Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  • • •

  Hillary had been dealing with the aftermath of her own personal crisis, this one played out on the public stage. The Lewinsky scandal had dominated 1998, during which the eyes of the world were on the First Lady. As a result of a combination of sympathy for her ordeal and admiration for the strength and dignity with which she navigated it, Hillary’s popularity had grown to new heights. Reports were swirling that she was contemplating a race for the U.S. Senate from New York. I was skeptical of such a move and told her so in a private meeting at the White House.

  “Why would you want to squander your standing just to become one of a hundred senators?” I asked. “You could make an enormous impact without that when you leave here. You could be another Eleanor Roosevelt!” Yet it was clear that Hillary was well down the road in her thinking. “I think it’s important to have a platform,” she said, all but acknowledging the rumors of her plans. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York’s senior senator, would be retiring, and Hillary was very much eying his seat.

  The Hillary juggernaut was launched the following year, and our firm was on board. While she had her own talented media consultant, the sharp-edged Mandy Grunwald, we would produce ads on Hillary’s behalf for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. In that role, I was part of a group that helped prepare her for the upcoming debates. Underscoring the unusual nature of her candidacy, our mock debates were held in the White House theater, where the president would drop by from time to time to observe. As a veteran of the news media, my job was to assume the role of a panelist asking the toughest, most provocative questions I could devise. “You’re just mean,” Hillary joked during a break from these sessions when I pressed her on some past comments. “I think you’re enjoying this a little too much!” Still, Hillary clearly warmed to the task. After Robert Barnett, a Washington attorney standing in for her Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, tore into her in our first run-through, she came back with a vengeance in the next, her fierce, competitive instincts fully engaged.

  Hillary was impressive, and so was her team, filled with young talents such as Howard Wolfson, Bill de Blasio, and Neera Tanden, who would later become stars in their own right. Yet hanging over the campaign was the dark, brooding presence of Mark Penn, who replaced Morris as the Clintons’ resident pollster and strategist. True to the Morris creed, Penn saw his mission as quashing any liberal impulses of the candidate or the campaign, and he justified himself with fuzzy polling numbers and a smug self-assurance that made every discussion grating. I felt he spent as much time manipulating his clients as providing constructive counsel. On the night the Clintons were featured at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, Penn told me he would begin polling the Senate race the following day.

  “Mark, is that methodologically sound?” I asked. “Given that the Clintons just dominated TV tonight, won’t you get a false positive?”

  “Listen, I know these people,” he said, referring to the president and First Lady. “They’re going on vacation. They’re going to fulminate about this race. What harm does it do to give them a little good news?”

  Bloodless and calculating, Penn was at the top of the heap in political consulting. My interactions with him only added to a growing feeling I had that maybe the time had come for me to move on. I relished campaigns, and was proud of many (though by no means all) of my clients. I loved my colleagues and the creative rush, and since opening my firm, I had made a better living than I’d ever imagined. Still, I hadn’t gotten into politics as a business. The compromises required and the level of cynicism that seemed more pervasive than ever were beginning to wear me down.

  Back home in Chicago, I would watch a cynical governor’s race unfold in 2002 that only added to my dismay.

  After I turned him down, Blagojevich hired Squier’s old firm to honcho his gubernatorial campaign. (Squier himself passed away in 2000, at the age of sixty-five, offering me one more reason to get out of the high-stress world of political consulting.) Taking a candidate who had no compelling rationale to run other than ambition, the consultants skillfully molded him to specs dictated by polling and focus groups and then spent a fortune—and made a fortune themselves—selling a fiction.

  The retiring Republican governor, George Ryan, was under federal investigation and, after a lifetime in politics, would wind up serving his next term at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. So Rod cast himself as a reformer, even as his team scooped up campaign contributions with a vigor that would make even the most hardened Chicago ward heeler blush. True to the polling, he pledged to hold the line on taxes, even as the state drifted into a deep budget morass.

  By the summer of 2002, it was clear to me that Blagojevich was on his way to the statehouse.

  I was happy for Rod personally, and grateful for the continuing kindness he had shown my family, even after I had declined to join his campaign. Weeks after his election, he would headline a Chicago event for Susan’s CURE foundation. Yet his success also raised troubling questions.

  The Blagojevich campaign was a masterpiece of modern political technique. Armed with incisive research, Rod’s consultants had furnished him with a compelling rationale to match his boundless ambition. As a purely clinical matter, I admired their execution. They had deftly used the tools of our trade to propel into high office a man who would prove himself thoroughly ill-suited to hold it. Fickle and immature, he would rarely show up for work, and when he did, he often made impulsive decisions that proved costly to the state. Maybe his consultants had done what I had, more times than I cared to admit: convinced themselves that their candidate was actually the man they spent millions selling to voters. Or maybe they just thought he was the better of two bad choices. Or, then again, maybe it was just another lucrative gig.

