Posted on 02/11/2015 7:44:17 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
When David Axelrod published his memoir he hoped it would be seen as a respectable political memoir. Naturally, everyone just wants the bitchiest dish.
President Obama despises Maureen Dowdabsolutely loathes the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist. Hes annoyed by Mitt Romney. And the presidents messaging guru and top gun, David Axelrod, has little regard for Mark Penn, Hillary Clintons erstwhile chief strategist.
Those are a few of the gossipy take-aways from Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, Axelrods hotly-anticipated (by political junkies) memoir that goes on sale today.
Yet those anecdotes represent just the sort of slicing and dicing of a serious work of political and personal history that AxelrodAxe to his friendssees as yet another example of the medias relentless marketing of sensationalism and triviality.
Sorry, Dave.
More than anything, this is whats terrible about modern media and how these books roll out, Axelrod says. I was determined to write a book that wasnt going to be characterized by some titillating nugget that had about a three-day half-life, but rather an entire story of my life and the conclusions that life has led me to. I wanted to write a book that people might want to read years from now and not just todays publication because they wanted to find out who had been knifing who.
A lovely sentiment. But Axelrod, who likes to think of himself as a real-world idealist, surely knew not to get his hopes up.
A couple of weeks from 60, hes a former shoe-leather newspaper reporter (in the political sump pit of Chicago, no less) who, during his four decades as a Democratic media consultant, has practiced the dark arts of campaigning with the best and the worst of them.
Believerwhich is not as slavishly cult-like as the title indicates, since it acknowledges that, yes, Barack Obama has rough edges and human imperfectionstracks Axelrods career from his early childhood in New York City, when, at age 5, he attended a rally featuring candidate John Fitzgerald Kennedy and caught the political bug.
It recounts his precocious beginnings as a journalist, writing a political column at age 18 for the Hyde Park Herald; his parents divorce and his fathers subsequent suicide; and his guilty conscience over his own role as an often-absent parent, working on out-of-town campaigns while his wife, Susan, kept the family together as they confronted the challenge of raising a daughter seriously disabled by epileptic seizures.
It was painful to write some of that, Axelrod says, noting that he as he put together the family chapters, he sent them to his eldest son, Michael, as a cautionary note: Dont do to your kids what I did to you.
The book treats Hillary Clinton, a client before she was an opponentand today Axelrods preferred 2016 presidential candidatewith admiration and respect, even when her operatives are dissed, and even when Axelrod reports that she considered a post-2008 primary conversation with him, aboard the Obama campaign plane, about as welcome as a root canal.
I think shes going to be the [Democratic] nominee, and I will strongly support her, says Axelrod, who claims that 2012 was his final campaign and that he has retired once and for all from political consulting; these days he presides over the Institute of Politics, which he founded in 2013 at his alma mater, the University of Chicago. Shes in a very strong positionnot to say that shes guaranteed anything, Axelrod says of Clinton. The questionand only she can answer it when she becomes a candidateis what kind of candidate shell be.
Axelrod continues: I thought she was not a very good candidate in 2007, when she was encased in this armor of inevitability. And she became a very compelling candidate in 2008 when she threw off that armor and threw caution to the winds, and really connected with people in a very visceral way about the struggles of their lives. And the fact that she herself looked vulnerable made her more accessible.
On the Republican side, Axelrod says Jeb Bush, with his relatively enlightened views on immigration and education reform, would be a strong general election contender if he can get through the primaries without being forced to make a Faustian bargain with the more extreme elements of his party.
Axelrod is skeptical of the presidential buzz surrounding Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. So he goes to Iowa and gives a good speech to a few hundred activists and hes the flavor of the month, he says. Presidential politics is like pole vaulting. Everyone can clear the early bar. But then the bar gets raised. And the reality is, how do you handle it when it gets really, really rough, when youre under constant scrutiny, when everything you say becomes an issue?
Axelrod has had some recent personal experience along these lines with the release of his book. Even though his publisher, Random House subsidiary Penguin Press, tried to enforce a strict embargo on reporting about its contentgoing so far as to require recipients of hardcovers to sign non-disclosure agreementsit was entirely predictable that an outlet like the New York Daily News would get its hands on an unauthorized early copy and highlight the nasty bits.
