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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (48106)	9/22/2008 10:35:15 AM
From: Ann Corrigan	2 Recommendations Respond to of 224706

Dirty trickster Axelrod led the Palin mudfest: Posted by: Brian Faughnan Monday, September 22, 2008 In light of the news about David Axelrod's associates running a smear campaign against Sarah Palin without disclosing it, a New York Times profile of Axelrod from last year becomes more interesting. Who is Axelrod? Excerpt: He's Obama's speechwriter and image crafter. The way the Times describes it, he sounds like the Mighty Oz: Axelrod has known Obama longer than any of his other close political advisers and, other campaign officials say, is now Obama’s chief strategist and someone he “trusts implicitly.” Axelrod has been intimately involved with the staffing of the campaign (David Plouffe, who was a partner in Axelrod’s consulting firm, is now Obama’s campaign manager), with its strategy and pacing and with the scrubbing of its message and language. Because of the vastness of the operation, Axelrod has had to hire other media consultants to help him develop commercials; his own role, he says, will be as “keeper of the message.” He's the man who refuses to let the carefully-crafted image of Barack Obama be sullied by negative associations: “If we run a conventional campaign and look like a conventional candidacy, we lose,” He's adept at video editing and he sounds almost obsessive about making sure that videos prepared by the campaign send the right message: For four years Axelrod has had camera crews tracking virtually everything Obama has done in public — chatting up World War II vets in southern Illinois, visiting his father’s ancestral village in western Kenya — and there were days when the camera crews have outnumbered the civilians. And of course, he's a dirty trickster: Axelrod is known for operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle. It is difficult to discuss Axelrod in certain circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce papers coming up. As the 2004 Senate primary neared, it was clear that it was a contest between two people: the millionaire liberal, Hull, who was leading in the polls, and Obama, who had built an impressive grass-roots campaign. About a month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune revealed, near the bottom of a long profile of Hull, that during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an order of protection. In the following few days, the matter erupted into a full-fledged scandal that ended up destroying the Hull campaign and handing Obama an easy primary victory. The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had “worked aggressively behind the scenes” to push the story. But there are those in Chicago who believe that Axelrod had an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story. They note that before signing on with Obama, Axelrod interviewed with Hull. They also point out that Obama’s TV ad campaign started at almost the same time. Axelrod swears up and down that “we had nothing to do with it” and that the campaign’s television ad schedule was long planned. “An aura grows up around you, and people assume everything emanates from you,” he told me. From a separate piece by Lynn Sweet, note that he's not above staging events for campaign ads and passing them off as the original It will probably prove impossible to determine whether David Axelrod was behind the viral smear campaign against Sarah Palin. But one thing seems certain: it must have been done by someone a lot like the person that the Times profiled. redstate.com