April 1, 2007

Obama’s Narrator

By BEN WALLACE-WELLS

I.

When Barack Obama decided in January that he would run

for president in 2008 and quietly began calling up his staff
members and close supporters to tell them so, the choice
had many effects, but one of the most immediate and
parochial was that it sent Obama’s chief political and media
adviser, a Chicago consultant named David Axelrod, into his
editing studio. For four years Axelrod has had camera crews
tracking virtually everything Obama has done in public —
chatting up World War II vets in southern Illinois, visiting his
father’s ancestral village in western Kenya — and there were
days when the camera crews have outnumbered the
civilians.

In the second week of January, Axelrod went down to his

editing studio, a raw, whitewashed loft space, and began to
sort through all of this tape to put together a five-minute
Internet video for the initial announcement of Obama’s
campaign, which would come the following Tuesday, Jan. 16.
Political observers tend to dismiss bio pieces as fluff. But for
Axelrod they supply a coordinating presence, a basic story to
wrap the campaign around. There is precision in the fluff.
Axelrod says he believes that Obama is something different:
a “trailblazing” figure who “represents the future.” And
indeed, so far Obama’s campaign has been steeped in his
biography. This is, after all, a 45-year-old man who has
written not one but two memoirs. Most of the raw videotape
Axelrod has is the banal, worn imagery of politics — Obama
speaking from a podium, with the familiar, angled hand
gestures, or seated and listening intently, elbows on knees
— and somehow from this he had hoped to wring

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transcendence. There was a clip he found from the early
stages of the 2004 Senate campaign of Obama, microphone
in hand, introducing himself to a small group of voters at a
coffeehouse on Chicago’s North Side; when the candidate
told them about his work in the early 1990s as a community
organizer, there was a spontaneous, sustained applause. “I
remember that!” Axelrod told me a few days later as we
watched the finished product in his office the morning it was
released to the public. “You know, we hadn’t thought that
was an important part of his bio, but people really responded
to the fact that Barack gave up corporate job offers to work
in the community.”

Axelrod has the political operative’s BlackBerried, wearied

demeanor, at once somewhat more and somewhat less than
fully awake. His conversations are staccato, 90-second
affairs, affirmations and advice. The day the video was
released, he had six TV news crews lined up to interview him
for segments they were putting together on Obama’s
announcement. The Fox cameraman started hooking up his
wires. He told Axelrod he had just walked past the subway
station, and a worker, seeing the TV cameras, asked whom
the crew was going to interview: “And I say David Axelrod,
and she just screams, ‘Obama’s running!’ That’s all I had to
say!”

“Yeah?” Axelrod replied, BlackBerrying, happy. He turned the

video back on. Axelrod says he loves man-on-the-street
interviews, and while digging through the tape the week
before, he found one he did with a young Hispanic guy. “He
gives you a — a sense of hope,” the young man says,
squinting past the camera, swaying slightly. “Uh, at a time
when, you know, things in this country are not going so
well.” It’s a good message for Obama, and a good
messenger, but what Axelrod likes are the stutters, the
verbal hiccups: “That kind of authenticity is how you cut
through.”

Axelrod says viewers are more likely to be arrested by shots

that look rough, like “a hybrid, part political commercial, part

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news.” He found a grainy, C-Span-style shot of Obama
talking about homelessness on the floor of the State Senate,
which Axelrod now uses to establish Obama’s prior political
experience. The consultant picked out a lingering, distant
shot of Obama walking down a sunny southern Illinois road
with his long arm around an older, short white farmer. He
says this was intended to convey his candidate’s ease with
conversation, his cross-cultural capability. The completed
announcement video would begin and end with Obama’s
keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, and
it would include two full minutes on his early life — his
father’s background, his mother’s, his grandfather’s, the
times he moved when he was a little boy. When you finish
watching the video, you don’t have a particularly good sense
of Obama as a politician (you might be able to say that he’s
for change), but there is an intimacy — you have been
drowned in his life, and you feel as if you know him.

