Axelrod Quotes

You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-You-Are? You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and say, "Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness." You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you're terrified somebody's going to stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somaliland. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

Based upon the tournament results and the formal propositions, four simple suggestions are offered for individual choice: do not be envious of the other player’s success; do not be the first to defect; reciprocate both cooperation and defection; and do not be too clever.

But history is replete with potential candidates for the presidency who waited too long rather than example of people who ran too soon." - David Axelrod

Richard: You really like it, don't you. Gabrielle: What? Richard: Life. Gabrielle: Oh! Every morning when I wake up and I see there's a whole new other day, I just go absolutely ape!

Axelrod argues that tit for tat embodies four principles that should be present in any effective strategy for the repeated prisoners’ dilemma: clarity, niceness, provocability, and forgivingness.

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

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.

In your defence, it's been a long day and you've had a lot to drink.

Hate is nature's most perfect energy source. It's endlessly renewable.

What accounts for TIT FOR TAT’s robust success is its combination of being nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear. Its

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

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

When the players will never meet again, the strategy of defection is the only stable strategy.

Winter in Pennsylvania was bleak, but still there was something beautiful in its nearly silent emptiness.

And I thought about how easy it was to view someone else’s future in a way that was so optimistic and full of hope. Why did it feel impossible to do the same about my own?

Because meetings involve people, things can and will go wrong. Provide first aid when necessary.

What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that the players might meet again

Opportunity has a way of popping up without warning or planning. Always helpful were a good banker, good advice, good credit, and good karma. Knock on wood.

Axelrod responded, "All we can do is everything we can do.

An outgoing president nearly always defines the next elections, Axelrod wrote, and people almost never seek a replica - certainly not after the presidency of George W. Bush.

Congress is going to meet with you or without you, I tell them. Don’t turn away in disgust and leave those decisions to someone else. You don’t like politics today? Grab the wheel of history and steer us to a better place. Run for office. Be a strategist or policy aide. Work for a government agency or a nonprofit. Become a thoughtful, probing journalist. Get in the arena. Help shape the world in which you’re going to live. At a minimum, be the engaged citizen a healthy democracy demands.

And this was something I would always wonder about—how the lines were drawn to define mental illness. When did a little depression become pathological? When did anxiety turn into something bigger, something greater and more cautionary about your own stability?

It will take so long for you to understand this, but you can’t punish yourself for someone else’s pain. You have to learn to separate, to draw boundaries. It’s the hardest thing, loving your mother. It’s the most profound and heartbreaking, the most important, love of my life. But I also couldn’t let it define me. I had another daughter. I had grandchildren. I had my own sense of self. And now I have Saul too.

Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

An excerpt from “Recess Theory,” by Axelrod MacMurray: We need to be happy in order to be productive. We need to push the boundaries of the workplace and allow adults to tap into their inner child in order to maximize success and innovation. It is important for the adult employee to be given time to be social in an unstructured and creative way during the work day and it is incumbent upon managers to foster this. The focus of the play should not have a goal. Used properly in the workplace, an hour of playtime will ultimately increase your output exponentially.

Gabrielle: When I was a little girl, on Sunday mornings, if I'd been good, I was allowed to feed the giraffes. Richard: Giraffes! Don't tell me that you had giraffes too? Gabrielle: You mean you... Richard: But of course we did Gabrielle: Oh what fun. Both of us having had giraffes as children.

Some books are like chewing gum. They have just enough flavour to sate you for an hour or so. Others are like gourmet meals. Meticulously crafted with complex flavours that - while exciting during consumption - leave only a vague memory behind. The best books are like old recipes, passed down through generations. They stick with you long after the last bite. You want to return to them again and again, because they become a part of who you are. I want to write those.

I don't see how My Fair Lady and Frankenstein are the same. Oh, wait a minute. Yes I do.

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

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.

campaign in poetry and govern in prose”—and

Beat a Pan, Save a Man

under suitable conditions, cooperation can indeed emerge in a world of egoists without central authority. To

Occasionally, I’d notice I’d lost a whole day to a book; even when I stepped outside for a walk, I was still having conversations with the characters in my mind.

