Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  I began talking to Stevenson about the possibility of a rematch. This wasn’t a business decision. I could have made more money by sticking with Hartigan. Yet I genuinely believed that a rematch was the difference between winning and losing, and that Adlai, quirky but smart and honorable, would be a far better governor than either Hartigan or Thompson.

  In the Senate, Adlai had teamed with Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, and other New Democrats to begin to redefine liberalism for the modern era, departing from orthodoxy on trade and other issues. While I didn’t agree with all of it, I had no doubt that Adlai would bring fresh thinking and integrity to the governor’s office.

  As it became known that Stevenson was exploring another race for governor, a local newscaster invited him and Hartigan to appear for an hour of debate on his public affairs show. The night before the show, I went to Stevenson’s house to help him prepare. When I arrived, I found him sitting in a high-backed chair, a tumbler of whiskey in his hand. As soon as he spoke, it was clear that this had not been his first glass.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine. We don’t need to do much,” he said, although the word sounded more like “mush,” and the former senator’s eyes appeared to be only half-open.

  Holy crap, I thought. This guy has a debate in twelve hours, and he’s shitfaced!

  But Stevenson indulged us and, whatever state of consciousness he was in, apparently absorbed our discussion. The next day, the old pro showed up and executed about 95 percent of the strategy. When an exasperated Hartigan finally played what he considered his trump card, suggesting that Stevenson was coasting on his famous name, Adlai was locked and loaded:

  “You know, Neil, when I first decided to run for office many years ago, I went to Dick Daley and asked for his advice,” he began, a smile on his face. “And you know what he told me? He said, ‘Adlai, don’t ever change your name.’ And I never will.”

  Hartigan dropped out shortly after the one-sided debate, and Adlai now had his rematch with Thompson. Before that contest was fully engaged, however, fate intervened. On the assumption that the entire party-endorsed state Democratic ticket would sail through the primary against nominal challengers, we hoarded our money for the general election and did little advertising. This was a dreadful mistake.

  On primary night, two supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, the madcap neofascist, nabbed spots on the Democratic ticket in races that no one had bothered to poll because they were deemed uncompetitive. One of the winners, Mark Fairchild, defeated Adlai’s candidate for lieutenant governor. Now Adlai was tied on the ballot with a LaRouchie, duly nominated and unwilling to resign. The only answer was for Adlai to quit the ticket and run as a third-party candidate.

  It was an incredible break for Thompson, who had run ten years earlier as an anti-machine reformer and was a man with talent and intellect as big as his six-foot-six frame. Yet Thompson had settled comfortably into a familiar and dreary pattern—temporizing problems while dispensing and accepting goodies as the state’s chief executive. Running as a Democrat, Stevenson could have taken Thompson. As the candidate of the newly constituted Solidarity Party, he had no chance.

  But we did make Big Jim work, with a series of ads that got some attention. One featured a tap-dancing governor, shot from pin-striped knees down, highlighting Thompson’s many switches of position and broken promises. Yet in the end, Thompson had the last laugh, dispatching Stevenson with 53 percent of the vote.

  In the fall of 1986, I got a call from Mayor Washington, who asked me to drop by his office at City Hall. When I walked in, Harold was sitting behind his ornate desk, eating.

  “You want half my lunch?” he asked, thrusting an overstuffed sandwich in my direction.

  I didn’t.

  “Come on, look at me,” said the mayor, who had quit smoking after taking office and had put on what looked to be a good forty or fifty additional pounds. “You think I need a whole sandwich?”

  Harold quickly got to the point. He was running for reelection in 1987 and wanted my help. “This is going to be a brawl,” he said. “These guys will do anything to beat me. They know if I win this one, it’s over. That’s the ball game.”

  For three years, Council Wars raged on as the white ethnic bloc, led by Vrdolyak and Burke, had engaged the mayor in an epic battle, seeking to bedevil him at every turn. With a special election in 1986, a Washington-backed candidate, Luis Gutiérrez, had taken an aldermanic seat from a Vrdolyak ally in a new Hispanic ward, tipping the council’s balance of power in the mayor’s favor. All the more reason Harold’s foes were going to make one last run to take back the mayor’s office and regain control of the machinery of city government.

