Automobiles are so extended that you dont have to go too far out on the extension to nick those predictions. You know that by 2025 there is a mandate in california and these other states that says 3. 3 million electric vehicles minimum are going to be on the road so that is the floor and not the ceiling. We know that companies have already created their timeline for deploying certain kinds of vehicles in the technology. They have a strategic roadmap for gravy aiding their level of economy starting in 2020 moving into 2025 by which they start to have the fully autonomous systems. They will get into electric cars. It depends what you want to drive us if you this if you want to drive an electric vehicle will be about to to drive an electric vehicle. If you want a car that has a ton of capabilities you should be able to purchase a car with substantial autonomous capabilities and then some people were not offered as options in 2025 some people will still drive their Chevy Silverado pickup truck. What are the features people will have . Today we have a lot of autonomous features. You have lane keeping, dynamic Cruise Control that allows the car to slow down and speed up. 2025, they are saying that youre essentially going to be able to get in your car, program a destination and it will drive you from point a to point. This is quite a story. It starts a long time ago with henry ford and in a sense although it ends now it really ends in 2025 or 2030 as it plays out. So this is a book to take along on a trip and recommended the great race to everybody and thank you all for joining us. [inaudible conversations] now after words with David Axelrod author of believer. Mr. Axelrod served as the senior strategist for obamas president ial campaigns and a former Senior Adviser to president obama. He discusses his life and career in politics with david, former speechwriter for president george w. Bush. Host but just to jump into the most controversial passage of the book. You tell a story that has a concession call from governor romney who after the 2012 election one in which you said he was offended by what he took to the undercurrent of the compassion. One of the aids that is that it was phone on which the call took place said the story is not true and has been angry about it. How can those that were not in the room ss which of you is right . Guest there were five people standing around and several of them have already come forward and said their recollection was completely the same as mine which is that the president got off the phone and related the fact that in the course of the call had said we really surprised them with the way we were able to get the vote out in places like cleveland and milwaukee. I didnt get the sense that he was trying to be a gracious i think he was trying to pay a compliment to the campaign and it was about the different lens through which they saw the election and they thought that it boiled down to more of what happened in cleveland and milwaukee and that was the frustration. I was surprised at the reaction. I always applauded loyalty and the loyalty of governor romneys body meant that i think that he blew the thing out of proportion and as i said, i dont have any reason to believe the president got off the phone and told the five of us something that didnt happen. Host but we talk about your role in the obama white house. People who dont Pay Attention to the details may not appreciate how new a thing it is for president s to install basically a chief political adviser as a staffer. George h. W. Bush didnt put me at water on the staff, bill clinton didnt put James Carville on the white house staff. I think think you it began with president bush who did hire karl rove and president obama interested you. What does that say about our government that this trend is occurring and do you think it will continue . Guest first of all i want to distinguish my role from carl and i dont pretend to understand exactly what carls was. But i would describe my role something as two more akin to what mike did for president reagans. I am someone whos been involved with the president and his message from the beginning of the relationship in the senate race in 2004. And i worked very much with him on the message and the messaging approach to the campaigns on speeches and policy rollouts and communication and communication strategy. I dont think that is that unusual or that it began with carl army. I think it goes back sometime. What it says is that president s want someone around who understands their message and understand them and can help represent that to others in the white house so that theres some consistency and that reflects the values and the points the president wants to make. Host president obama has had an unusual relationship with the imperatives of politics. You write about that in the book. Were you there to remind him that you dont get to govern unless you get elected and you do have conflicts over the need to listen to people like you rather than for him to follow what was more ideological. Guest i think everybodys strength is their weakness. His great strength is that he believes that there are more important things than winning elections and that is once you get elected doing the things you think are important to advance the country so we often have conflicts about the need to have some of the techniques and conformity is of campaigns in his presentation. Its a good example is dressed the discipline of how you answer questions and getting your message out front and keeping the answers short and making sure that you are punching through the point. He viewed interviews, town Hall Meetings as much part of the discussion in that he wanted to answer and often times he would get to the. 7 minutes in and of that would be a frustration to me. The book is subtitled by 40 years in politics and you have candidates for whom you worked not only president obama, senator obama as he was before. One of the themes that runs through the book is you wrestle with the problem what are the ethical responsibilities