Reciprocity is certainly not a good basis for a morality of aspiration. Yet it is more than just the morality of egoism. It

With [Columbus'] sailors ready to revolt, land--as if cued by a hack playwright--suddenly materialized at the horizon on October 12, 1492.

I called Daniel, promised myself that if he picked up I wouldn’t see Phil. But Daniel didn’t answer, and I texted Phil back right away.

Maybe he was just really in love with her, despite her illness, and wanted to be with her.

I groaned. “I hate that. I hate girls who hate girls.

(that was so the kind of thing she would do, not smoke a joint, but a blunt).

That he had a beard seemed like some symbol of his manliness. I tried to control the impulse to compare Daniel and Phil, but it was difficult.

The great enforcer of morality in commerce is the continuing relationship, the

How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult—what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be—if you are not!

The Cooperation Theory that is presented in this book is based upon an investigation of individuals who pursue their own self-interest without the aid of a central authority to force them to cooperate with each other.

What did that mean? I analyzed it from a hundred different angles. A smile seemed so loaded. Had my mother recognized him? Was she happy? Or was she lost, and smiling at a faraway thought in her head? Was it a simple,

A bowl of pistachio nuts sat on the coffee table and I took a handful, tried to crack the shells open into my lap. Daniel took the tough ones and pried them open with his teeth, lovingly spitting the meat into my palms.

I felt as though I might be sick and I wondered if this was the moment that I’d look back on and know, irrefutably, that everything had changed. I wished that I could’ve somehow held onto and savored the ordinariness of the past few days.

He got into the tub and ran a little cold water. Then he lowered his thin, hairy body into the just-right warmth and stared at the interstices between the tiles. Sadness--he had experienced that emotion ten thousand times. As exhalation is to inhalation, he thought of it as the return from each thrust of happiness. Lazily soaping himself, he gave examples. When he was five and Irwin eight, their father had breezed into town with a snowstorm and come to see them where they lived with their grandparents in the small Connecticut city. Their father had been a vagabond salesman and was considered a bum by people who should know. But he had come into the closed, heated house with all the gimcrack and untouchable junk behind glass and he had smelled of cold air and had had snow in his curly black hair. He had raved about the world he lived in, while the old people, his father and mother, had clucked sadly in the shadows. And then he had wakened the boys in the night and forced them out into the yard to worship the swirling wet flakes, to dance around with their hands joined, shrieking at the snow-laden branches. Later, they had gone in to sleep with hearts slowly returning to bearable beatings. Great flowering things had opened and closed in Norman's head, and the resonance of the wild man's voice had squeezed a sweet, tart juice through his heart. But then he had wakened to a gray day with his father gone and the world walking gingerly over the somber crust of dead-looking snow. It had taken him some time to get back to his usual equanimity. He slid down in the warm, foamy water until just his face and his knobby white knees were exposed. Once he had read Wuthering Heights over a weekend and gone to school susceptible to any heroine, only to have the girl who sat in front of him, whom he had admired for some months, emit a loud fart which had murdered him in a small way and kept him from speaking a word to anyone the whole week following. He had laughed at a very funny joke about a Negro when Irwin told it at a party, and then the following day had seen some white men lightly kicking a Negro man in the pants, and temporarily he had questioned laughter altogether. He had gone to several universities with the vague exaltation of Old Man Axelrod and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness. He had come to take shallower breaths, and the two had become mercifully mixed into melancholy contentment. He wondered how pain would breach that low-level strength. "I'm a small man of definite limitations," he declared to himself, and relaxed in the admission.

You know, they say that a boy never really becomes a man until he’s buried his father. Now, mine has been dead to me since the moment he walked out when I was 12 years old. I don’t remember if I cried, but I do remember that I was forced to grow the fuck up.

...Axelrod also pointed out that TIT FOR TAT interactions lead to cooperation in the natural world even without the benefit of intelligence. Examples include lichens, in which a fungus extracts nutrients from the underlying rock while providing a home for algae that in turn provide the fungus with photosynthesis; the ant-acacia tree, which houses and feeds a type of ant that in turn protects the tree; and the fig tree whose flowers serve as food for fig wasps that in turn pollinate the flowers and scatter the seeds.

