Quotes from David Axelrod

Yet his legislative victories were possible only because of the strong Democratic majorities that Obama had helped sweep into Congress. The Republicans stuck to their game plan and refused Obama cooperation from the start, compelling him to pass every major bill on party-line votes, thus denying him the claim to bipartisanship that both the president and the country desired.

In November 2004, the last person on the planet who expected Barack Obama to run for president in 2008 was Barack Obama.

It is a fact of modern political life that when such disasters strike, even those Americans who say they believe in smaller government, or no government at all, quickly break glass and call the government, demanding relief.

Hillary: Live With It' is no rallying cry.

Local government is where the rubber hits the road. While state legislators and members of Congress are more remote, local officials are present and visible. They are the first responders of politics.

I think that more and more you're going to see people of good will on their side of the aisle say you know what, we got to get off the bus here, this is not headed in the right direction.

But obviously, we're looking for all good ideas to help deal with our long-term debt problem. This is something that is going to affect our economy. It affects our kids. And we need to deal with it.

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.

We can't have - we can't have a patchwork of 50 states developing their own immigration policy. I understand the frustration of people in Arizona. They want the federal government to step up and deal with this problem once and for all, and that's what we want to do.

I think President Obama is a committed, practicing nonideologue. He's consumed by neither tactics nor ideology. He is more concerned about outcomes than he is about process and categorizations.

Two years before the last election you nor anyone else would have predicted that Barack Obama was going to get elected president of the United States.

We've got ballots flying around, being counted by hand, arriving by truck and in God knows whose custody.

The place where we don't agree is on whether there should be some restraint on insurance companies and whether they should be allowed to run wild. We believe there should be some restraint; some on the other side don't think so.

We agree with Simpson and Bowles and others who have looked at this. What's necessary is to stabilize the debt and then work from there. You can't balance the budget in the short term because to do that would be to ratchet down the economy.

This ought to be a season for cooperation in terms of pushing our economy forward, job creation, steadying the middle class, and laying the groundwork for a better future. And that's what we want to work on with Republicans and Democrats.

We don't want to go back to the same policies and the same practices that drove our economy into a ditch, that punished the middle class, and that led us to this catastrophe. We have to keep moving forward.

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.

You know, we - if, for example, Jerry Brown can withstand, you know, what will probably end up being $200 million of spending by his opponent and get elected governor of California, that will be a big victory in the nation's largest state.

I have never believed in the Wizard of Oz theory of consulting, that I am all-knowing and all-seeing, and that everyone around me is kind of a backbencher.

Any time you have loose ballots, you have to worry about shenanigans. It's a shame such a hard-fought election has to come down to something like this.

I think the millions of people who had been able to renegotiate their mortgages so they are paying lower interest rates are better off.

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.

But we are not going to stand by and go back to allowing people with preexisting conditions to be discriminated against, go back to the situation where people can be thrown off their insurance simply because they become seriously ill or you can't get on your parents' insurance after the age of 20.

I came to the conclusion months ago, and I said it to members of Congress, that the only way people are going to fully appreciate what this reform is if we pass it and implement it and it becomes not a caricature but a reality, and I still believe that. So I think it will be easier to sell it moving forward than it was to this point.