Quotes from David Axelrod

I haven't given up on working... across the aisle on issues and maybe it'll take an election or two for that to fully ferment, maybe it you know sometimes it takes awhile for people to realize what the best path is.

I think that the millions and millions of young Americans, young Americans, who have health care today, who wouldn't have had it if the president hadn't acted are better off.

But you say, does it represent change? The change is that we are fighting an insurance industry that has killed health reform for generations. They're spending tens of millions of dollars right now to defeat this bill, and we're on the doorstep of winning a great victory for the American people.

No one wants to go back to a situation where, if you have a pre-existing medical condition, you, you can be deprived of coverage. No one wants to go back to a situation where, if you get seriously ill, you can get thrown off your insurance. Seniors don't want to go back to paying more for their prescription drugs.

Listen, I have a great affection and respect for Joe Biden. I think he's been a great vice president. He's taken on a lot of tough assignments for our administration.

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.

As the old saying goes, "Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.

We must build bridges to the future, not the past.

A year earlier, I had described campaigns to reporters as "like an MRI for the soul—whoever you are, eventually people find out.

So, on the day after we lost Ted Kennedy's seat, when everyone in town was reading last rites over our health care bill, Obama began plotting the miracle of its resurrection.

I don't know if history has a sense of justice. But it certainly has a sense of humor.

campaign in poetry and govern in prose"—and

You won the Nobel Peace Prize," he said. "Are you kidding me?" "I promise you, sir, that I wouldn't wake you up to play a joke," Gibbs replied. "You've won the Nobel Peace Prize." "Gee," Obama said, absorbing the unlikely news. "All I want to do is pass health care.

And because they're not, when disaster strikes, it tears the curtain away from these festering problems . . . and black and white, all of us should be concerned to make sure that's not the kind of America that's reflected on our television screens.

Gibbs was assigned to roust the president. I had left my room so hastily that my hair was standing straight up in the air. When Obama arrived, perfectly groomed, and saw me, he also saw his perfect, unwitting foil. "Axe, I see you decided to dress up as Kim Jong-Il for the occasion," he said, a reference to the North Korean leader with the famously bizarre hairstyle.

he said. "I remember very well. Because of our student loans, Michelle and I could never catch up. So, some months, we paid our bills with credit cards. I went to refinance our condo and I was kind of surprised when they said, 'You can get cash, too.' So all of a sudden, my condo is worth fifty thousand dollars more and I can take forty thousand dollars in cash as a loan? I did it, but it seemed too good to be true. It was a racket.

I'm looking at the U.S. Senate in 2004," he said. "I promised Michelle that if I did it, this would be up or out for me. If it doesn't work, I'm going to have to go out and make a living.

career. Why didn't he wait and run for mayor after Daley was done? Barack would be the perfect candidate to bridge the city's divides.

Whether I am the candidate for the presidency, or president, or stay in the Senate, I regard our obligation not to please you but to serve you, and in my judgment, in 1960, a candidate for the presidency should be willing to give the truth to the people, and the truth is that what we are now doing is not good enough.

When incumbents step down, voters rarely opt for a replica of what they have, even when that outgoing leader is popular. They almost always choose change over the status quo. They want successors whose strengths address the perceived weaknesses in the departing leader.

There are people that who want to be someone and there are people that want to do something.

I said that certain West Coast jazz was like "wet dream music." That's a great line, isn't it? You knew something happened when you woke up but you got no satisfaction!

His book was a bestseller, and by the end of the year, he had signed a lucrative deal to write three more.

in January 2003, Barack Obama was just a small speedboat trying to launch before some battleship came along and capsized his ambitions.