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.

I spend a lot of time with young people now, bright, public-spirited kids from across the political spectrum who give me hope for the future...They want to have an impact, but they're not sure that politics is a viable path on which to do that. Congress is going to meet with you or without you, I tell them. Don't turn away in disgust and leave those decisions to someone else. You don't like politics today? Grab the wheel of history and steer us to a better place. Run for office. Be a strategist or policy aide. Work for a government agency or a non-profit. Become a thoughtful, probing journalist. Get in the arena. Help shape the world in which you're going to live. At a minimum, be the engaged citizen a healthy democracy demands.

It was this situation that led mathematician Chris Hauert and his colleagues to consider another possibility in an important evolutionary model published in Science in 2002. In Axelrod's study and in most previous theoretical models, individuals were forced to interact with each other. But what if they could choose not to interact? Rather than attempting to cooperate and risking being taken advantage of, a person could fend for herself. In other words, she could sever her connections to others in the network. Hauert called the people who adopt this strategy "loners." Using some beautiful mathematics, Hauert and his colleagues showed that in a world full of loners it is easy for cooperation to evolve because there are no people to take advantage of the cooperators that appear. The loners fend for themselves, and the cooperators form networks with other cooperators. Soon, the cooperators take over the population because they always do better together than the loners. But once the world is full of cooperators, it is very easy for free riders to evolve and enjoy the fruits of cooperation without contributing (like parasites). As the free riders become the dominant type in the population, there is no one left for them to take advantage of; then, the loners once again take over -- because they want nothing to do, as it were, with those bastards. In short, cooperating can emerge because we can do more together than we can apart. But because of the free-rider problem, cooperation is not guaranteed to succeed.

A Historia me chupa inteiro, a lingua porejando sangue goza filhinho, sim dona Historia, vou indo, estou cheio de ideias, tenho duvidas, tenho gozo rapidos e agudos, vou te apalpando agora, o povo me olha, o povo quer muito de mim, gosto do povo, devo ser o povo, devo ser um unico e harmonico povo-ovo, devo morrer pelo povo, adentrado nele, devo rugir e ser um so com o povo, Axelrod-povo, Axelroad-coesao, virulência, Axelroad-filho do povo, HISTORIA-POVO, janto com meus pais, sopa de proletariado, paezinhos mencheviques, engulo o monopolio, emocionado bebo a revoluçao, lendo vou dirigindo o intelecto, mas estou faminto, estarei sempre faminto, cago o capitalismo, o lucro, a bolsa de titulos, e ainda estou faminto, ô meu deus, eu me quero a mim, o ossudo seco, eu. Aos vinte temos muitas certezas e depois so duvidas, certeza de nada eu tenho exceçao. Aos vinte pontifiquei, tinha orgulho danado, um visual pretensamento sabio como?

Earlier that morning I’d been flipping through the pages of Anna Karenina, and I came across this sentence toward the end: But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable. There was such a comfort in those words. Yes, it was impossible to control whom I loved and why, and just as my family had no choice but to love my mother, I had not chosen whatever complicated feelings I felt for Daniel or Phil. There was nothing to be done about that. All I could do was try my best to navigate through the tangled mess of loss and longing.

In fact, the fourteen programs submitted in the first round of the tournament embodied a variety of complex strategies. But much to the astonishment of Axelrod and everyone else, the crown went to the simplest strategy of all: TIT FOR TAT. Submitted by psychologist Anatol Rapoport of the University of Toronto, TIT FOR TAT would start out by cooperating on the first move, and from there on out would do exactly what the other program had done on the move before. That is, the TIT FOR TAT strategy incorporated the essence of the carrot and the stick. It was "nice" in the sense that it would never defect first. It was "forgiving" in the sense that it would reward good behavior by cooperating the next time. And yet it was "tough" in the sense that it would punish uncooperative behavior by defecting the next time. Moreover, it was "clear" in the sense that its strategy was so simple that the opposing programs could easily figure out what they were dealing with. Of course, with only a handful of programs entered in the tournament, there was always the possibility that TIT FOR TAT's success was a fluke. But maybe not. Of the fourteen programs submitted, eight were "nice" and would never defect first. And every one of them easily outperformed the six not-nice rules. So to settle the question Axelrod held a second round of the tournament, specifically inviting people to try to knock TIT FOR TAT off its throne. Sixty-two entrants tried-and TIT FOR TAT won again. The conclusion was inescapable. Nice guys-or more precisely, nice, forgiving, tough, and clear guys-can indeed finish first.

