David Axelrod
Posted on 06/08/2008 5:14:54 PM PDT by dennisw
His strategy was to market a personality, rather than market policies or issues. According to liberal political consultant Saul Shorr: “What David is basically doing – and this is somewhat new for Democrats – isn’t trying to figure out how to sell policies. It’s a matter of personality."
How do we sell leadership?Axelrod’s strategy has been to promote a personality, not issues. Perhaps this is why Obama’s campaign speeches have been more like Saturday Night Live Matt Foley motivational speeches than serious attempts to lay out what an Obama presidency would mean to our nation.”
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Who Is David Axelrod – Obama’s Political Advisor?
March 5, 2008 – Political strategist David Axelrod is Senator Barack Obama’s key political advisor and speech writer.
Axelrod has previously worked on the campaigns of numerous liberals, including Deval Patrick, current governor of Massachusetts; John Edwards, Senator Chris Dodd, Rep. Rahm Emanuel and others.
In fact, according to a lengthy feature on Axelrod in The New York Times (April 1, 2007), Axelrod was instrumental in helping Emanuel in the 2006 campaign to take over the House of Representatives from Republicans.
Axelrod worked as lead political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and later became a political consultant for far left politicians.
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David Axelrod
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His strategy was to market a personality, rather than market policies or issues. According to liberal political consultant Saul Shorr: “What David is basically doing – and this is somewhat new for Democrats – isn’t trying to figure out how to sell policies. It’s a matter of personality. How do we sell leadership?”
Axelrod’s success in helping Deval Patrick become governor of Massachusetts has been replicated in Obama’s campaign for the presidency. Patrick was a leftist political operative who served as head of the Civil Rights Division in the Clinton Justice Department under AG Janet Reno.
Patrick’s first year as governor of Massachusetts has been seen as a train wreck by most political observers – even Boston Globe editorialists.
Axelrod’s strategy has been to promote a personality, not issues. Perhaps this is why Obama’s campaign speeches have been more like Saturday Night Live Matt Foley motivational speeches than serious attempts to lay out what an Obama presidency would mean to our nation. Massachusetts voters are learning the folly of voting for a personality rather than sound policies and a plan. (This isn’t to discount the importance of character or personality in a political candidate, but the candidate should state what he’s going to do when elected – not simply give motivational speeches.)
David Axelrod’s political heroes are John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and he has consistently worked on the campaigns of liberal and far leftist candidates.
Axelrod’s parents were both liberals. His father, Joseph Axelrod, was a psychologist in New York City and his mother Myril was a writer. She later became an advertising executive.
David’s Mother And Radical Leftist Journalism
Myril Axelrod was formerly a writer for PM, a leftist tabloid newspaper published from 1940 to 1948 in New York City.
A feature on the leftist nature of PM was published by City Journal in the Summer of 1993.
The paper was founded by Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, a liberal who thought he could use Communists on his staff to help with the circulation of the paper. The Communists, however, used the paper for their own purposes and he lost influence over the magazine after entering the Army.
In fact, in 1946 five of the staff members of PM’s Washington, DC bureau resigned in protest over the high level of Communist influence within the newspaper. The five resigned after three other members of the staff were fired. According to the five who resigned:
Although not himself a Communist, he [Ralph Ingersoll] has continuously yielded to Communist pressure and has denounced as factionalists those staff members who have tried to keep the party line out of the paper. He has destroyed the confidence of those who believe that PM should be as realistic and critical of Russian foreign policy as in its evaluation of the foreign policy of our own government. (New York Times, June 15, 1946)
The staff was comprised of both Communists and non-Communist liberals. The paper was overtly political and the writers didn’t hide their political biases in their writings. Ingersoll refused to carry advertising because he didn’t want the paper to be influenced by advertisers. City Journal writer Roger Starr noted: “Although every member of PM’s staff was profoundly anti-Hitler, the staff was divided into two cliques: the liberals who regarded the Soviet Union as a slave state, devoid of individual rights, and the liberals who regarded the Soviet Union as a living demonstration of a truly humane society.”
For example, Leo Huberman, a Communist sympathizer, was the labor news editor. I.F. Stone was the Washington, DC correspondent for PM. In the 1980s, a KGB agent fingered Stone as a willing participant in Soviet intelligence operations in the U.S.