There are a variety of problems of political communication

that the industry’s operatives spend their time obsessing
over. One, which obsessed James Carville, is persuasion: How
do you persuade people who believe one thing to believe
another? A second, the big one for Joe Trippi, is commitment:
What motivates your party’s loyalists to go to the polls in
larger numbers? But Axelrod has become animated by a
more basic challenge of political communication, the
problem of breaking through, of sounding different and new.
Axelrod says that the way to cut through all the noise is to
see campaigns as an author might, to understand that you
need not just ideas but also a credible and authentic
character, a distinct politics rooted in personality. (“David
breaks them down,” Peter Giangreco, a Chicago direct-mail
consultant who often works with Axelrod, told me. “Who is
your mother? Who is your father? Why are you doing this?”)
This, Axelrod says, is what Karl Rove understood about
George W. Bush. “One of the reasons Bush has succeeded in
two elections,” Axelrod says, “is that in his own rough-hewn
way he has conveyed a sense of this is who I am, warts and
all.” For Obama, because of Senator Hillary Clinton’s far-

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greater experience and establishment backing, this is a
particularly essential project. “If we run a conventional
campaign and look like a conventional candidacy, we lose,”
Axelrod says.

When the first major profile of Axelrod appeared in Chicago

magazine in 1987, three years after he left a high-profile job
as the lead political reporter for The Chicago Tribune to work
as a political operative, the article (“Hatchet Man: The Rise
of David Axelrod”) began by comparing him to an “exotic
rodent.” Two decades later, there remains the matter of the
comb-over and the damp mustache, but his looks seem less
important now. In the last four years, Axelrod has helped
steer campaigns for fully four of the Democrats now running
for president — Obama, Clinton, John Edwards and Chris
Dodd — and one who dropped out (Tom Vilsack); framed the
messages for the new young governor of Massachusetts,
Deval Patrick; and served as the chief political adviser for
Representative Rahm Emanuel when the congressman
helped orchestrate the Democratic takeover of the House of
Representatives last fall.

Axelrod, who is 52, is lumbering, sardonic and self-

deprecating, and he still has the old Chicago street-fighter
belief that you can see what matters about politics most
clearly when you’re slumming in the wards. His bookshelves
are filled with Abe Lincoln biographies, but what he says he
admires about Lincoln isn’t just his philosophy but his
political effectiveness, the Great Emancipator’s secret shiv.
Professional opinions of Axelrod in this pitted, rivalrous field
vary, but Axelrod, working from Chicago, has become
perhaps the consultant with the tightest grip on his party’s
future. “So many consultants are fighting the last war, but
David is fighting the next one, and that makes him very,
very dangerous,” the Republican consultant Mike Murphy
told me.

After the consecutive presidential losses of Al Gore and John

Kerry, patrician candidates who ran ill-fitting “people versus
the powerful” campaigns designed for them by the

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consultant Bob Shrum, many Democrats began to suspect
that part of what was wrong with the party was its formulaic
consultants. The party has suffered, Axelrod says, from a
“Wizard of Oz syndrome among Washington political
consultants who tend to come to candidates and say: I have
the stone tablets! You do what I say, and you will get
elected. And they fit their candidates into their rubric.”

Axelrod’s is a less grand, postideological approach, and his

campaigns are rooted less in issues than in the particulars of
his candidate’s life. For him, running campaigns hitched to
personality rather than ideology is a way of reclaiming
fleeting authenticity. It is also, more and more, the way of
the Democratic Party. Its 2006 Congressional campaign
strategy — run by Axelrod’s close friend Emanuel, with the
Chicago consultant acting as principal sounding board — did
not depend on any great idea of where the party ought to
go, like the last political cataclysm, Newt Gingrich’s 1994
House “revolution.” As they have reclaimed power, the
Democrats have done so not by moving appreciably to the
left or the right; rather, they have done so by allowing their
candidates to move in both directions at once. “What David
is basically doing — and this is somewhat new for Democrats
— isn’t trying to figure out how to sell policies,” says the
Democratic media consultant Saul Shorr. “It’s a matter of
personality. How do we sell leadership?”

II.

It seems bizarre to consider now, but there was a time, just

about three years ago, when Barack Obama was a pretty
obscure black candidate for statewide office, and his political
fortunes seemed to obey the regular, racialized rules of
urban politics. The campaign needed to find a way for him to
add white progressives from the Chicago suburbs and
lakefront to his expected base among black voters. “When
you’re breaking barriers and asking voters to do something
they haven’t done before — vote for an African-American for
governor or senator — it’s very helpful to have third-party
authentication, newspaper endorsements or institutional

