David Axelrod

At a Glance

Career History: Senior White House adviser (January 2009-January 2011) Partner of AKP&D Message and Media formerly known as Axelrod & Associates (since 1985); Partner ASK Public Strategies (since 2002); Media Adviser to Barack Obama (2004 and 2008)
Birthday: Feb. 22, 1955
Hometown: New York, N.Y.
Alma Mater: University of Chicago, B.A. (political science), 1977

Spouse: Susan Landau
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Path to Power

If the traditional image of a Washington political adviser has a polar opposite, it would be Axelrod. Though he owns a few suits and ties, they often seem reserved for television appearances. Just as often on the campaign trail, Axelrod can be seen schlepping beside his natty candidate wearing a pullover sweater, open collar and a droopy mustache often described as "damp."

Axelrod grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City and was bitten early by the political bug. His mom, Myril, wrote for PM, a leftist daily newspaper in New York bankrolled by Chicago millionaire Marshall Field III and often accused of having ties to the Communist Party. His dad, Joseph, was a psychologist and standout amateur baseball player. Axelrod's parents divorced when he was just a boy and his father later committed suicide, devastating the son who would eventually write that it took him 30 years "to say out loud that the man I most loved and admired took his own life."

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By age 10, Axelrod was canvassing his housing development with a cardboard box filled with the brochures of New York mayoral candidate John Lindsay. At 13, he was selling campaign buttons and bumper stickers for Robert Kennedy.

When it came time for college, Axelrod and his family agreed that he would benefit from time away from New York. He ended up at the University of Chicago, where he studied political science. While in school, Axelrod wrote for a neighborhood newspaper, The Hyde Park Herald, and secured an internship with The Chicago Tribune. He also met his future wife, Susan Landau, a business student. The couple has three grown children, one of whom suffers from debilitating epilepsy that prompted Axelrod and Landau to found the group Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy or CURE.

Axelrod went to work for the Tribune the day after he graduated in 1977, and, at age 27, became the paper's youngest-ever chief political writer.

But Axelrod wasn't entirely satisfied writing about politics and, he would later add, was becoming disenchanted with the "corporatization" of American newspapers.

Rep. Paul Simon (D), a folksy, intellectual liberal from southern Illinois who had his own journalism roots, had been lobbying Axelrod to come work on Simon's 1984 Senate campaign, prompting the prodigy to leave the Tribune and journalism for good.

Birth of a Political Consultant

Axelrod joined the Simon campaign as communications director. Less than two months later, he was promoted to co-manager, and Simon went on to defeat 18-year incumbent Republican Sen. Charles Percy.

With Simon on his way to the Senate, Axelrod in 1985 opened shop in Chicago, forming Axelrod & Associates, a political consultancy, with Forest Claypool, one of his deputies from the Simon campaign. They handled mostly longshot candidates for two years before they took on a campaign that significantly influenced Axelrod's career path. Harold Washington, Chicago's first - and so far only - African-American mayor, was running for re-election in 1987 when he hired Axelrod to handle the campaign.

It was the first time Axelrod worked for a black candidate, though he had come to know and admire Washington during his time at the Tribune. He calls Washington "the most kinetic campaigner and politician that I've ever met."

The campaign quickly turned ugly. The city's predominantly white political machine had mobilized against Washington, thwarting him at every opportunity during the so-called "Council Wars." His political opponents passed out buttons featuring a picture of a watermelon and his Republican opponent, Bernard Epton, campaigned on the slogan "Before It's Too Late."

Axelrod recalled meeting with Washington the day after he won the election. "He turned to us and asked, 'What percentage of the white vote did I get?' We told him it was 20 percent, and we were happy, because four years earlier he'd gotten only 8 percent." But Washington wasn't impressed. He had spent as much as 80 percent of his time campaigning in white neighborhoods. Washington said, "Ain't it a bitch to be a black man in the land of the free and the home of the brave," Axelrod recalled.

Two Consulting Firms

Axelrod & Associates evolved into AKP&D Message & Media and Axelrod became the firm's senior partner. But Axelrod and his new partners also created a second firm, ASK Public Strategies, which is as secretive as the political consultancy is public. ASK dealt only with corporate clients, including AT&T, ComEd, Cablevision and the Chicago Children's Museum.