of the Campaign Consultant and i will Say Something about a competitor you said that they use the tools of the trade to propel into high Office Demand that proved himself unsuited to the governor what responsibilities do you think the consultant has . Do they extend beyond just honor to the candidate, what responsibilities do they have to the general public . Guest first i should say the subhead that i wanted wanted on the book but was too long for the book cover was how my idealism survived 40 years in politics. As you know, having read the book, my interest in politics goes back to when i was 5yearsold in the john f. Kennedy came to the Little Community in which i grew up in new york and really fired my imagination. I didnt quite understand what he was saying but i knew it seemed important talking about the future of the country and everybody was watching. It just seemed very important and that was the beginning of it. So i approach politics from that place. On the other hand when you are a Campaign Consultant you hire someone out to get elected and what you try to do is choose carefully the people that you work for. But i mean, i confess here in the buck i didnt always choose right. But once you are doing the race you are job is to get the person elected into you upgrade with a certain perimeter in doing so or you should. I loved campaigns where i thought i became disillusioned with the candidate. But there are those ambiguous situations and someone is less than you hoped but not so egregious that youre going to walk away from it. I found myself persuading in my case is that whatever they were they were better than the alternative and thats how i would motivate myself to go forward. Host what happens when it turns out not to be true and im thinking of a campaign that he ran for the longest serving mayor in cleveland history. You deliver quite a negative verdict. You say i didnt keep in close touch with him after all that i knew that it lived up to its great promise. Actually the premise is interesting because it was here he first wrote to us that a lot of the themes, hope and change and division and unity that would appear in the Obama Campaign and then continued idealistic as it was governing is more difficult than campaigning and the public proved stubborn and he would be tarnished by charges that he is one of his closest friends and allies and of course cleveland was heading into trouble even before Michael White but he punished a much deeper. When you look back on that michael is the one responsible and yet he owes a great degree his career to you. Guest first of all i would put the emphasis on the word entirely. I think that he did somethings that were important for a lot of the iconic structures that have brought back down had come cleveland with the stadiums and rock and roll music and have their efforts to bring those things there and make them happen and he did other things in cleveland that were quite positive. He may have overstayed his time there and there were problems at the end involving one of his associates that i wouldnt he want to suggest that either his demise was his responsibility order she didnt do anything good for cleveland and im realistic about the fact that no one is all good or all bad or all accomplished without flaw. Thats not the way it is. I think he was idealistic. He hoped to get some important things done for the city and inspired people in an important way. So thats not one of the campaigns that i would say i was sorry. I was happy that i did that grace and i might have advised him to leave a little earlier than he did. But he did important things for cleveland. Host you rose to be one of the most important if not the most important of the democratic consultants in the state of illinois. You were there for a long period of time, generally successful. Illinois now is in a pretty rough Economic Situation rated 50th in its Credit Rating of any major city ive ever been to in the trite. He was one of the top states during the Great Recession and as it walked into this desperate situation where today guest a lot of them tied in together. The situation is one of the reasons why the state Pension System filtered down in many ways. They have their own pension issue fighting their way out of it but the states centric problems are associated with the city finances that have contributed. There is no doubt that there is a legacy and i can see the result of both republican administrations and democratic administrations making unaffordable deals with Public Employee unions. We went through the era of the two governors that went to prison and some irresponsibility expanding the states obligations. But not at the end when he got into real trouble but at the beginning. Guest i had concerns over what kind of governor he would be. He asked me if i would work with had and i said you can help me figure that out. I said if i have have to help you figure it out you shouldnt run for governor and he shouldnt. But by the loss of people many were clients of yours and i just again as you look back on the political choices do you look back on that industry that was good work or i dont know that my talents were guest of me ask you which of my clients do you think were responsible . I am curious about that. Most of the time when i was involved in the politics the governors were not my clients. The state legislative leaders were not my clients and the two that i worked for were Harold Washington who served briefly and the patronage politics of the city breaking down racial barriers and they made the face of the city in many ways that was considered a model mayor. It left some fiscal problems than proud of working for those guys so im happy to respond if you have a particular politician you think was responsible for the states problems but imperious who that would be. Host i think it is the handiwork of many and as i look back on it how does one because the state is the other part of that is my candidate paul simon who has the essence of integrity so i chose my clients carefully. I knew