  I recalled a conversation I once had with one of my most successful peers, who, in discussing his work, offered a depressing analogy to another profession. “These candidates come in, one after another, and say, ‘Write me a spot,’ and they pay me a shitload of money to do it,” he said. “But, Axe, the next day, I can’t even remember their names.”

  The weight of all this—the demands of intense campaigns and needy, self-absorbed candidates—was mounting. I knew that I either had to find a way to recharge my batteries and renew my idealism or give up political consulting.

  Then I got a perfectly timed and totally unexpected call from an old friend that would change my life.

  “David, it’s Barack. I’m thinking about what I want to do next, and was wondering if we could talk.”

  EIGHT

  THE NATURAL

  I FIRST MET BARACK OBAMA only as a favor to a friend.

  It was 1992. Obama had recently graduated from Harvard Law School, where he made national news as the first African American editor of the extremely prestigious and equally stodgy Harvard Law Review. Now he had been hired to organize Project Vote, a registration drive focused on the large number of unregistered minority voters in the Chicago area. Bettylu Saltzman, a longtime Democratic activist, called to ask me to get together with Obama. “He’s a really extraordinary young guy,” she said. “I think it’s important for you two to know each other.”

  “Happy to, Bettylu, but why?” I asked.

  “Honestly?” she replied. “I think he could be the first black president.”

  Bettylu was a dear friend whose sensibilities about politics and taste in candidates tended to line up with mine. She had been one of Paul Simon’s earliest supporters and had served as his first state director when he moved to the Senate. I wanted to meet this new wunderkind, if only because it was Bettylu who’d asked.

  So Barack and I arranged to get together for lunch. While I didn’t exactly leave that first meeting humming “Hail to the Chief,” I could see why Bettylu was so enthused about this newcomer. Without displaying any arrogance, Barack spoke with the wisdom and earnest self-assurance of someone much older. A
ny law firm or corporation in America would have paid handsomely to recruit a guy like him, I thought. Instead, he had returned to Chicago to sign up voters in the neighborhoods where, before law school, he had worked as a community organizer. In a city where politics was too often treated as a business proposition, Obama’s decision to turn down a private-sector windfall to lead a voter registration drive impressed me. He was clearly ambitious, but those ambitions seemed less about doing well than about doing good.

  I didn’t keep in close touch with Barack during the next few years, though I bumped into him at the occasional political event. I knew he had joined a small law firm, well known around town for its support of progressive causes. He was practicing civil rights and employment law and teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. He had married Michelle Robinson, another promising Harvard Law School grad, who had worked for Mayor Daley. The couple had settled in Hyde Park, which made sense because it was close to the university. It also was the perfect base for a brainy, reform-minded black man contemplating a run for office. To the extent that I thought about it, which wasn’t much, it seemed to me that Barack was shrewdly and methodically preparing himself for a career in public life.

  In late 1994, three years after Obama returned to Chicago, his opportunity came. State senator Alice Palmer, a fiery but flighty independent Democrat from Barack’s South Side district, announced an exploratory campaign to challenge Congressman Mel Reynolds, who had been indicted for having sexual relations with a sixteen-year-old campaign volunteer. Palmer’s seat had an illustrious history. Back in 1966, her predecessor, Richard Newhouse, had become one of two African Americans to successfully challenge the Daley machine for the state senate. For a quarter century, Newhouse, an attorney from Hyde Park, was a maverick voice in Springfield, and in 1975 he became the first African American to run for mayor of Chicago. His campaign, though unsuccessful, helped lay the foundation for Harold Washington’s election as mayor eight years later.

  Newhouse’s seat would be a potential launching pad for Obama, who quickly became the choice of Palmer and key progressive leaders in the district. Yet as the filing date approached, Obama’s glide path to office ran into unexpected turbulence. Reynolds’s conviction forced a special election in the fall of 1995, which Palmer lost to Jesse Jackson Jr. Soon after, she rescinded her pledge to retire from the state senate and instead sought reelection. When Barack refused to defer to her wishes and step aside, Palmer chose to take him on in the March primary. Yet Barack, who stood a good chance of losing the primary to an established political figure, challenged Palmer’s hastily prepared candidacy petitions, and she was thrown off the ballot for lack of sufficient signatures.

  It was a controversial move—and a revealing one as well—to dispatch a popular incumbent and former ally on a technicality. Barack might have felt that Palmer had broken her commitment. Yet in effectively ending her career to launch his own, Barack had engaged in the bare-knuckle politics that they didn’t teach at Harvard. I made a mental note. This thoughtful and polished young man had a competitive edge. Clearly he could be tough, unsentimental, and even bruising when the situation demanded. I would see that quality surface at critical junctures in future campaigns, when his will to win required something more than Marquess of Queensberry rules.