ASK specializes in a practice known as "astroturfing," which involves setting up front groups that appear to be independent but are, in fact, backed financially by Axelrod's corporate clients. When ComEd, the Chicago-based utility, wanted to raise electric rates after a 10-year freeze, ASK formed a group called Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity, or CORE, to help win over public support. It used a similar technique to aid other clients.

Politically, Axelrod, who left both firms to work for Obama, had found his niche: consulting for African-American candidates. In addition to Washington's campaign, Axelrod helped Deval Patrick become Massachusetts' first African- American governor in 2006 and, two years later, helped make Obama America's first black president.

Axelrod has played a major role in some of the black community's greatest political triumphs. The roster of Axelrod's clients includes Carol Moseley-Braun (D), the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate; Dennis Archer, the first African- American president of the American Bar Association; and Lee Brown, first black mayor of Houston.

Before joining Obama's presidential campaign, Axelrod's office was winning nearly 80 percent of the campaigns on which it worked.

The key to Axelrod's success in electing African-American candidates is his ability to sell them to white voters.It's a strategy that has served Axelrod's clients well, though it has not been without criticism.

To some critics, there is a sameness to Axelrod-run campaigns. "Yes, we can," the slogan that drew voters eager for change to Obama's presidential bid made earlier appearances in both Obama's Senate run and Deval Patrick's race for governor in Massachusetts, both of which Axelrod worked.

Not all of Axelrod's clients are black, to be sure. He remains closely aligned with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley (D) and helped Rahm Emanuel, who would go on to become Obama's White House chief of staff, win a House seat.

Meeting Obama

Axelrod originially planned to sit out the 2008 presidential campaign because so many of his former clients were competing against each other for the Democratic nomination, including former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut.

Obama had talked about his presidential ambitions with Axelrod, but they both agreed it was too early for the first-term Senator. He should wait. That changed in 2006 when Obama went on tour for his book, "The Audacity of Hope," which Axelrod helped edit. Thousands of people who turned out for his book signings mentioned the inspiring speech Obama gave at the 2004 Democratic Convention and suggested he run for president. "This was the closest thing to a draft that I've seen in my lifetime," Axelrod said. He and Axelrod reconsidered the matter and entered the race as a team.

Axelrod first met Barack Obama through a mutual acquaintance in 1992. He would later recall liking the Harvard Law School grad who'd come to Chicago's South Side to work as a community organizer. But Axelrod wasn't exactly wowed. The two men stayed in touch, but it wasn't until nearly ten years after their initial meeting, when Obama was thinking about running for the U.S. Senate, that he and Axelrod finally joined forces.

Axelrod focused Obama's Senate campaign on predominantly white southern Illinois rather than on the African-American wards of Chicago. "First of all, I never felt in our campaign for the Senate that he had to make a special effort to reach the African-American community," Axelrod has said. "I always felt that if we did it right that he would rise in prominence in the campaign, and the community would see this and respond to it and respond to him. Obviously we made appeals there, but they weren't particularly different than the appeals we made anywhere else.

By the time Obama decided to run for president, Axelrod was convinced that there had been a seismic shift in public opinion over race. It wasn't that race no longer mattered; people just had bigger issues on their mind.

"I think the really big story on race isn't the resistance that we're meeting but how little resistance there has been," Axelrod said. "People have got bigger concerns and we've moved beyond that as a country. So I don't worry about that, what I worry about is mobilizing our voters so that when people come out they understand that in many of these battleground states the race is close. It's not enough to anticipate victory; you have to earn it."

2008 Presidential Race

As he did with Obama's Senate race, Axelrod focused the 2008 presidential campaign on caucus contests in mostly white states like Iowa, while chief Obama rival Clinton employed the more traditional strategy of focusing on primary states rich in electoral votes.

But Axelrod's most crucial contribution to the Obama's campaign was his insistence on sticking with an optimistic message of hope even when Obama was under intense criticism from Clinton, and others in the campaign questioned whether Obama should go negative.

Axelrod, true to his journalistic roots, builds campaigns around the candidate by mining their biographies for the details to which voters could best relate. He also often needs to feel a personal connection to the people for whom he's working, his friends and associates say. In that sense, Obama may have been the perfect candidate for Axelrod, who once said, "If I could help to get Obama to Washington, then I would have accomplished something great in my life."

