The three dominant characters in this political memoir by David Axelrod, one of the Democratic Party’s best-known strategists, are Axelrod, his once-in-a-lifetime client Barack Obama and belief. Axelrod believes “in politics as a calling; in campaigns as an opportunity to forge the future we imagine; in government as an instrument for that progress.” Though he does not expound on this theology, it is manifest in his unswerving fidelity to the president.
In a literary genre that consists primarily of take-downs and paeans, Axelrod’s Believer falls squarely in the latter category. This may frustrate some readers who, seven years in, are still struggling to make sense of the mixed bag that constitutes the Obama presidency, and who would figure that a book by his consigliere might provide novel insights. Less than a fourth of Believer is devoted to Axelrod’s two years in the West Wing as senior adviser to the president, a notable apportionment that is likely to fortify the central critique of Obama — namely, that he and his team (including Axelrod) are far better versed in hopey-changey atmospherics and cutting-edge campaign tactics than in actual governing.
To be fair, Axelrod has never professed to be a policymaker. His stock in trade is “messaging” — the distillation of a political persona into a few penetrating words and images — and for the past three decades he has been among the best in the field. That said, and as Believer makes clear, his influence on the Obama administration’s record is pervasive, from healthcare to economic policy to the war in Afghanistan. And this gives rise to a Groucho Marx-like conundrum: Should Axelrod have such fealty to a president who gives an image-maker like himself so much clout?
Interspersed throughout Believer are tantalizing if unexplored hints as to why Axelrod so yearned for a cause to believe in. His father was a dreamy-eyed baseball fan and itinerant psychotherapist, his mother a highly driven researcher at the New York ad agency Young & Rubicam who showed little interest in parenthood. More than once, he acknowledges sharing with his mother, Myril, a “debilitating self-doubt.” When his father, Joe (to whom he bears a striking physical resemblance), committed suicide in 1974, David, then 19, somberly concluded, “I was completely on my own.”
By this time, he was transplanted to Chicago and writing political columns for the weekly Hyde Park Herald. Though Axelrod says that he was drawn to journalism as “a great way to sate my thirst for politics,” it seems more than coincidental that his emotionally distant mother was also a reporter before settling on a career in advertising and polling, as the son himself would.
BENEFITS OF BELIEVING
Axelrod writes with unalloyed affection of Chicago’s seamy political theater, of its looming lead characters (including Mayors Richard M Daley and Harold Washington) and of the gimlet-eyed City Hall reporters who, he says in a jab at today’s win-the-hour media culture, “lived to get it first and get it right.” Two periods of distinct joy — each shimmering with idealism, each lasting about two years — leap out of his autobiography. The first is Axelrod’s time as a hustling, jut-jawed political reporter for The Chicago Tribune, during which he lustily hounded Mayor Jane Byrne. That heyday began to sour for him in 1981, when the Tribune changed management and, in Axelrod’s view at least, became less fun to work for. (Disillusionment is an inevitable leitmotif in Believer.)
The other high point is, of course, Obama’s “Yes We Can” quest for the presidency, in which the candidate is cast as the levelheaded adult in the room. One of the most fascinating chapters, though, comes later, when the incumbent Obama seems to be another man entirely during his listless, at times petulant, 2012 debate prep. So what happened along the way?
As to why the man described by the author in a 2007 campaign memo as “the only authentic ‘remedy’ to what ails Washington” has only widened the capital’s partisan divide, Axelrod takes the familiar position that Obama’s “preternatural cool” and “hint of moral superiority and disdain for politicians who put elections first” are off-putting. But the idea of Obama’s moral superiority becomes less credible after you read that he admitted to Axelrod that “he had pulled his punches with Netanyahu to avoid antagonizing elements of the American Jewish community” and had “modified” his support for same-sex marriage so as not to offend black church leaders.
The unreliable-narrator dynamic occasionally crops up in this book, obscuring exactly what the Believer believes in, beyond winning. While he portrays Obama as a fellow idealist, the author also plainly admires his ruthlessly “bare-knuckle” streak. Then again, he admits to being “stunned” when the president-elect selected Hillary Rodham Clinton to be his secretary of state, not because he doubted her abilities, but because her team had run bare-knuckled “ads questioning his preparedness to be commander in chief.”
When Axelrod the newsman covered race-inflected issues, the beat was a righteous one; when reporters did so in 2008, it was because “race was the shiniest of objects.” While lamenting that among the Washington press, “success is measured not by what you accomplish, but how voters feel about it at any given moment,” Axelrod later volunteers that he “devoured” polls every day at the White House. Indeed, when the treasury secretary at the time, Timothy Geithner, opposed the politically popular tactic of denying Wall Street executives their bonuses — protesting that it “would be the end of capitalism as we know it!” — Axelrod fired back, “I hate to break the news, Mr Secretary, but capitalism isn’t trading very high right now!”
All of that said, Believer is a well-written and often moving account of how a committed liberal measures his principles against the bruising imperatives of high-stakes politics. And, it should be noted, there is ample juice in Axelrod’s literary steak. He is withering in his appraisal of Clinton’s former strategist, Mark Penn, as the quintessential nonbeliever. And for the first time, he recounts here in detail his brief but excruciating stint in 2003 as the communications strategist for presidential aspirant John Edwards and his “edgy and quite often unhappy” wife, Elizabeth.
Axelrod makes only a halfhearted attempt to conceal his dissatisfaction with the omnipresence of the Obamas’ BFF and fellow senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, who was directed by Obama in August 2007 to lend “adult supervision” to a struggling campaign. Jarrett possessed “virtually no campaign experience, at any level, making some of her critiques hard to take.” The competitor in Axelrod cannot resist divulging that as their campaign began to gain traction during the final months of 2007, Obama returned from an ad hoc meeting on a tarmac with Clinton, then the front-runner, and said, “For the first time in the campaign, I saw fear in her eyes.”
Even the throwaway anecdotes in Believer are revealing. When Senator John Kerry offers his endorsement just before the fateful Iowa caucuses, then pulls back once Obama’s poll numbers go south, then re-offers as victory becomes inevitable, Obama coolly demurs. As Axelrod puts it with evident relish, “The ship had already sailed.” Believing, in other words, has its benefits.
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