  Blessed with an unparalleled gift for rewriting history in her own mind, Jane Byrne had returned to the fray, posturing herself once again as the plucky challenger and outsider. The combination of continuing racist resistance to Harold and widespread weariness with the ceaseless strife between the council and mayor actually made her comeback plausible. In early polls, Byrne was beating Washington among Democratic voters.

  Even if he turned back Byrne’s challenge in the primary, Harold couldn’t assume victory. In the past, the general election was merely a formality, the ritual sacrifice of whatever poor, hapless soul was willing to run on the Republican line in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. Yet for many Chicago voters, race still trumped party. Bernard Epton, Harold’s last Republican opponent, had proven that. Now, with the city’s first black mayor on the ballot, candidates were lining up to take a shot.

  Thomas Hynes, the popular county assessor and Daley ally, had signaled his intention to challenge the winner of the primary as an independent candidate. So had Vrdolyak, Washington’s council nemesis. And the Republicans would slate a credible candidate as well. If voters coalesced around one of them, the mayor knew it could be a close and competitive race.

  “This is serious business,” Harold told me, in grave tones. “I don’t want to play around.”

  While I would be the point man on the Washington reelection campaign, I needed help in what promised to be a full-tilt rumble. So I recruited my friends Shrum and Doak, who had dropped Caddell and started their own media firm, to partner in what I saw as an important moment in the city’s history. Fortunately, Washington had plenty to tout, having made good on his pledge to end the most egregious patronage abuses at City Hall and to refocus its efforts on improving the city’s neighborhoods. Though Harold was plainly happier on the hustings than behind a desk, and though some of his appointees were more notable for their loyalty than their talent, he had made a solid impact.

  Beyond that, he had the ebullient, larger-than-life quality that suited Carl Sandburg’s “City of the Big Shoulders.” Even if they didn’t support him, Chicagoans delighted in Harold’s joyful rants, such as when he took off after his “antediluvian dodohead” opponents. They loved his exuberant, if off-key, renditions of “My Kind of Town.” They laughed when he only half-jokingly boasted of improving Chicago’s image from the corrupt old days of Al Capone: “Now anywhere you go in the world . . . you know what they say to you? They ask, ‘How’s Harold?’”

  As the mayor barnstormed the city, we mounted a dual media strategy, highlighting Washington as a “mayor for all of Chicago’s neighborhoods,” while reminding voters—two-thirds of whom had voted against Byrne in the last election—what life was like under Calamity Jane. Slowly but surely, we moved the needle. Chicago’s newspapers backed Washington, giving a timely nudge to wavering white voters. On primary day, Washington defeated Byrne by 80,000 votes, or seven points, lifted by a familiar formula: the nearly unanimous support of the black community, a solid Hispanic majority, and more white votes than he needed to make the difference.

  The next day, a few of us gathered at the mayor’s office to help prepare him for a postprimary press conference. The group was gleeful, relieved to have put Byrne and the primary behind us, but the normally gar
rulous mayor was pensive.

  “Say, what percentage of the white vote did I get?” he asked.

  “About twenty-one percent,” someone replied. “But that’s a lot better than last time, when you only got eight percent!”

  “Twenty-one percent?” Harold said. “You know, I’ve probably spent seventy percent of my time in those white neighborhoods. I think I’ve been a good mayor for those neighborhoods. I’ve reached out to everyone in this city. And I get twenty-one percent of the white vote, and we’re all happy?”

  Harold smiled and shook his head.

  “Ain’t it a bitch to be a black man in the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

  Despite any disappointment, Harold attacked the general election like a pile driver, and with particular enthusiasm in the final days, when Vrdolyak emerged as the leading challenger. Though both Vrdolyak and Burke were ringleaders in the acrid Council Wars, it was only Vrdolyak whom the mayor loathed. I asked him why.