On the first day I walked into Simon’s bustling headquarters, just across from City Hall, I encountered an intense young fund-raiser sitting in an open cubicle, working his quarry over the phone. Curious, I stopped to watch the spectacle. “Five hundred bucks? Five hundred bucks! You know what you’re telling me? You don’t give a shit about Israel,” the intense, wiry young man shouted at God knows which mover and shaker on the other end of the line. “I’d be embarrassed for you to take your five hundred bucks.” The kid hung up and stared at the phone, which rang an instant later. “Yeah, that’s better,” he said, in a markedly calmer tone. “Thanks.” Even at twenty-four, Rahm Emanuel had a gift for getting his point across, a quality I would see on display many times as we teamed up in the decades to come.

Throughout my years with Obama, I publicly deflected questions about whether the vehemence of his opposition was rooted in race. “I’m sure some people voted for the president because he is black and some people voted against him because he is black,” I would say, with the authority of one who had spent a lifetime working with minority candidates to knock down racial barriers that blocked higher offices. “The election of the first black president was a dramatic step forward for America, not a magic healing elixir.” I simply didn’t want to fuel the discussion or appear to be setting the president up as a victim. Still, the truth is undeniable. No other president has seen his citizenship openly and persistently questioned. Never before has a president been interrupted in the middle of a national address by a congressman screaming, “You lie!” Some folks simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of the first black president and are seriously discomforted by the growing diversity of our country. And some craven politicians and right-wing provocateurs have been more than

Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Adventure tales offering superb insight into solitude, both its horror and its beauty, include The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and Alone by Richard E. Byrd. Science-focused books that provided me with further understanding of how solitude affects people include Social by Matthew D. Lieberman, Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Quiet by Susan Cain, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. Also offering astute ideas about aloneness are Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie, The Life of Saint Anthony by Saint Athanasius, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”) and Friedrich Nietzsche (especially “Man Alone with Himself”), the verse of William Wordsworth, and the poems of Han-shan, Shih-te, and Wang Fan-chih. It was essential for me to read two of Knight’s favorite books: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Very Special People by Frederick Drimmer. This book’s epigraph, attributed to Socrates, comes from the C. D. Yonge translation of Diogenes Laërtius’s third-century A.D. work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. The Hermitary website, which offers hundreds of articles on every aspect of hermit life, is an invaluable resource—I spent weeks immersed in the site, though I did not qualify to become a member of the hermit-only chat groups. My longtime researcher, Jeanne Harper, dug up hundreds of reports on hermits and loners throughout history. I was fascinated by the stories of Japanese soldiers who continued fighting World War II for decades on remote Pacific islands, though none seemed to be completely alone for more than a few years at a time. Still, Hiroo Onoda’s No Surrender is a fascinating account.

