David Axelrod Will Be Obama’s Senior Adviser
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack
Again, no surprises so far. Axelrod was one of the key strategists in Obama’s phenomenal campaign, and he’s known in many circles as a consensus builder. Sort of the anti-Rove Rove. A guy who can get things done, but doesn’t get dirty doing it.
This move even more sense if you think about how close Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel are. New Republic has this…
Despite their very, uh, different personalities, Obama and Emanuel have one big thing in common: David Axelrod. Emanuel is one of Axelrod’s closest friends; Axelrod even signed the ketubah at Emanuel’s wedding.They first got to know each other during Richard Daley’s 1989 mayoral campaign and then worked on a couple campaigns afterwards. In 2002, Axelrod served as the media consultant for Emanuel’s 2002 first Congressional race, during which Axelrod cut an ad for Emanuel that featured the candidate explaining how his support for a children’s health care bill stemmed from his father’s experience as a Chicago pediatrician.”It localized me, my dad being a pediatrician here, and it showed why I cared about it,” Emanuel recalled for me when I interviewed him about a month ago. “He took this hard charging guy like me and put a point to that charge. It had a power to it. We were tied and after that ad, we went up eleven.”
And just in case you’re not particularly familiar with Axelrod, who looks as if he’s constantly exhausted, New York Times had a piece about him that discussed his temperament and relationship with Obama…
In many ways, Mr. Axelrod is a classic example of the Washington political consultant (even though he lives in Chicago and says he has no intention of moving to the capital if Mr. Obama wins). He has been making advertisements and offering advice for candidates for mayor, senator and president for a generation, since quitting his job as a newspaper reporter in 1984. He has a particular specialty in helping black candidates appeal to white electorates and has tallied up a list of corporate clients along the way.But Mr. Axelrod, in this client-consultant relationship, appears to be something different, with a personal investment in Mr. Obama’s success that is obvious in the distress marked on his face whenever the candidate comes under attack.
Every politician has a guardian angel, and every presidential hopeful has a right-hand dispenser of wisdom. Yet in the trio of top strategists around Mr. Obama, including Robert Gibbs, a senior communications adviser, and David Plouffe, the campaign manager, it is Mr. Axelrod who has been at Mr. Obama’s side the longest and has the most interwoven relationship with him.
“Although he is as tough as they come, he’s actually not a mercenary,” said Mr. Obama, of Illinois, in an interview. “He actually believes in what we’re doing, which actually makes him a bad consultant when he doesn’t believe in the candidate. And he’s a great consultant when he believes.”
The question now is obviously: how will he conduct himself in the White House? Because situations and circumstances can change people drastically.
We shall see…
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
If what you mean by that is that he is better at covering his tracks and keeping his bloody fingerprints hidden from the media, then I’ll agree with you. He is twice as good Rove or if you prefer, twice as bad as Rove. Same difference. Definitely this is “Barack’s Brian” like Rove was to Bush.
If you want to get a good appreciation of Axelrod, you need to take a good hard look at his consulting firm ASK (he is the “A” in the three man partnership). This is his political consulting firm for corporate cleints. It is co-located in the exact same office space as his political consulting firm for politicians. ASK specializes in “astroturfing”. That was a new term for me. It is when corporations need to support or defeat some political initiative, fund and set up a positive sounding PAC to advocate and advertise their position. Nothing wrong with that, but Axelrod managed to keep the information about his corporate ASK clients and details about his role with them out of the media for the most part. The linked Business Week article is an exception, but pretty skimpy on details of what certainly has potential for some conflict of interest.
It would be real interesting to know who ASK’s clients are now, but the client list on their web page came down when Axelrod went to work on the Obama campaign. Axelrod said he was on leave from ASK, but again this is an organization that shares office space and has the same partners with the political consulting firm where he is still working. How does that work? In this new role shouldn’t we know who the ASK clients are? Shouldn’t we know the exact nature of his financial relationship with ASK both now and during the campaign? Where is the transparency?
Bottom line, we are not going to know if he changes, when we really don’t know who he is right now.