And what I later realized was that the bishop, bishop Sullivan, based in Richmond, was”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was a feminist before it was cool. My grandmother, Reba. And so really having that sort of service tradition and that immigrant American dream.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is actually now of all things in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame, having never played, but having created a league for people to play and how transformative that was for a lot of people, a lot of girl, young girls to have that opportunity. So again, you know, being able to make a difference in the community certainly was a factor. It also, you know, when my opponent at the time, the incumbent Virgil Good, tried, spent a million dollars right off the bat calling me a New York lawyer, even though I'd never practiced law in New York and having those roots and having people know my family just made it silly in a way and land, I think, you know, veer off in that sense. But, you know, it was really sort of the American dream story from my dad's side on my mom's side, you know, is the Irish Catholic or Irish side. And, you know, he was a World War II veteran and a fireman and a public high school teacher and a coach.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This. Thank you of all the truths she reinforced. But that was a time, this is sort of the 80s, basically, when the understanding of how empowering it was for girls to have access to sports and every statistic shows that. So people understanding that my mom.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mom as well, you know, she'd been a teacher and financial advisor and some things, but she also started several of the girls' sports leagues in town because when my sisters were going through school, cheerleading was the only real option or basketball. I do not come from a family of tall people. I'm here to attend.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before they think about politics, right? And if you've been there, yeah, and if you've been there for people and the things they need most and certainly, you know, having a kid who's sick is right up there on the list, they assume you get their life and care about them in a way that”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, that Christmas right after I won, and as you probably recall, I lost my dad very suddenly about two months into office, so I didn't know it at the time, but it was our last Christmas together. I actually gave him a graph for Christmas of our overperformance in counties relative to the number of babies he had taken care of in those counties. And needless to say, it was a very direct correlation. And since I'd come from 34% behind in the polls to win by 127 votes, it was very easy to be able to say that he hadn't just made an impact but had made the difference. And, you know, it really is. I think it speaks to obviously what a giant of a man he was, but also in some ways how important it is to, for us all to remain rooted in community and in direct services. I think that when you are providing meaningful services to people, people think about their”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They did not, but they moved because other Italians were there and then were in and out of different odd jobs growing up, ended up working for the public service commission driven the decals to trucks that were going through West Virginia and getting to see his son become a beloved pediatrician in Charlottesville. My dad helped build and run the really the only pediatric practice for a large.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Son of immigrants. So he grew up poor and in and out of poverty in Dunbar, West Virginia outside of Charleston. A lot of Italians ended up there either for the coal mines or for the Union carbide facility.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was a great two years, and the program here at IOP has really been great. I appreciate being a part of it, and the students are brilliant. I encourage folks to come out and have an experience here in Hyde Park with your program.”
2018-04-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 237 - Tom Perriello · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source