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support, to encourage them to go there,” Axelrod told me.
His first choice to vouch for Obama was his old client Paul
Simon, the bow-tied, progressive, retired U.S. senator and a
beloved figure in their target demographics. But just as
Axelrod was trying to fix dates, Simon was taken to the
hospital for heart surgery; he died the next day. Paul
Harstad, the campaign’s pollster, told me that Axelrod was
adamant that Simon had been the perfect proxy. So he
sought out the closest substitute he could find and cut a
commercial featuring the senator’s daughter, Sheila, a
member of the Carbondale, Ill., City Council. Sheila Simon
made an ad for Axelrod linking Obama’s legacy and her
father’s, saying they were “cut from the same cloth.” When
the cash-strapped campaign put the ads on the air and then
followed up with another ad linking Obama to Harold
Washington, the late, beloved, liberal mayor of Chicago,
“that was it,” according to Mark Blumenthal, who was
running tracking polls for the opposing Senate campaign of
Blair Hull. “The ads did something rare in politics, which was
make Obama seem like a historic candidate,” Blumenthal
told me. “They helped move his numbers from 30, 35
percent up to 53 percent, and it became a landslide. You
could just about see this whole Obama wave beginning.”

Axelrod has known Obama longer than any of his other close
political advisers and, other campaign officials say, is now
Obama’s chief strategist and someone he “trusts implicitly.”
Axelrod has been intimately involved with the staffing of the
campaign (David Plouffe, who was a partner in Axelrod’s
consulting firm, is now Obama’s campaign manager), with its
strategy and pacing and with the scrubbing of its message
and language. Because of the vastness of the operation,
Axelrod has had to hire other media consultants to help him
develop commercials; his own role, he says, will be as
“keeper of the message.” One senior campaign adviser told
me: “Barack is a no-drama kind of guy. He’s not looking for a
person or a group of people that bring their own set of
dramas to the operation. What [Obama] gets from David is
no nonsense.”

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Axelrod met Obama when the senator was 30 years old and
coordinating a voter-registration drive in Chicago and Betty
Lou Saltzman, a doyenne of progressive politics in Chicago,
suggested that the two get to know each other. In the 15
years since, Axelrod has worked through Obama’s life story
again and again, scouring it for usable political material, and
he believes that some basic themes come through: that he is
“not wedded to any ideological frame or dogma,” that he is
“an outsider rather than someone who’s spent years in the
dens of Georgetown,” that he is an “agent for change” and
has the optimism and dynamism of a fresh, young face.
Axelrod knows that each of these characteristics has its flip
side — optimism can be read as naïveté, independence as
ideological unmooredness, unjadedness for a lack of
experience and bipartisanship as an instinct to avoid
necessary combat.

In his office back in Chicago, Axelrod’s walls aren’t covered

with bookcases but with political images, candidates Axelrod
has worked for on winning election nights, their hands thrust
up, their grins wide, the newspaper headlines behind them.
There are the black mayors of Philadelphia, Cleveland,
Detroit and Chicago. There is a charming, signed shot of
Obama underneath a print of Muhammad Ali knocking out
Sonny Liston. Signed thanks from Harold Washington. It is a
museum of a particular kind of history — not just the
evolution of the modern political left but also the ascendance
of a particular kind of charismatic, reformer African-American
candidate — and you get the sense that this is how the
consultant sees himself, as a curator of this history. Electing
Obama president would be “something you could really be
proud of for the rest of your life,” Axelrod told me in early
January. “It would really change politics in a very positive
way.” When he talks about his own ideas, Axelrod has a habit
of substituting anecdotes not from his own life but from
Obama’s, or Deval Patrick’s, as if his is a compounded, and
cultivated, existence.

With Obama’s candidacy, Axelrod is placing a gaudy bet:

that the symbolic significance of race has now begun to flip.

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An underlying message of the campaign is that African-
American candidates can symbolically represent the future. I
asked him if he thought that Obama’s race would be a
detriment. “I don’t think of it as a detriment,” Axelrod said. “I
know that there are people who wouldn’t vote for a black
candidate, but I don’t know if they would vote for a
Democratic candidate anyway. But I think that in a sense
Barack is the personification of his own message for this
country, that we get past the things that divide us and focus
on the things that unite us. He is his own vision.”