  “Because I think Burke is the product of his upbringing and environment. He is an honest racist,” said Harold, who didn’t live to see Burke later adopt an African American son. “But Vrdolyak isn’t a racist. He’s an opportunist. He’s using race, whipping people up for his own political purposes. And that I can’t forgive. That’s evil.”

  On Election Night, Harold polished off Vrdolyak and the field. He had run the gauntlet, and now a sense of calm settled over the city. Harold was the mayor and could no longer be dismissed as a historical accident. And Chicagoans seemed eager for an end to the constant strife at City Hall.

  That night, at a boisterous postelection reception, we were confronted by a logistical problem. Two inveterate camera hogs, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and boxing impresario Don King, were on hand and would almost certainly try to flank Washington at the lectern for the “hero” shot in the morning papers. It wasn’t the photo we wanted, as Harold worked to bring a diverse city together. So we decided to flood the stage with a multiracial crowd of supporters, who would provide the backdrop for Harold’s acceptance speech. To ensure that Jackson and King were not in the picture, we would provide catnip by asking them to do out-of-town media interviews that would keep them busy almost right up to the moment Washington took to the stage.

  It seemed like a good plan, but we underestimated the skills Jackson and King had in navigating their way to the limelight. Though the reverend and the impresario reached the stage after the backdrop crowd was in place, each worked his way to the lectern from opposite sides, like knives through butter. By the time Washington began speaking, they were, just as we feared, flanking him, nearly jostling the mayor’s fiancée out of the way. When Washington finished his remarks, Reverend Jackson, who was planning a second race for president in 1988, grabbed the mayor’s left arm to hoist it in the familiar victory salute. Yet Harold was a strong man, and his arm didn’t budge. He kept it plastered to the lectern while he waved to the crowd with his other hand.

  “I’ll be damned if I was going to let that SOB lift my arm up,” Harold whispered, as he left the stage. “This isn’t his night.”

  Sadly, this victory night, which held out such promise, would be Harold’s last.

  Shortly before Thanksgiving, I was flying home to Chicago from New York. Upon landing, I found several urgent messages from Mike Holewinski, a former state legislator who was one of Harold’s top aides. “The mayor collapsed at his desk,” Holewinski said quietly. “They took him out of here on a stretcher, but it doesn’t look good.”

  Seven months after his resounding victory, Harold Washington was dead, the victim of a massive heart attack.

  Chicagoans formed long lines outside City Hall to view his body, reflecting a cross-section of the diverse city he led. For all the tumult Harold’s ascension had provoked, Chicago appeared united in its grief. I felt the loss acutely. Harold was as interesting, authentic, and fearless a character as I have met in politics. I thoroughly enjoyed working with him and appreciated the historic role he played with such brass and verve. I miss him to this day.

  When I got home the night of his funeral, my son, Michael, just four, had set up his own tribute, creating an open “casket” in which he placed a teddy bear to signify the mayor. He had been watching the news with Susan and, touchingly, had somehow sensed our loss.

  • • •

  Yet in the fall of 1987, I had little time to dwell on my feelings. My old boss Paul Simon was running for president. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, and I told him so. In the little more than two years he had been in the Senate, Simon had gotten off to an admirable start, leading fights to address illiteracy and to combat influence peddling in Washington. He even worked with Reagan on a balanced-budget amendment, though they had vastly different ideas about how the budget should be balanced. He was having an impact. Yet I worried that a failed presidential race might jeopardize his reelection in 1990, and with it his chance to do more. Also, I frankly doubted America was ready for a jug-eared, bow-tied liberal as president.

  Still, Simon’s reasoning wasn’t entirely crazy. Hart began as a front-runner, but was forced out by news of an alleged tryst. Reagan was retiring, and the field was open. The presidential race would begin in Iowa, a state with a huge Illinois border. And Paul’s small-town, midwestern liberalism was well suited for a caucus that tilted left. If he could win there, he would have momentum and a legitimate shot at the nomination.