The most garish headlines generated by last weeks leak involve a close Mitt Romney aides fiery rebuttal to an anecdote from Election Night 2012. In Believer, Axelrod recounts the presidents slightly irritated and unsmiling reaction to Romneys concession phone call.
Upon hanging up, Axelrod writes, Obama told a group of aides witnessing his end of the conversation that the Republican candidate had just complimented Obamas great job of getting out the vote in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee. The president allegedly added: In other words, black people. Thats what he thinks this was all about.
In response, Romneys personal campaign aidewho had arranged the phone callpromptly called Axelrod a big fat fibber in suggesting that the former Massachusetts governor had made a veiled racial reference. I was so appalled that he just made that up, Garrett Jackson insisted. I hope its David Axelrod that concocted this crazy line and not the president.
In his interview with The Daily Beast, Axelrod sticks to his story, and points out that other Obama operatives present during the phone call recalled the presidents reaction in exactly the same wayespecially Campaign Manager Jim Messina, who tweeted: Every word of @davidaxelrod mitt e-night call is true. I was standing with axe & POTUS. Thats what happened.
I admire his loyaltyI have no beef with him, Axelrod says about Garrett Jacksons outburst. There was no implication that Romney was trying to be ungracious. He was complimenting the campaign. This was at the end of a long battle and they each saw this through their own lens, and the president reacted He thought it was kind of a cramped way of analyzing what had just happened in the election. So I think this is just one of the kerfuffles in the run-up to a book release.
Perhaps Axelrods juiciest yarnat least for some the self-absorbed, self-dramatizing pundits who traffic in the journalism bizconcerns a visit Maureen Dowd paid to the candidate on the 2008 Obama campaign plane.
When we brought her to the front of the plane, Axelrod writes, Obama proceeded to blister her for a previous column she had written. No one got under Baracks skin more than Maureen He was patronizing and disrespectful After that awkward encounter, she seemed to take particular delight in psychoanalyzing Barack and belittling him in print, which only deepened his contempt Why are you friends with her? he would demand after Maureen sent one of her acid darts his way.
Axe also makes short work of Clinton strategist and pollster Penn, currently Microsofts chief strategy officer, whom he describes as bloodless and calculating during their brief stint toiling together, and tangling with each other, on Hillarys successful 2000 Senate race.
Penn saw his mission as quashing any liberal impulses of the candidate or the campaign, and he justified himself with fuzzy polling numbers and smug self-assurance that made every conversation grating, he writes. I felt he spent as much time manipulating his clients as providing constructive counsel.
Axelrod claims: I dont wish Mark ill The underlying premise of the book is I believe politics has meaning I believe politics is the way in which we organize ourselves to try and move the wheel of history and try to shape the future in a positive way. Theres nobility in that calling.
Axelrod adds, however, that Penn represents a not-rare view that politics is really a business. Its about winning elections, thats the ultimate goal, and political consulting is about making as much money as you can make. In certain ways, Mark became a surrogate of a style of thinking about politics that I strongly object to.
I thought this was going to be about when MoDo made light of Jug Ears’ jug ears.
Figures he'd be spewing for The Daily Beast...
This Muslim, on the down-low poser, disrespects himself.
Thank you sir may I have another?
“Hes the leader of the band of fellow travelers. The guy is inarguably the best at what he does, but in the end, look what he did.”
He’s the lefts version of Karl Marx Rove.
...And the reality is, how do you handle it when it gets really, really rough, when youre under constant scrutiny, when everything you say becomes an issue?
With 0bama, who will ever know? If he'd had that sort of scrutiny during the '08 campaign he'd never have been elected. We now know, for example, that Ted Cruz had a trunk full of beer in high school and Scott Walker looked bored in certain college classes he took, but not where the sitting President was born. That sort of thing gives a reporter earnestly committed to All The Truth when it comes to one party and All The Protection when it comes to the other a very suspect reputation.
As for Dowd, she wasn't much help when it came to transparency during 0bama's campaigns either. If now there is squabbling in the playpen it really isn't our problem.
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