Every veteran political operative has his batch of lessons

learned. From his experience running the antic, aggressive
Emanuel’s campaign for Congress, he realized that the way
to deal with your client’s perceived flaws is to embrace them
and not run from them. When he ran Tom Vilsack’s campaign
for governor of Iowa, he learned that the smoothest way to
beat back a staunch social conservative message is to attack
not the content but “the over-the-top negativism” that often
accompanies it. From some advisory work he did for Bill
Clinton during the 1996 campaign, when he wrote the memo
that introduced the phrase “Bridge to the 21st century” into
the political vernacular, Axelrod learned that for a Democrat
the future always trumps the past. He says he also learned
from Clinton that a pol’s biggest task is “to narrow the
distance between the people and government.” From a
distance, he watched Karl Rove help George Bush win two
terms as president by “understanding that every election is
a reaction to the last president” and then in 2004 by
“figuring out how to make Bush’s stubbornness into a
political virtue.” During the 2004 convention, he stood with
Senator Chris Dodd, who told Axelrod that Democrats “were
making a mistake by turning the whole thing into a giant
V.F.W. convention and not mentioning the failure of the Bush
administration on a wide variety of issues.” The lesson he
took was that the party shouldn’t get too wrapped up in the
issue of the moment. Most of all, from campaign after
campaign, and particularly in 2004 from the Dean and
Edwards campaigns, Axelrod took the lesson that the

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problem with failed candidacies isn’t usually that the
message wasn’t shrewd but that “unless a message
authentically reflects the messenger, it’s likely to fail.”

Axelrod says that his model for the Obama campaign came
last year when Deval Patrick ran for governor of
Massachusetts. There are many ways in which Patrick’s run
and Obama’s are similar: the optimism, the constant
presence of the candidate’s biography, the combination of a
crusading message of reform with the candidate’s natural
pragmatism, the insistence that normal political categories
did not apply, even the same, unofficial slogan, shouted from
the crowds — “Yes. We. Can!” But most essential is the way
in which both of these campaigns came to use the
symbolism that accompanies their candidates’ race, not by
apologizing for it or ignoring it but by embracing the
constant attention paid to the historic nature of the
candidacy itself. The Democratic media consultant David
Eichenbaum, whose candidate, Chris Gabrieli, lost to Patrick
and Axelrod in Massachusetts, told me: “What they were
able to do in the Patrick campaign was similar to what
they’ve been able to do with Obama. The campaign
managed to energize the grass roots, but there was a sense
of idealism and hope and being able to break that historic
barrier that was very unifying and reached out beyond
liberals or the base. It became a movement that took on a
life of its own.”

At the beginning of January, on a sunny day in the middle of

the Northeast’s strange extended warm spell, Axelrod
traveled to Boston for Patrick’s inaugural. Recounting it for
me afterward, he said, “I really thought a lot about this
Obama thing, and I thought, You know, these are really the
moments you work for, and I thought, how amazing would it
be to be not at the Massachusetts Statehouse but at the U.S.
Capitol for that.”

III.

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We were in Chicago in January, and it was absurdly
unpleasant outside, the sun hanging high above the wind
and the chill like a taunt. Axelrod was on a man-in-the-street
shoot, a campaign commercial for Axelrod’s old friend and
client Richard M. Daley, and the first scheduled interviewee,
a retired Irish firefighter, had been mocking Axelrod’s crew
for dressing wrong. “You need the layers in this cold,” he
announced. “You need this wickywack stuff.” (“Gee,” Axelrod
deadpanned, “I wonder if I’ll be able to draw him out.”) This
is Axelrod’s Chicago, the old ward Democrats, and he started
bantering with the guy. The firefighter asked Axelrod about
Obama: “Everybody’s raving about him, this new black guy,
but he doesn’t have any experience. Not everyone’s in love
with him, you know.” And the guy grinned, confrontationally,
and it just kind of hung there, like race sometimes does in
Chicago, somewhere between tolerance and menace.

This has been Axelrod’s career, an eternal return to Chicago

and to the politics of race. Axelrod and his sister, Joan, grew
up in Manhattan, the children of two Jewish liberals — a
mother who worked as a journalist at PM, a left-wing
newspaper of the 1940’s, and later ran focus groups for an
advertising firm, and a psychologist father. He went to
college at the University of Chicago. He found the city
familiar-feeling and married a business student named Susan
Landau, whom he met while playing co-ed basketball. He has
been there ever since.