He ran long at the White House, and arrived late to his next meeting with Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan and Frank Ruggiero—their first major strategy session on Taliban talks after the secret meeting with A-Rod. She was waiting in her outer office, a spacious room paneled in white and gilt wood, with tasseled blue and pink curtains and an array of colorfully upholstered chairs and couches. In my time reporting to her later, I only ever saw Clinton take the couch, with guests of honor in the large chair kitty-corner to her. She’d left it open for him that day. “He came rushing in. . . . ” Clinton later said. “And, you know, he was saying ‘oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ ” He sat down heavily and shrugged off his coat, rattling off a litany of his latest meetings, including his stop-in at the White House. “That was typical Richard. It was, like, ‘I’m doing a million things and I’m trying to keep all the balls in the air,’ ” she remembered. As he was talking, a “scarlet red” flush went up his face, according to Clinton. He pressed his hands over his eyes, his chest heaving. “Richard, what’s the matter?” Clinton asked. “Something horrible is happening,” he said. A few minutes later, Holbrooke was in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney, headed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where Clinton had told her own internist to prepare the emergency room. In his typically brash style, he’d demanded that the ambulance take him to the more distant Sibley Memorial Hospital. Clinton overruled him. One of our deputies on the SRAP team, Dan Feldman, rode with him and held his hand. Feldman didn’t have his BlackBerry, so he scrawled notes on a State Department expense form for a dinner at Meiwah Restaurant as Holbrooke dictated messages and a doctor assessed him. The notes are a nonlinear stream of Holbrooke’s indomitable personality, slashed through with medical realities. “Call Eric in Axelrod’s office,” the first read. Nearby: “aortic dissection—type A . . . operation risk @ > 50 percent”—that would be chance of death. A series of messages for people in his life, again interrupted by his deteriorating condition: “S”—Secretary Clinton—“why always together for medical crises?” (The year before, he’d been with Clinton when she fell to the concrete floor of the State Department garage, fracturing her elbow.) “Kids—how much love them + stepkids” . . . “best staff ever” . . . “don’t let him die here” . . . “vascular surgery” . . . “no flow, no feeling legs” . . . “clot” . . . and then, again: “don’t let him die here want to die at home w/ his fam.” The seriousness of the situation fully dawning on him, Holbrooke turned to job succession: “Tell Frank”—Ruggiero—“he’s acting.” And finally: “I love so many people . . . I have a lot left to do . . . my career in public service is over.” Holbrooke cracked wise until they put him under for surgery. “Get me anything you need,” he demanded. “A pig’s heart. Dan’s heart.

The conditions for the evolution of cooperation tell what is necessary, but do not, by themselves, tell what strategies will be most successful. For this question, the tournament approach has offered striking evidence in favor of the robust success of the simplest of all discriminating strategies: TIT FOR TAT. By cooperating on the first move, and then doing whatever the other player did on the previous move, TIT FOR TAT managed to do well with a wide variety of more or less sophisticated decision rules. It not only won the first round of the Computer Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament when facing entries submitted by professional game theorists, but it also won the second round which included over sixty entries designed by people who were able to take the results of the first round into account. It was also the winner in five of the six major variants of the second round (and second in the sixth variant). And most impressive, its success was not based only upon its ability to do well with strategies which scored poorly for themselves. This was shown by an ecological analysis of hypothetical future rounds of the tournament. In this simulation of hundreds of rounds of the tournament, TIT FOR TAT again was the most successful rule, indicating that it can do well with good and bad rules alike. TIT FOR TAT’s robust success is due to being nice, provocable, forgiving, and clear. Its niceness means that it is never the first to defect, and this property prevents it from getting into unnecessary trouble. Its retaliation discourages the other side from persisting whenever defection is tried. Its forgiveness helps restore mutual cooperation. And its clarity makes its behavioral pattern easy to recognize; and once recognized, it is easy to perceive that the best way of dealing with TIT FOR TAT is to cooperate with it.

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!

Dialogues build strong links when they are about things that matter.

Personal connection builds trust;connection to the task builds energy.

The first question to ask about your next meeting; is this meeting really necessary?

Having clear decision rules saves heartburn later.

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

[It] strikes me that my morning walks are like Post-it Notes to myself, the kind my mom put on my bathroom mirror when I was a kid. Unlike hers, they convey no information—no went to Star Market, no clean up your room. They just say: look around, go slowly, feel yourself a part of something bigger than yourself. Such a Post-it on my bathroom mirror would make me cringe. But to write and read it by walking just feels practical. Without the walk, I feel as though I’ve forgotten to do something important, something without which the rest of my day will go sideways. At bottom, maybe that’s what prayer is. A kind of note to yourself, with your God looking on, written in your religion’s handwriting, to remind you of whatever you think you need to be reminded of—to remind you how to live a better life. Maybe all the major religions knew that how you started your day would effectively be a prayer anyway, that whatever you do every morning, whatever frame you give to your day, effectively becomes what you worship.

