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MIKE ALLEN
White House senior adviser David Axelrod, speaking on C-SPAN's "Newsmakers," interviewed by C-SPAN's Steve Scully, The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut and The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib:
-- On his closed-door clash with Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who argued that President Barack Obama should have taken a more insistent role on health reform: "We had a very good exchange. He expressed his feelings about this. I thought [I] responded very candidly to him. And it was a good airing of views. ... I think people would like the president to ... snap fingers and finish this out. We have a system: You have to have a certain number of votes to pass a bill. ... And it is not something that you can do by command or by ordinance of the president of the United States. It takes some work, and we're working through it. I'm encouraged by what I see."
Axelrod invoked Stuart Smalley, a lisping self-help guru that Franken used to play on "Saturday Night Live": "At the end of it, as I was watching Sen. Franken, I thought to myself: However this turns out, I'm good, I'm smart, and doggone it, people like me.' So I was OK with it." Smalley YouTube
-- On the administration's handling of accused terrorists: "This isn't new. We haven't invested anybody with one more right than they had before we took office. And we're actually not behaving any differently than the last administration did. Which raises the question: Is this about politics, or is it really about dealing with the issue at hand?"
-- On differences, reported in The New Yorker, between Attorney General Eric Holder and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, on the method of trying Sept. 11 conspirators: "Rahm ... looks at things from a legislative perspective. He looks at it from other perspectives. The attorney general was ruling on his view of what the law commanded. ... Believe me, we have disagreements all the time within the White House, within the administration. That's as it should be."
-- On the tea party movement: "There is a sense that this town is consumed by politics, that people are consumed by their own ambitions and that we're not dealing with the real problems facing this country including -- yes -- the deficits. ... People who are involved now in the tea party movement are expressing their frustration about that. And I think politicians of both parties in this town have to understand that frustration."
-- On the White House's tougher tone with Republicans, starting around the State of the Union: "It became apparent because of this habitual use of the filibuster -- because every appointment was being put on hold, and so on -- that political mischief was making it difficult to solve the problems of the country. And we felt that we had to penetrate that, in order to move forward. We would be more than happy to work together with people from both parties to solve problems, and that's what we're trying to encourage. But what we can't do is be governing while the other party is simply running a campaign -- an election campaign."
-- On what has surprised him in his job: "What surprises me is that everything I've said about Washington for 30 years turns out to be true. But I still remain confident that we can improve that -- we can change that. I know the president's committed to that and that we can really pull together here and solve some problems."
