John King to interview Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod

CNN’s John King is in Chicago this afternoon to report on the race for mayor.  King spoke with Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel about Wisconsin and if Emanuel will seek savings from public employee unions. Please find a short excerpt of Emanuel’s answer below jump – credit to CNN’s John King, USA . Also, King will interview David Axelrod former senior adviser to President Obama about Chicago politics and Wisconsin. Interviews will air tonight on John King, USA at 7 p.m. ET.

Highlighted Excerpt

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

RAHM EMANUEL, CHICAGO MAYORAL CANDIDATE:  —  It’s not about a cooperative coming to a resolution together with an understanding and respect.  That’s not about fiscal issues, it’s about politics.  And here we’re going to deal with our fiscal issues by being honest with each other, straight forward, and on a level of respect to work out the agreements that are necessary to put our fiscal house in order so our economy can grow. That’s the goal here.

What Wisconsin’s doing is Wisconsin and it’s not what we want to do in Chicago, because there’s no respect, no sense of cooperation, no sense that we all have a vested interest in working something out.

And here, my view is, and as I did this in a number of areas, let’s just take the area of public health and Chicago’s health care budget. I’ve announced a wellness plan that could save us $50 million.  The people that have been the biggest advocates for what I’ve been talking about on health care have been organized labor. And I want to take it from just a pilot project on diabetes to deal with all our ailments of the chronics of heart, blood, diabetes. And the unions have been the most supportive and I have been the one advocating exactly that agenda.

So it’s a total different approach.  We won’t even be second cousins.  The Wisconsin governor is playing politics. Here in Chicago, we have a vested interest of working together, finding an agreement together, put our fiscal house in order, get our schools strong, get our streets safe, so we can make sure that our residents here — and this is a city that a middle class family can send their kid to school and feel safe on the streets.