The paper, however, was never a financial success without advertising. It received funding from Marshall Field III, a leftist millionaire who kept the paper running for eight years. Field also funded the Industrial Areas Foundation, a training school for radical leftist organizers, which was headed by Saul Alinsky. (Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were trained by Alinsky radicals in Chicago).
Former Communist Eugene Lyons, writing in The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America, noted that PM’s staff included a former editor of the Daily Worker; another was former editor of The Communist; and a third was a leader of the Communist Youth League; a fourth was a Soviet government official; and a fifth was the former staff cartoonist for the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, USA.
We have been unable to determine if Axelrod’s mother was a liberal who considered the Soviet Union a slave state or a Marxist-leaning liberal who viewed the Soviet Union as a humane society. The fact remains, however, that her liberalism was obviously infused into the mind of David Axelrod and is what still apparently motivates him to support leftist candidates.
PM’s Radical Staff Writers – Linked To Marxist ‘Black Power’ In 1940s
One of PM’s writers was Earl Conrad, a leftist who also wrote for the Negro Story, a leftist newspaper founded by two black women, Alice C. Browning and Fern Gayden. The ideological nature of this paper was described by Bill Mullen in a historical critique of African-American literature during World War II. Writing in African American Review, Vol. 30; Issue: 1; 1996), Mullen notes:
… [the] Negro Story’s editorial stance, rather than “non-political,” was in many ways close to that of black and white Communists, socialists, and internationalists, whose wartime positions combined pro-labor, pro-black, anti-fascist sentiment in equal measure…
… the editors of Negro Story consciously continued to represent and re-form their critiques of capitalism, American race relations, and imperialism to suit the newly evolving political crises of the mid-1940s, while adding to them a black feminist awareness the magazine’s female editors could hardly avoid.
Among those writing for Negro Story was Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist Party member who became Barack Obama’s mentor when Obama was living in Hawaii in the 1970s.
Another writer for Negro Story was Jack Conroy, a Marxist who taught at the openly-Communist Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago. Four of his students at this school also wrote for the Negro Story, so the Marxist influence was significant in this magazine.
According to Mullen, the articles and ideas articulated in Negro Story influenced the political educations of Malcolm X “and a generation of Civil Rights activists.”
Connecting The Dots
Clearly, Chicago has been a hotbed of leftist political activities for decades. Saul Alinsky successfully trained hundreds of radicals who are now in positions of power – including both Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton.
Chicago was also a hotbed of Marxist Black Power activities during World War II, and the anti-capitalist writings of the Negro Story helped fuel future black power advocates.
Chicago is also an area heavily influenced by Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, who has recently endorsed the candidacy of Barack Obama to become our next president. During a Presidential debate on Feb. 26, Obama rejected the endorsement when pressured by the debate host, but the fact is that he has Nation of Islam members on his own staff. If Obama rejects the hateful anti-Jewish and anti-White rhetoric of Farrakhan, why does he have Farrakhan followers on his Senate office staff?
The radicalism of Frank Marshall Davis that was planted in a young Barack Obama appears to have taken root – and the son of a writer for a Communist-dominated newspaper – is running Obama’s political campaign to help him become President and Commander-in-Chief of our Armed Forces.
“Change” is the Axelrod and Obama slogan. Many Americans rightfully fear what kind of change this might be if Senator Obama ascends to the highest elected office in the land.
I appreciate the research of the TVC on this issue, but it is too indirect and too circumspect to have any real consequence. The mother of the political advisor to Obama once worked for a magazine which fell into the hands of people sympathetic to the Communists. That is just too weak. We have far stronger ties of Obama to unsavory characters. While the entire preceeding narrative is not surprising to those of us who are aware of the formative influences of East Coast post-war liberals, most Americans will find it boring and irrelevant.
I should not have posted all that.
The most important part is in the first ten paragraphs. The brilliance of Axelrod is how he markets Obama as a personality candidate. The issues and experience are a distant second. This way you get lots of dazzled people voting Obama but if they thought it through -— Would realize they don’t like his ultra liberal slant
After all, Obama has the most liberal record in the US Senate
The hard left considers the November election not a choice among alternative leaders but, rather, a referendum on the implementation of Marxism in America. Groups like Progressives for Obama, Moveon, the black liberationists and others are making no bones about this. And the fact is that most of the grassroots Obama groups are open about their Marxist leanings. Only the MSM is blind to what’s going on.