Axelrod wasn’t the most attentive student; he took so many

incompletes in college that he ended up having to finish a
quarter of his credits in his last semester. When he was 19, a
junior, his father, divorced and living in a Manhattan studio,
killed himself, and Axelrod was notified as next of kin. The
consultant still has tacked to his wall a fierce self-portrait his
father drew in his 20s. Axelrod threw himself into journalism,
working after classes at a tiny paper in Hyde Park and
covering, among other things, Chicago’s roaring, pitted racial
politics; he knew who all the aldermen in the city were by
the time he graduated. The Chicago Tribune took him on
right out of school, sent him to the night desk for a couple of

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years of hardening and then turned him loose on City Hall. It
was 1979, Axelrod was 23 and the whole politics of the city
were caught up in the race thing. Axelrod was inclined
toward the reformers, even after his great hope, a white
mayor named Jane Byrne, turned out to be a hack and a dud.
“I should have known,” he says. In 1984, Axelrod decided to
get into politics himself. He signed on with Simon’s senatorial
campaign as communications director, became campaign
manager and, after Simon won, opened his own shop.

Axelrod can be a fussy bag of liberal tensions and conflicts.

He says he hates the idea that he might become the kind of
media-hogging consultant who overshadows his client, but
he appears on television in Chicago so frequently that
construction workers and subway conductors recognize him
on the street. He drives, charmingly and humbly, a Pontiac
Vibe, but he also has a vast weekend house in Michigan that
makes the reporters who talk to him jealous. This basic
tension goes beyond personal style; it runs through his
career, and it’s the tension of the modern Democratic
establishment, caught between its reform origins and the
compromises necessary to win power. And it’s the conflict of
the Daley circle, a bunch of reformers who brought about a
restoration of the machine with its attached pathologies.

“David Axelrod’s mostly been visible in Chicago in the last

decade as Daley’s public relations strategist and the guy
who goes on television to defend Daley from charges of
corruption,” Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman who
is now chairman of the political science department at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, told me. Axelrod sees it a
little differently. He says that Daley’s election was necessary
as a “moment of racial healing” and that he is “proud of the
mayor’s progressive record.”

Axelrod is known for operating in this gray area, part idealist,

part hired muscle. It is difficult to discuss Axelrod in certain
circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce
papers coming up. As the 2004 Senate primary neared, it
was clear that it was a contest between two people: the

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millionaire liberal, Hull, who was leading in the polls, and
Obama, who had built an impressive grass-roots campaign.
About a month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune
revealed, near the bottom of a long profile of Hull, that
during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an
order of protection. In the following few days, the matter
erupted into a full-fledged scandal that ended up destroying
the Hull campaign and handing Obama an easy primary
victory. The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece
later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had
“worked aggressively behind the scenes” to push the story.
But there are those in Chicago who believe that Axelrod had
an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial
story. They note that before signing on with Obama, Axelrod
interviewed with Hull. They also point out that Obama’s TV
ad campaign started at almost the same time. Axelrod
swears up and down that “we had nothing to do with it” and
that the campaign’s television ad schedule was long
planned. “An aura grows up around you, and people assume
everything emanates from you,” he told me.

Today, as Axelrod basks in his profession’s highest glory —

shaping a historical presidential campaign — he is
experiencing one of its nastiest turns: in a tiny and
ideologically promiscuous world, you often need to go to war
with your friends. (If Obama hadn’t run, Axelrod says, he
would have sat out this presidential race, and he says he told
all of his other former clients that early on; he hasn’t had
much interaction with them since.) There is Dodd, and there
is Edwards, but perhaps most poignantly, there is Hillary
Clinton. It’s a matter of epilepsy. David and Susan Axelrod
have three children in their late teens and early 20s. Their
eldest, Lauren, has developmental disabilities associated
with chronic epileptic seizures and now lives in a group home
in Chicago. But for years her illness required enough of her
parents’ time that it kept Susan Axelrod out of the work force
and kept David from moving to Little Rock during the 1992
presidential campaign. Susan and two other mothers of
children with epilepsy started a foundation, Citizens United

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for Research in Epilepsy (CURE), which Susan runs, to
promote research and raise funds for a cure. Because of
David’s political work, they have had political celebrities do
fund-raisers: Bill Clinton, Tim Russert, Obama. But few have
done as much for the foundation as Hillary Clinton.