"I do love Barack Obama," Axelrod said. "I believe in him."

The Issues

Axelrod told reporters during the 2008 campaign that he had no intention of leaving Chicago if Obama won. When he agreed to go, he emphasized that he never intends to call Washington home. "Just to be clear, I am not moving from Chicago - just doing a little public service for a while."

Leaving most of his family home in Chicago, Axelrod in early 2009 rented an apartment a few blocks from the White House - with a view of the Washington Monument - and settled into a life that consists of long hours at work, five hours or so of sleep at night and a diet that added 20 pounds to his already stout frame. The leather jacket and casual button-down shirts Axelrod favored in Chicago are largely gone from public view in Washington. He bought four new suits and a bunch of neckties in deference to his new position.

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As a political consultant who occupies the West Wing office closest to the president's, Axelrod has attracted comparisons to Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's top political adviser who was viewed as a political Svengali with outsized influence over the president. Axelrod dismisses such comparisons, arguing that his focus is Obama's image and message and not policymaking.

As Obama's closest adviser, Axelrod took much of the heat for what was a tumultuous first year for the president. While the 2008 campaign successfully and consistently inspired Americans, particularly young voters, Axelrod wasn't easily able to recreate that kind of excitement from the White House. Indeed, a number of critics claimed that Axelrod's intense loyalty to Obama blinded him to the president's political problems.

At the start of 2010, there were calls for the president to get rid of Axelrod and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Others claimed that Axelrod was among those who failed to heed Emanuel's advice on critical issues like the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison or health-care reform.

Axelrod denied any "fissure with my buddy Rahm," and dismissed the storyline as the kind of insular, distracting debate over which Washington obsesses but America ignores. "I have dealt with a lot of 'real stuff' in my life," said the man whose daughter is chronically ill, whose father killed himself and whose wife struggled with breast cancer. "The disapprobation of some folks in Washington doesn't seem very meaningful."

Still, Axelrod has had his share of Washington-style scrapes. He participated in the White House fight against Fox News saying it was so partisan that it's "not really a news station;" he angered Israel by deriding its plans for new settlements in east Jerusalem as an "affront" and "insult;"and he riled the conservative, grassroots Tea Party movement, whose members he calls "the tea bags," as an "unhealthy" addition to the national debate over taxes and health care.

Health Care

No issue consumed more of Obama's time and political capital as his roller-coaster ride to reform the nation's health-care system. With no support from Republicans, Obama pushed through legislation that instituted some of the most sweeping changes in health care since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965.

It was a debate in which "You lie" and "baby killer" were shouted in the House chamber and outside picketers were waving signs comparing Obama to Hitler.

In March 2010, the night the reforms finally cleared the last hurdle, Axelrod said, was even sweeter than election night 2008 when Obama became America's first African-American president and stood among thousands of cheering supporters in Chicago's Grant Park.

The Economy

When he first entered office, Obama was faced with an economy in the throes of the greatest depression since the Great Depression, unemployment rates near 10 percent and two wars.

All of that severely handicapped a new president with ambitious goals of his own, Axelrod said, because it forced Obama to make unpopular but critical decisions, including bailouts for Wall Street and automakers and a massive economic stimulus package. "Some of those policies were ones that no one wanted to undertake but were absolutely essential. Nobody wanted to have to throw a lifeline to the financial sector. Nobody wanted to shore up the auto industry. Nobody wanted a $787 billion emergency Recovery Act as our first initiative as president."

"We didn't create this crisis, but we are responsible for trying to solve it," Axelrod said.

The Network

Despite the reported drama between Obama's chief aides during the first year of his presidency, Axelrod and Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have a long history of cooperation. The pair first worked together in 1984 on the Senate campaign of Paul Simon (D) in Illinois. Five years later, they joined forces to help Chicago Mayor's Richard M. Daley's (D) with his first campaign in 1989.

In 2002, Axelrod helped Emanuel win election to Congress in a blue-collar district in Chicago.Four years later, when Emanuel was running the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Axelrod was brought in as his chief strategist, helping Democrats capture 31 House seats and end 12 years of Republican control.

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Additional Resources

David Axelrod

Former senior Obama adviser (since January 2011)