Dwight David Eisenhower never led a single soldier into battle. Before World War II, he had never even heard a shot fired in anger. His only “combat wound” was the bad knee, weakened by a West Point football injury, that he twisted helping push a jeep out of the Normandy mud. Yet it was Ike Eisenhower who, as supreme Allied commander in Europe, was responsible for leading the greatest military enterprise in history.

The ads on the subway kiosk that featured life-size photographs of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, the words think different emblazoned beside a little white apple, as though Einstein and Picasso had time-traveled to 1999 and derived their genius from a computer, as though the gateway to a unique way of seeing was looking at the world through a screen. I felt like a wild animal who’d mistakenly wandered into the zoo. A born believer who’d wandered into a culture of heretics.

The morning was beautiful. The whole Hudson River Valley was beautiful. I thought of the last page of The Great Gatsby, the green land flowering before the Dutch sailors’ eyes, that last moment, Fitzgerald wrote, when man was face to face with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder. I thought of Dirk’s inadvertent similarity to Gatsby—the unused rooms of his house, the twenty-two televisions, which were maybe the convenient, modern stand-in for glittering parties, and I wondered what part of the past he was trying to recapture. I wondered if it was similar to the feeling of community my parents were trying to recapture every time they drove through Newburgh. And I wondered if it was similar to what I was trying to recapture by living in the woods, just in my own solitary way.

There was only that fathomless void of what her father had felt losing his father, and of what she had felt losing hers. She apologized for crying. There was a tremendous loneliness in her, so beyond her daily concerns, which I’d never imagined she had. An otherness from everything else in the world. It wasn’t that I’d still thought of her as an extension of me, the way so many children think of their mothers, but I’d assumed she still thought of me as an extension of her. Most of the time, for better or for worse, that’s how she acted. But there was this other part. A part of her, because her father was waiting there, already tending towards the beyond. And I suppose it was the first time I knew, really knew, my mother would die. Her father had passed on that forever to her, and some day she would pass on that forever to me. She wouldn’t be there to answer a call from the hospital, or be there for me not to call from the woods. That’s what death was—no matter the love that had preceded it, there would be no answer, no possibility of an answer, forever.

I understand that, for you, hunting has been a tradition passed on from generation to generation,” Obama said. “Your father probably took you out at dawn to hunt, like his dad did with him. And now, you’re doing the same with your own kids. But where I come from, mothers sit by the window, anxiously waiting for their kids to come home from school, hoping they don’t get shot in some gang crossfire. There has to be a way we can find to both preserve your traditions and save our children.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I deeply admire the president’s determination to defy the small, poll-driven politics of our day to tackle big things. However, the gap between the singular focus of the campaign and his varied and ambitious agenda afterward undoubtedly sapped some of his political strength, leaving Americans wondering if he was truly focused on their concerns. You can’t take politics entirely out of the process. I don’t speak with the president as much anymore. With the campaigns over, our once-frequent conversations have slowed to a trickle. I miss them. And when I hear the thundering hooves of the Washington pundits and pols on a stampede to run him down, I feel for him. Hell, I bleed for him. The brutal midterm election of 2014 was another painful rebuke. Yet I know this: There are people who are alive today because of the health coverage he made possible. There are soldiers home with their families instead of halfway across the world. There are hundreds of thousands of autoworkers on the assembly line who would have been idled but for him, and the overall economy is in better shape than it has been in years. There are folks who are getting improved deals from their banks and mortgage lenders thanks to new rules in place and a new cop on the beat. There are gay and lesbian Americans who are, for the first time, free to defend their country without having to lie about who they are. There are women who have greater legal recourse when they’re paid less than the man doing the exact same job alongside them. There are families who can afford to send their kids to college because there is more aid available. Oh, and yes . . . just as he predicted in my conference room back in those wonderful, heady days when we first considered an audacious run for the presidency, millions of kids in our country today can dream bigger dreams because Barack Obama has blazed the trail for them.

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

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.

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.