  I loved Paul, and despite my concerns, once he decided to run, I was very much in the thick of the race. I produced an unusual two-minute biographical ad, a minidocumentary that told Paul’s compelling story in his unscripted words and the words of others. The ad featured a valuable testimonial from Harold Hughes, the crusty former senator and governor of Iowa, revered by his state’s party activists. “I look at Paul Simon,” said Hughes, “I trust Paul Simon.”

  Authenticity is an indispensable requirement for any successful candidate, but particularly a candidate for president. Biography is foundational. More and more, I had become convinced that voters were inured to slick, highly produced media, and the antidote was this more genuine, documentary-style approach. Part of that might have been defensive, since I felt more comfortable, and proficient at, telling stories than I did creating the ads that were the state-of-the-art in Washington. The documentary style also particularly suited Simon, with his Orville Redenbacher looks and Capra-esque story.

  I ended the ads with a silent challenge, words on the screen that went to Paul’s authenticity and his defiant belief that government could still be a force for good: “Isn’t it time to believe again?”

  And for a while, Iowans did. After an early flurry of media, Simon vaulted into the lead. Yet leadership also makes you a target. Paul had an abundance of warmth and decency, but his heart sometimes led him to positions that were hard to square. He had insisted on including in his platform hefty new social spending as well as the balanced-budget amendment. What neither he nor we had entirely figured out was just how to square the two. Now that Simon had emerged as the putative front-runner in Iowa, this stubborn math problem was fodder for the news media and his opponents.

  In a debate in early December, Congressman Dick Gephardt, a Missourian who also was banking on a shared border with Iowa to jump-start his own campaign, scored with a potent line comparing Paul’s suspect plan to the dubious assumptions by Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics. In deeply cutting taxes, Reagan had said that dynamic growth would more than make up for the lost revenues. It hadn’t.

  “Simonomics is really Reaganomics with a bow tie,” Gephardt said.

  It was a killer line. Then, as Simon’s poll numbers began to spiral, Gephardt launched new ads that delivered a hard, populist message on trade. Gephardt had introduced an amendment in Congress that would slap deep tariffs on imported Korean cars in retaliation for the prohibitive taxes placed on the sale of American-made autos in Korea.

 
“When that government’s done, a ten-thousand-dollar Chrysler K car costs forty-eight thousand dollars in Korea,” Gephardt said in a brilliantly manipulative ad. If the Koreans didn’t relent under a Gephardt administration, he concluded, they would be “left asking themselves how many Americans are going to pay forty-eight thousand dollars for one of their Hyundais?”

  The ad, tagged with a new slogan, “It’s Your Fight, Too,” struck an immediate chord in Iowa, where thousands of auto and factory workers feared losing their jobs to plants overseas. Gephardt surged, and we faced a dogfight. The lead shifted from day to day, but on caucus night, Gephardt barely edged out Simon—a murky result, which Simon privately disputed until the day he died. Still, a narrow loss on what was viewed as Simon’s home turf was enough to doom his candidacy.

  Even in defeat, I found the experience of producing media and strategy for a presidential contest heady stuff. I hoped I would get the chance again. The cost, at least in the short run, was my relationship with Simon. When Paul ran for reelection in 1990, he retained Gephardt’s consultants—my old friends Bob Shrum and David Doak—to do the race, concluding that they had the secret sauce he had lacked in 1988. I was disappointed but not surprised. Candidates place their trust in their consultants and expect these highly paid geniuses to deliver, much as if they’ve retained a lawyer to win a big case. If you lose, they look for the next genius.

  Still, I owe Paul a great deal. In the biggest race of his life, he entrusted his media to me and my fledgling firm. Just three years after we opened our doors, we got to play, albeit for a brief time, on the presidential stage.

  In the end, Paul might not have been the best messenger, but there was power in his message. A lot of folks did want to believe again that we had a stake in one another as Americans. They wanted to believe again that we still could act together to build a better future in which everyone had a place. They wanted to believe again in a politics of conviction, and not just calculation. They wanted to believe again in hope.