David Axelrod (political consultant)

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David Axelrod
Born	David Axelrod 1955 Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York
Education	University of Chicago, A.B. 1977

David Axelrod is an American political consultant based in Chicago, Illinois. He is best known as a top adviser to Barack Obama, first in Obama's 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate in Illinois and currently as strategist for Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

Axelrod is the senior partner of AKP Message & Media and was a political writer for the Chicago Tribune. He is also a supporter of Cook County Commissioner Forrest Claypool, who helped Axelrod found his firm (under the name Axelrod and Associates).

Contents 1 Early life and career 2 Career 2.1 2008 presidential campaign 3 Notes 4 External links

[edit] Early life and career

Axelrod was born to Jewish parents in 1955 in the Lower East Side of New York City and grew up in Manhattan. Axelrod's father was a psychologist and avid baseball fan.^[1] His mother worked as a journalist at PM, a left-wing 1940s newspaper. His parents separated when he was eight. Axelrod traces his political involvement back to his childhood. Describing the appeal of politics, he told the Los Angeles Times, "I got into politics because I believe in idealism. Just to be a part of this effort that seems to be rekindling the kind of idealism that I knew when I was a kid, it's a great thing to do.^[2] So I find myself getting very emotional about it." At just 13 years old, he was selling campaign buttons for Robert F. Kennedy.

After attending Stuyvesant High School^[1] in Manhattan, Axelrod attended the University of Chicago, where he majored in political science. He met his future wife, business student Susan Landau, there. They were married in 1979. As an undergraduate, Axelrod wrote for the Hyde Park Herald, covering politics, and picked up an internship at the Chicago Tribune. They hired him when he graduated in 1977.

[edit] Career

At the age of 27, Axelrod became the City Hall Bureau Chief and a political columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He worked at the Tribune for eight years, covering national, state and local politics. He became the youngest political writer there in 1981.^[3] Unhappy with his prospects at the Tribune, in 1984 he joined the campaign of US Senator Paul Simon as communications director; within weeks he was promoted to co-campaign manager.^[4]

He formed a political consultancy, Axelrod & Associates, in 1985. In 1987, he worked on the successful reelection campaign of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor. This established his first experience in working with black politicians and he later became a key player in similar mayoral campaigns of blacks, including Dennis Archer in Detroit, Michael R. White in Cleveland, Anthony A. Williams in Washington, D.C., Lee P. Brown in Houston, and John F. Street in Philadelphia.^[5] Axelrod is a longtime strategist for Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley and styles himself a "specialist in urban politics."

In 2004, Axelrod worked for the presidential campaign of John Edwards. During the campaign, he lost responsibility for making ads, but continued as the campaign's spokesman. Commenting on Edwards' failed 2004 presidential campaign, Axelrod has commented "I have a whole lot of respect for John, but at some point the candidate has to close the deal and — I can’t tell you why — that never happened with John."^{[6] [7]}

In 2006, Axelrod consulted for several campaigns, including for the successful campaigns of Eliot Spitzer in New York's gubernatorial election and for Deval Patrick in Massachusetts's gubernatorial election. Axelrod also served in 2006 as the chief political adviser for Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair U.S. Representative Rahm Emanuel for the U.S. House of Representatives elections, in which the Democrats gained 31 seats.

[edit] 2008 presidential campaign

Axelrod and Barack Obama's ties reach back a decade. Axelrod met Obama in 1992 when Obama so impressed Betty Lu Saltzmann, a woman from Chicago's "lakefront liberal crowd," during a black voter registration drive he ran that she then introduced the two. Obama also consulted Axelrod before he delivered his famed 2002 anti-war speech^[8] and asked him to read drafts of his book, The Audacity of Hope.^[9]

Axelrod currently serves as the chief strategist and media adviser for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Axelrod contemplated taking a break from the 2008 presidential campaign, as five of the candidates—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, and Tom Vilsack—were past clients. Personal ties between Axelrod and Hillary Clinton also made it difficult, as she had done significant work on behalf of epilepsy causes for a foundation co-founded by Axelrod's wife, Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy. (Axelrod's daughter suffers from developmental disabilities associated with chronic epileptic seizures). Axelrod's wife even said that a 1999 conference Clinton convened on finding a cure for the condition was "one of the most important things anyone has done for epilepsy."^[10] Ultimately, however, he viewed Obama's potential candidacy as inspirational and historic. He often likens Obama to Robert F. Kennedy and told The Washington Post, "I thought that if I could help Barack Obama get to Washington, then I would have accomplished something great in my life."^[1]

Axelrod contributed to the initial announcement of Obama's campaign by creating a five-minute Internet video released January 16, 2007. [1] He continued to use 'man on the street' style biographical videos to create intimacy and authenticity in the political ads.

While the Clinton campaign chose an incumbent strategy that emphasized experience, Axelrod helped to craft the Obama campaign's main theme of "change." Axelrod criticized the Clinton campaign's positioning by saying that "being the consummate Washington insider is not where you want to be in a year when people want change...[Clinton's] initial strategic positioning was wrong and kind of played into our hands."^[11] The change message played a factor in Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses. "Just over half of [Iowa's] Democratic caucus-goers said change was the No. 1 factor they were looking for in a candidate, and 51 percent of those voters chose Barack Obama," said CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider. "That compares to only 19 percent of 'change' caucus-goers who preferred Clinton."^[12] Axelrod also believed that the Clinton campaign underestimated the importance of the caucus states. "For all the talent and the money they had over there," says Axelrod, "they - bewilderingly - seemed to have little understanding for the caucuses and how important they would become."^[12] In the 2008 primary season, Obama will have won a majority of the states that use the caucus format.

Axelrod is credited with implementing a strategy that encourages the participation of people, a lesson drawn partly from the effectiveness Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign as well as a personal goal of Barack Obama. Axelrod explained to Rolling Stone magazine, "When we started this race, Barack told us that he wanted the campaign to be a vehicle for involving people and giving them a stake in the kind of organizing he believed in."^[13] This includes drawing on "Web 2.0" technology and viral media to support a grassroots strategy. Obama's web platform allows supporters to blog, create their own personal page, and even phonebank from home. Axelrod's elaborate use of the Internet has helped Obama to organize under-30 voters and build over 475,000 donors in 2007, most of whom were Internet donors contributing less than $100 each.^[14] The Obama strategy stands in contrast to Hillary Clinton's campaign, which has benefited from high name recognition, large donors and strong support among established Democratic leaders.

The Politico described Axelrod as 'soft-spoken' and 'mild-mannered'^[15] and it quoted one Obama aide in Chicago as saying, "Do you know how lucky we are that he is our Mark Penn?"^[16] Democratic consultant and former colleague Dan Fee said of Axelrod, "He's a calming presence."^[17] "He's not a screamer, like some of these guys," political advisor Bill Daley said of Axelrod in the Chicago Tribune. "He has a good sense of humor, so he's able to defuse things."^[18]

In late April and early May, Barack Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright criticized Axelrod's influence on Obama. The New York Times reported that Wright said of Axelrod "while he was expert at promoting black candidates with white voters, he did not know much about relating to the black community...They're spiriting him away from people in the African-American community. David doesn't know the African-American church scene."^[19]

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Bio page at AKP media