And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN, the Axviles, with your

host, David Axelrod.

I first met Shayla Murray when she was assigned to Cover the Obama campaign in 2008 for the

Washington Post and was with us throughout much of that incredible journey and filed some

of the most insightful pieces on the race, not always ones I liked, but always ones I respected.

Two years later, she joined the administration as a communications director for Vice President

Biden and ultimately became a senior advisor to President Obama and really helped revolutionize

how White Houses communicate in the modern age. She was recently a fellow at the Institute

of Politics and I got to sit down with my old friend and talk about her journey, the presidency,

and modern communication.

Shayla Murray, my friend, welcome here and welcome to the Institute of Politics where you're

wowing young people. We appreciate that. So I've known you a long time and I've been

meaning to ask you this. You were a really great journalist, reached the highest levels of government,

but looking at your background, shouldn't you have been a missionary, a Catholic missionary,

somewhere in the third world or something more connected to that?

Well, yes. Tell me about your folks. In many respects, that was the prescribed path and

well my parents are kind of the archetypes of the progressive 60s Catholics who came from Republican

families and were sort of seized by the transformation in the church in the 60s which coincided with

you know the Pope John the 23rd. Exactly and the transformation in the country and so

those all those streams ran together and my father was in the Franciscan seminary for four years

and met my mom on a blind date, day or two after he left.

Hence no priesthood. I think he was having some daydreaming about the cleaning lady and the

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