It was January 1999, President Clinton’s impeachment trial

was just beginning in the Senate and Hillary Clinton was
scheduled to speak at the foundation’s fund-raiser in
Chicago. Despite all the fuss back in Washington, Clinton
kept the appointment. She spent hours that day in the
epilepsy ward at Rush Presbyterian hospital, visiting children
hooked up to machines by electrodes so that doctors might
diagram their seizure activity and decide which portion of
the brain to remove. At the hospital, a local reporter pressed
her about the trial in Washington, asked her about that
woman. At the organization’s reception at the Drake Hotel
that evening, Clinton stood backstage looking over her
remarks, figuring out where to insert anecdotes about the
kids. “She couldn’t stop talking about what she had seen,”
Susan Axelrod recalled. Later, at Hillary Clinton’s behest, the
National Institutes of Health convened a conference on
finding a cure for epilepsy. Susan Axelrod told me it was “one
of the most important things anyone has done for epilepsy.”
And this is how politics works: David Axelrod is now
dedicated to derailing this woman’s career.

“Life can be tragic,” Axelrod told me by phone from Chicago

the day before Obama officially announced his candidacy,
“but it is important to focus on the moments when it is
rapturous.” Political consultancy is often understood, from a
distance, as a science of cynicism, but from up close it can
look instead like a ruthless form of love.

IV.

On the second Saturday in February, David and Susan

Axelrod drove down to the old Statehouse in Springfield, Ill.,
to watch Obama officially announce his candidacy for
president, giving a speech he had sent to Axelrod for edits at

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4 in the morning, two nights before. There was a crowd of
more than 15,000 in the square, it was freezing out and
Obama looked even skinnier than usual in his big wool coat.
Axelrod’s cameras roamed through the crowds, interviewing
Illinois locals with mustaches and rural accents, who talked
about how Obama is “different,” “inspiring.”

The historic overtones of the speech were unguarded and

blunt. Obama mentioned Lincoln half a dozen times. His
central theme was the promise of the future, of himself:
“Let’s be the generation,” he said over and over again, that
meets the big challenges of the day — poverty, energy
independence, the environment. “What’s stopped us from
meeting these challenges,” he said, “is the failure of
leadership, the smallness of our politics.”

Axelrod says that Obama wrote nearly all of the speech, but
there were distinct echoes of Axelrod’s previous clients: not
just Patrick but also John Edwards’s campaign for president
in 2004 — Axelrod was his chief media adviser. Edwards and
his message never really took hold. One rival Democratic
media consultant told me, “What I’d like to know about
David Axelrod is, What the hell happened with the Edwards
campaign?” Axelrod says the Edwards campaign didn’t falter
because of the message, “which was pretty good, it got us
pretty far.” Instead, he points to Edwards: “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.”

But the lingering lesson of the Edwards campaign may be

that presidential campaigns are wide open and unpredictable
things, dozens of different actors pouring their political
convictions into a single vessel, with convictions of his own,
and they can slip out of the media consultant’s control. In
early March, for instance, a minute-long commercial
appeared on YouTube attacking Hillary Clinton as a drone out
of “1984,” showing her speaking on a giant screen in front of
a group of zombielike followers — mimicking the famous
Apple commercial — and purporting to come from the

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Obama campaign. Close to two million people watched the
ad in two weeks, and it moved the Obama message in ways
Axelrod hadn’t planned. (It later emerged that the ad’s
creator worked for a company that contracted for the Obama
campaign, though the campaign itself wasn’t involved.) The
spot made Axelrod cranky. “I didn’t think much of it,” he told
me.

The ad incident came just a month after the campaign’s first

disruption, when the Hollywood mogul and liberal Obama
fund-raiser David Geffen gave an interview to Maureen
Dowd, the Times columnist, in which he said that the
Clintons lie “with such ease, it’s troubling.” The Clinton
campaign immediately called on Obama’s team to repudiate
the comments, but they refused, and afterward the two
camps volleyed barbs back and forth for a day or so. It was
one of those early campaign spats that get endlessly
analyzed for who won some minor tactical advantage, but to
Axelrod it was a mistake, a self-induced undermining of the
transcendent character he spent so long helping to cultivate.
The Geffen episode was “a good object lesson about how
easy it is to slide into the morass,” he told me. “I’m mindful
of the responsibility not to lose our way, not to disappoint,
not to sink into the conventional and lose our soul in the
process. There are enormous pressures to conform. And to
fight a small tactical battle.”

His friends put it more bluntly. “What David is going to learn

in the course of this presidential campaign,” Emanuel told
me, “is the economic efficiency of the four-letter word.”

Ben Wallace-Wells writes about national affairs for Rolling

Stone. His last article for the magazine was a profile of Tony
Snow, the White House press secretary.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/magazine/01axelrod.t.h
tml?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

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