the landscape and i chose my candidates but he carefully. Host it is to suggest they are less ethical than other parts of the United States is that a slur is that capture a genuine problem . Guest . But institutionalized corruption is not the problem that it was at but it was at times in history but weve had problems with production and one of the reasons i am so gravitated to barack obama is because he was on the reform side of the fight in the Campaign Finance reform bill that had been passed in illinois and a quarter of the century and they may have been involved in the previous one. It made it illegal to take campaign contributions. You could raise money and use it as your own personal income if you pay taxes on it and he ended that practice so illinois and chicago has had its problems and then people come along and try to address them. Those are people i try to gravitated to. Host she ended up being afraid of medicaid and went to a prison. Guest other than in the course of a campaign was accused of medicaid fraud. He was an interesting person because im the one on the one hand he was one of the most powerful people in washington and i dont know anybody that relished the process working across party lines. Up to eight or nine president s and loved it. On the other hand he got prosecuted for what i consider unconscionable stuff like caching and stamps which may have been government issued stamps that might have been the practice in the 1950s but the norms have changed and he didnt host if its true there something in chicago and illinois, what is it . Is that the great transportation hub so there is money that didnt belong to local people and it could be siphoned off without feeling like you were taking from your constituents . Guest i dont know what the sociology of that led to some of the corruption problems endemic to illinois at times of our history and im not willing to say that there are other states and localities in the country that havent experienced some of the same. I do think that things are much different now in the city in particular. We dont have a vast patronage machine we once had. I havent heard anything about rahm emanuel trying to promote the interest of the city. I think you would do a disservice to say there is corruption in the city and other cities it doesnt define the city that i know. An artist or writer there are themes that run through your campaign. The phrase was change and hope before you changed it to hope and change some of the economic inclusion and those are dealing with issues of our time but also your approach to things and they all converged in the work you did with president obama. How much of the campaign was waiting in your head for him ex guest how is it that we came together. Ive known burdock obama for some odd years. I was introduced by a progressive politics in chicago. She said i think he could be the first africanamerican president of the United States. This is just when he returned from law school. I always take videos with the track because she can spot a winner well in advance but what i found is we shared the same sensibilities. Hed been president of the harvard law review. Hed been a Community Organizer and it was very clear to me that he was someone who wanted to make a difference. We became friends and in 2002 when i became disillusioned because i saw that he was going to get elected its what i consider to be a cynical campaign. I am wondering whether i wanted to continue doing what i was doing and. We shared a lot of sensibilities about politics, the issue of the approach to politics. I think it was a little of both of what he brought and i thought that it was a really Productive Partnership and it helped animate the message and my view when youre building a Campaign Message if it is going to be successful it has to be authentic and who someone is. Barack obama from the time that he was working as a Community Organizer before he went to law school, somebody that cares about how the economy work and it didnt work with large numbers of people in and he wanted to have an impact on that and believed politics was a noble calling to have hopes rather than their fears and someone who saw a change as something to embrace. It reflected her he was the at their there are moments. Isnt it time to be the . I believe it is a way to grab the wheel of history and turn it in a positive. I think it was a happy partnership between two people that shared a sensibility. The great defining crane has been the american middle class frustrated by the increasing difficulty of getting ahead and even maintaining this position. The struggling with world war ii after these people just continue to stay in the same position in society you got better and better off you didnt have to be anybody special in order to get better off and guest wages rose with the gdp. Thats been the arena that you play politics. Theres a big article you may have seen. Democratic leaning writer detailed to speak to a loved the campaign thinking. He suggested that he may have oversold his argument and there is an advantage based on the disillusionment of the voters with an experience of the past six years. This isnt a homework assignment the mobility has been pulsing through for decades and its created disenchantment against whoever the incumbent party is because it is a constant theme of the forces larger than policy. So, they require some policy answers but it is a function of the changes in our economy of fast advancing technology and globalization. We see the same issues in other advanced economies and so, you know, it has been a persistent theme in our politics and it continues to be a challenge into each succeeding party has borne some of the brunt of the disenchantment about it but obviously we just came through a massive economic crisis that was in full theory when Obama Took Office that helped exacerbate the problem. It depressed wages even further and made the problem of disparity even greater. So we have come through some tough years. I think though if you ask the average person who is