Yes, that revelation is far more devastating in the long run than if Axelrod's mother was a willing whore for Communists.
Good post. Thanks!
I want to add one more liberal that Axelrod helped elect was Spitzer. As we know Spitzer didn't pan out to fine either.
Perhaps I should be glad he is working for Obama,eh?
As my tagline (from HL Mencken) states: “The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots”. That is the very definition of Democrats. They are Demagogues — and Obama is chief among them. It’s his party... and his party is comprised of idiots from sea to shining sea.
Unfortunately, for Republicans and John McCain, it can be difficult to combat the “nothing” that Barack Obama represents. It’s like boxing with a cloud of smoke — Obama’s policies are also a cloud of smoke that none of his talking heads can describe in any detail, so they don’t have to defend of debate them. They are counting on the idiot vote — and unfortunately, folks, that is a huge contingency in today’s USA. The Dems coddling of the Teachers Unions is paying the dividends they obviously were counting on.
I’m so glad to see this in print. For months and months I’ve kept wondering what IS it about this campaign that makes me SO uneasy. Yeah- I know- “empty suit” “no experience” and his frightening policies are part of it- but there’s been something else. This guy nails it- the campaign has been designed to sell a personality, not a political figure. Brilliant strategy given the market Axelrod is going after...
~snip~
His strategy was to market a personality, rather than market policies or issues. According to liberal political consultant Saul Shorr: “What David is basically doing – and this is somewhat new for Democrats – isn’t trying to figure out how to sell policies. It’s a matter of personality.”
How do we sell leadership?Axelrod’s strategy has been to promote a personality, not issues. Perhaps this is why Obama’s campaign speeches have been more like Saturday Night Live Matt Foley motivational speeches than serious attempts to lay out what an Obama presidency would mean to our nation.”
~snip~
Nice, nice, very nice:
so many Marxists in the same device
Yes, Twinkie the Messiah is under the spell of CPUSA Uncle Frank Marshall Davis, fellow traveler Saul Alinsky, and the red-diaper-baby Axelrod.
This Marxism provides the balance to his obvious sympathies to PLO/PLA terrorism, Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran, not to mention his "nothing so pretty as the Muslim call to prayer at dusk--and now I'll sing it note-perfect and verbatim after all these years". . . .
And of course Axelrod markets Twinkie as a personality--he wouldn't dare present the Twelfth Imam from Alinskistan as the Marxist-Muslim racebaiting switchhitter he is.
Gotta keep that tickle going up Chris Matthews leg through November 4--after that, the mask comes off and the mosque is front and center.
No record of accomplishment?
Not a problem!
Most liberal US Senator?
Not a problem!
Because the younger generation is very poorly educated and will vote on looks and personalities. Which is partly a reflection of the visual -TV- age we are on. Obama looks better on TV than McCain
Add to that Islamo-Marxist melange Obama’s pro-death votes on abortion. He is so pro abortion he voted against mandatory saving babies that survive late term abortions. In the Illinois Senate I believe
To disarm the population is the easiest way to enslave them!
Gun control & Mind control!
| OBAMA’S SUPPORTERS READ LIKE A LIST OF WHO’S WHO AMONG RACISTS, THUGS, MUSLIMS, MARXIST AND AMERICAN HATERS OF THE WORLD. >William Ayers (Weatherman Underground bomber, unrepentant domestic terrorist) |
Classic case of the tried and true sales technique: SELL THE SIZZLE.
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Excellent post potlatch
Well , wait until the $hit hits the fan, and see how Mr. personality handles that.
He propably gets on his knees and not to pray either.
Soros knows.
Thank you devolve. Lol, that’s the one I’m ‘supposed’ to make into a table that would encompass the whole thread!!
They are mostly Marxists as well, they aren't blind, they are leading the charge.
Its coming to thumpin' time and I sure hope thumpin' happens to stop Obumma.
There I go again. I have an impulsib wisp.
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Just push that little button and.....
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