Elections are like winning the semifinals. They just give you the opportunity to make a difference. What we did last night? That’s what really matters.

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

filler. Barack viewed speeches as carefully constructed arguments.

The late fall afternoon had filled the house with a heaviness of waiting.

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.

Pfleger, the fiery, white Catholic priest of St. Sabina

In his first two years in the White House, Obama accomplished more than any president since LBJ. Not only did he staunch the bleeding of an economy on the brink of disaster and pass health care reform, but he also saved the American auto industry, passed landmark Wall Street reform, raised fuel efficiency standards in cars and trucks, struck down the ban on gays in the military, expanded college aid and reformed student loans, paved the way for new clean energy sources, and passed the Lilly Ledbetter Law to combat pay discrimination against women. He also began to make good on ending America’s longest-running wars, negotiated a new arms control treaty, and rallied the world behind withering sanctions that would bring Iran to

This is the way it is with all people, I’ve learned. A person’s strengths almost always have a flip side. Obama’s strengths are prodigious, but he’s not perfect or exempt from blame for some of the disappointments I hear expressed about him ever more frequently these days. The day after the Affordable Care Act passed, a slightly hungover but very happy president walked into my office to reflect on the momentous events of the night before. “Not used to martinis on work nights,” he said with a smile, as he flopped down on the couch across from my desk, still bearing the effects of the late-night celebration he hosted for the staff after the law was passed. “I honestly was more excited last night than I was the night I was elected. Elections are like winning the semifinals. They just give you the opportunity to make a difference. What we did last night? That’s what really matters.” That attitude and approach is what I admire most about Obama, the thing that makes him stand apart. For him, politics and elections are only vehicles, not destinations. They give you the chance to serve. To Obama’s way of thinking, far worse than losing an election is squandering the opportunity to make the biggest possible difference once you get the chance to govern. That’s what allowed him to say “damn the torpedoes” and dive fearlessly into health care reform, despite the obvious political risks. It is why he was able to make many other tough calls when the prevailing political wisdom would have had him punt and wait for another chance with the ball. Yet there is the flip side to that courage and commitment. Obama has limited patience or understanding for officeholders whose concerns are more parochial—which would include most of Congress and many world leaders. “What are they so afraid of?” he asked after addressing the Senate Democrats on health reform, though the answer seemed readily apparent: losing their jobs in the next election! He has aggravated more than one experienced politician by telling them why acting boldly not only was their duty but also served their political needs. Whether it’s John Boehner or Bibi Netanyahu, few practiced politicians appreciate being lectured on where their political self-interest lies. That hint of moral superiority and disdain for politicians who put elections first has hurt Obama as negotiator, and it’s why Biden, a politician’s politician, has often had better luck.

The discrimination of others may be among the most important of abilities because it allows one to handle interactions with many individuals without having to treat them all the same, thus making possible the rewarding of cooperation from one individual and the punishing of defection from another.

In his first two years in the White House, Obama accomplished more than any president since LBJ. Not only did he staunch the bleeding of an economy on the brink of disaster and pass health care reform, but he also saved the American auto industry, passed landmark Wall Street reform, raised fuel efficiency standards in cars and trucks, struck down the ban on gays in the military, expanded college aid and reformed student loans, paved the way for new clean energy sources, and passed the Lilly Ledbetter Law to

All we can do is everything we can do. (David Axelrod)

Chanukah; It's a miracle anyone can spell it!

When you wake up the next morning and see a bag filled with stale pieces of bread, a candle, a wooden spoon, and a feather, you may be wondering what you did last night and weather anyone got hurt [Note: This is some strange Jewish custom].

This is a deeply, deeply polarized country not just by party but by class,” David Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Obama, told me. While Obama’s attention to nuance and emphasis on diplomacy was seen by many as a strength after the bellicose, black-and-white W., Axelrod said, now some find those qualities a weakness and yearn for a strongman. “There

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.

As Obama used to say all the time,” Axelrod says, “ ‘This shit would be really interesting if we weren’t right in the middle of it.

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.

Time magazine’s Jay Carney and Richard Stengel are now in government while Obama aides David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs are commentators on MSNBC.