The IHT has an interesting profile of David Axelrod (Obama's Chief Strategist)...
iht.com
A star strategist offers Democrats a new vision
By Ben Wallace-Wells
Friday, March 30, 2007
WASHINGTON: When Barack Obama decided in January that he would run for president in 2008 and quietly began calling up his staff members and close supporters to tell them so, the choice had many effects, but one of the most immediate was that it sent Obama's chief political and media adviser, a Chicago consultant named David Axelrod, into his editing studio.
For four years Axelrod has had camera crews tracking virtually everything Obama has done in public - chatting up World War II veterans in southern Illinois, visiting his father's ancestral village in western Kenya - and there were days when the camera crews have outnumbered the civilians. Axelrod began to sort through all of this tape to put together a five-minute Internet video for the initial announcement of Obama's campaign, which would come the following Tuesday, Jan. 16.
Political observers tend to dismiss bio pieces as fluff. But for Axelrod they supply a coordinating presence, a basic story to wrap the campaign around. There is precision in the fluff.
Axelrod says he believes that Obama is something different: a "trailblazing" figure who "represents the future." And indeed, so far Obama's campaign has been steeped in his biography. This is, after all, a 45-year-old man who has written not one but two memoirs.
The completed announcement video would begin and end with Obama's keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, and it would include two full minutes on his early life - his father's background, his mother's, his grandfather's, the times he moved when he was a little boy. When you finish watching the video, you don't have a particularly good sense of Obama as a politician, but you feel as if you know him.
In the last four years, Axelrod has helped steer campaigns for fully four of the Democrats now running for president - Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Christopher Dodd - framed the messages for the new young governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick; and served as the chief political adviser for Representative Rahm Emanuel when the congressman helped orchestrate the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives last fall.
Axelrod, who is 52, is lumbering, sardonic and self-deprecating. Professional opinions of Axelrod in this rivalrous field vary, but Axelrod, working from Chicago, has become perhaps the consultant with the tightest grip on his party's future.
"So many consultants are fighting the last war, but David is fighting the next one, and that makes him very, very dangerous," the Republican consultant Mike Murphy said.
After the consecutive presidential losses of Al Gore and John Kerry, patrician candidates who ran ill-fitting "people versus the powerful" campaigns designed for them by the consultant Bob Shrum, many Democrats began to suspect that part of what was wrong with the party was its formulaic consultants.
Axelrod's is a less grand, post-ideological approach, and his campaigns are rooted less in issues than in the particulars of his candidate's life. For Axelrod, running campaigns hitched to personality rather than ideology is a way of reclaiming fleeting authenticity. It is also, more and more, the way of the Democratic Party.
Its 2006 congressional campaign strategy - run by Axelrod's close friend Emanuel, with the Chicago consultant acting as principal sounding board - did not depend on any great idea of where the party ought to go. As they have reclaimed power, the Democrats have done so not by moving appreciably to the left or the right; rather, they have done so by allowing their candidates to move in both directions at once.
"What David is basically doing - and this is somewhat new for Democrats - isn't trying to figure out how to sell policies," says the Democratic media consultant Saul Shorr. "It's a matter of personality. How do we sell leadership?"
Axelrod is Obama's chief strategist and someone he "trusts implicitly." Axelrod has been intimately involved with the staffing of the campaign, with its strategy and pacing and with the scrubbing of its message and language. Because of the vastness of the operation, he has had to hire other media consultants to help him develop commercials; his own role, he says, will be as "keeper of the message."
Axelrod met Obama when the senator was 30 years old and coordinating a voter-registration drive in Chicago and Betty Lou Saltzman, a doyenne of progressive politics in Chicago, suggested that the two get to know each other.
In the 15 years since, Axelrod has worked through Obama's life story again and again, scouring it for usable political material, and he believes that some basic themes come through: that he is "not wedded to any ideological frame or dogma," that he is "an outsider rather than someone who's spent years in the dens of Georgetown," that he is an "agent for change" and has the optimism and dynamism of a fresh, young face.
Electing Obama president would be "something you could really be proud of for the rest of your life," Axelrod told me in early January. "It would really change politics in a very positive way."
With Obama's candidacy, Axelrod is placing a gaudy bet: that the symbolic significance of race in the United States has now begun to flip. An underlying message of the campaign is that African-American candidates can symbolically represent the future. I asked him if he thought that Obama's race would be a detriment.
"I don't think of it as a detriment," Axelrod said. "I know that there are people who wouldn't vote for a black candidate, but I don't know if they would vote for a Democratic candidate anyway. But I think that, in a sense, Barack is the personification of his own message for this country, that we get past the things that divide us and focus on the things that unite us. He is his own vision."
Every veteran political operative has his batch of lessons learned. From his experience running the antic, aggressive Emanuel's campaign for Congress, Axelrod realized that the way to deal with your client's perceived flaws is to embrace them. When he ran Tom Vilsack's campaign for governor of Iowa, he learned that the smoothest way to beat back a staunch social conservative message is to attack not the content but "the over-the-top negativism" that often accompanies it.
