“Sort of the anti-Rove Rove. A guy who can get things done, but doesn’t get dirty doing it.” – JG

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.