The View From 1776

Senator Obama’s frequent backing away from extreme left-wing policy positions advocated during the early days of the Democrat/Socialist primary campaign has been widely deplored, even by mainstream socialist media such as the New York Times.

A partial explanation is provided by Obama’s Narrator, an article in the New York Times Magazine.

There is little substance or genuine political accomplishment behind the teleprompter oratory of Senator Obama.  His campaign persona is an invention of his political mastermind and top campaign guru, David Axelrod.

Quote:

For four years [Obama’s chief political and media adviser, a Chicago consultant named David 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...He found a grainy, C-Span-style shot of Obama talking about homelessness on the floor of the [Illinois] State Senate, which Axelrod now uses to establish Obama’s prior political experience.

...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...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.

...For Obama, because of Senator Hillary Clinton’s far-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.

...Sheila Simon [daughter of the late Democrat/Socialist Senator Paul 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 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.

...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 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 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.

...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...“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?”