From some advisory work he did for Bill Clinton during the 1996 campaign, Axelrod learned that for a Democrat the future always trumps the past. He says he also learned from Clinton that a politician's biggest task is "to narrow the distance between the people and government."
From a distance, he watched Karl Rove help George Bush win two terms as president by "understanding that every election is a reaction to the last president" and then in 2004 by "figuring out how to make Bush's stubbornness into a political virtue." Most of all, from campaign after campaign, Axelrod took the lesson that the problem with failed candidacies is that "unless a message authentically reflects the messenger, it's likely to fail."
Axelrod and his sister, Joan, grew up in Manhattan, the children of two Jewish liberals - a mother who worked as a journalist at PM, a leftist newspaper of the 1940s, and later ran focus groups for an advertising firm, and a psychologist father. He went to college at the University of Chicago and has been there ever since.
The Chicago Tribune took him on right out of school, sent him to the night desk for a couple of years of hardening and then turned him loose on City Hall. In 1984, Axelrod signed on with Paul Simon's senatorial campaign as communications director, became campaign manager and, after Simon won, opened his own shop.
Axelrod can be a fussy bag of liberal tensions and conflicts. He says he hates the idea that he might become the kind of media-hogging consultant who overshadows his client, but he appears on television in Chicago so frequently that construction workers and subway conductors recognize him on the street. He drives a Pontiac Vibe, but he also has a vast weekend house in Michigan that makes the reporters who talk to him jealous. This basic tension is the tension of the modern Democratic establishment, caught between its reform origins and the compromises necessary to win power.
Today, as Axelrod basks in his profession's highest glory - shaping a presidential campaign - he is experiencing one of its nastiest turns: In a tiny and ideologically promiscuous world, you often need to go to war with your friends. There is Dodd, and there is Edwards, but perhaps most poignantly, there is Hillary Clinton.
It's a matter of epilepsy. David and his wife, Susan, have three children in their late teens and early 20s. Their eldest, Lauren, has developmental disabilities associated with chronic epileptic seizures and now lives in a group home in Chicago. Susan and two other mothers of children with epilepsy started a foundation, Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy, which Susan runs, to promote research and raise funds for a cure. Few political celebrities have done as much for the foundation as Hillary Clinton.
It was January 1999, President Clinton's impeachment trial was just beginning in the Senate and Hillary Clinton was scheduled to speak at the foundation's fund-raiser in Chicago. Despite all the fuss back in Washington, Clinton kept the appointment. She spent hours that day in the epilepsy ward at Rush Presbyterian hospital, visiting children hooked up to machines by electrodes so that doctors might diagram their seizure activity and decide which portion of the brain to remove.
Later, at Hillary Clinton's behest, the National Institutes of Health convened a conference on finding a cure for epilepsy. Susan Axelrod told me it was "one of the most important things anyone has done for epilepsy." And this is how politics works: David Axelrod is now dedicated to derailing this woman's career.
"Life can be tragic," Axelrod said by phone from Chicago the day before Obama officially announced his candidacy, "but it is important to focus on the moments when it is rapturous." Political consultancy is often understood, from a distance, as a science of cynicism, but from up close it can look instead like a ruthless form of love.
On the second Saturday in February, David and Susan Axelrod drove down to the old Statehouse in Springfield, Illinois, to watch Obama officially announce his candidacy for president, giving a speech he had sent to Axelrod for edits at 4 a.m., two nights before. There was a crowd of more than 15,000 in the square, it was freezing and Obama looked even skinnier than usual in his big wool coat.
Obama's central theme was the promise of the future, of himself: "Let's be the generation," he said over and over again, that meets the big challenges of the day - poverty, energy independence, the environment. "What's stopped us from meeting these challenges," he said, "is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics."
Presidential campaigns are wide open and unpredictable things, and they can slip out of the media consultant's control. The campaign's first disruption took place when the Hollywood mogul and liberal Obama fund-raiser David Geffen gave an interview to Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, in which he said that the Clintons lie "with such ease, it's troubling."
The Clinton campaign immediately called on Obama's team to repudiate the comments, but they refused, and afterward the two camps volleyed barbs back and forth for a day or so. It was one of those early campaign spats that get endlessly analyzed for who won some minor tactical advantage, but to Axelrod it was a mistake, a self-induced undermining of the transcendent character he spent so long helping to cultivate.
The Geffen episode was "a good object lesson about how easy it is to slide into the morass," he told me. "I'm mindful of the responsibility not to lose our way, not to disappoint, not to sink into the conventional and lose our soul in the process. There are enormous pressures to conform. And to fight a small tactical battle."
His friends put it more bluntly. "What David is going to learn in the course of this presidential campaign," Emanuel told me, "is the economic efficiency of the four-letter word." |