  If some of his new constituents were dismayed by the way in which Obama reached the state capital of Springfield, most were pleased by his work once he arrived. In his first term, Obama—encouraged by my old mentor Paul Simon, who had just retired from the U.S. Senate—cosponsored and passed the state’s first significant campaign finance reform law in a generation. It took dead aim at one of the perks most cherished by politicians and most despised by reformers. Under it, public officials were allowed to pocket campaign contributions for personal use as long as they paid the appropriate income taxes. Whatever you called it—tipping, or legalized bribery—it was an egregious practice, and Obama, bolstered by growing public outrage, persuaded his colleagues to grandfather out the tawdry loophole. I knew that anytime you could persuade Illinois politicians to forgo money, it was an impressive bit of work.

  In this and other early initiatives, Barack demonstrated an uncanny ability to forge consensus, often mediating between the parties and among factions within his own. It was a skill he had honed as a community organizer and as editor of the law review at Harvard, where he harmonized a host of noisy intellectuals of varied philosophical stripes. Barack cleaved close to Emil Jones, a wily, old Chicago precinct captain and sewer inspector who had worked his way up to become the state senate’s Democratic leader. The two had first met when Barack was a community organizer, prodding Jones and other local officials for action on a new school to give dropouts a second chance. In Obama’s first year, Jones tapped him to lead the Democrats in complex negotiations with the Republican majority over how the state would adopt and implement the new national welfare reform law. The resulting Illinois version was still tough but more humane than the guidelines adopted by many other states. Obama quickly mastered the senate, earning the admiration of many of his colleagues and the resentment of only a few. Still, almost no one believed Springfield would contain Barack’s interest or ambition for long. “He’s too big a talent for this place,” one of his colleagues told me.

  In the summer of 1999, a little more than two years after joining the state senate, Obama asked to meet with me again. Earlier in the year, Daley had won a fourth term by crushing Bobby Rush, a South Side congressman, carrying 45 percent of the black vote citywide and even winning in Rush’s home ward, an almost unimaginable rebuke in the parochial world of Chicago politics. Obama had little respect for Rush, who had risen to prominence as a leader of the Black Panthers in the late ’60s, but had long since settled into a comfortable career as a run-of-the-mill Chicago politician. Eager to move up, Obama saw opportunity in Rush’s stumble. “I think Bobby is vulnerable,” he told me. “I’m going to take a shot.”

  Barack asked for my help, but I still was Daley’s media consultant and, having just helped engineer his landslide, felt it would be overkill to work to purge Rush from Congress. It would have looked like old-school political revenge, which is exactly how Rush would have framed it. That would have been bad for Daley and me, and wouldn’t have helped Barack. So I recommended some consultants and offered behind-the-scenes advice where I could.

  Obama’s calculation was that if he could run up the score among white voters, who constituted more than a quarter of the primary electorate, and hold his own among black voters, he could eke out a win. It turned out to be a very bad calculation. Rush was universally known within the black community and, despite his poor showing against Daley, generally well liked. That support only grew when, in October ’99, Rush’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Huey, was shot on a Chicago street and died four days later, a tragedy all too familiar to residents of Chicago’s South Side. At the same time, Rush subtly positioned Obama as the effete candidate of outsiders: a Harvard-trained professor alien to the district and the community. Obama, who started the race as an unknown to most of the district’s voters, was crushed in the black wards and lost the primary by thirty points.

  For a man who had known so much success, the outcome was stinging. It was also costly. The race left Barack not only dispirited but broke. Between his legislative duties and the demands of the campaign, Obama, now the father of two small daughters, had sacrificed a good deal of his outside income to politics. It was money he could ill afford to forgo, given the cost of raising kids, covering the mortgage, and paying off the student loan debts he and Michelle had accrued. So when we spoke in the early summer of 2002, at a time when I was contemplating what direction my future should take, Barack was also at a crossroads, and thinking about a Hail Mary pass in the hope of regenerating his political career.

  “I’m looking at the U.S. Senate in 2004,” he said. “I promised Michelle that if I did it, this would be up or out for me. If it doesn’t wor
k, I’m going to have to go out and make a living.”

  If Barack was prepared to roll the dice on his career, it seemed like an audacious bet. The Republican incumbent, Senator Peter Fitzgerald, was indisputably vulnerable. A quirky conservative, Fitzgerald had won the Senate seat in 1998 primarily because of the baggage that Moseley Braun carried. Yet to face Fitzgerald, Obama would have to win a Democratic primary, and many Democrats wanted a crack at Fitzgerald, and several seemed to have more political advantages than Obama. After all, he had just failed badly in a House race in a largely black district. Now he wanted to aim higher—a black man from the South Side of Chicago with no money, no statewide organization, and precious little name recognition—and that’s before you considered the problem that Obama’s exotic surname rhymed with that of the hated terrorist who, one year earlier, had masterminded the horrific 9/11 attacks that killed three thousand Americans. How accepting would voters be of a black man with an alien-sounding name in the wake of that?

  In our first conversations about the Senate race, I made these points to Obama, and suggested alternative paths. I was concerned that by aiming too high, Obama could gamble away his career. Why didn’t he wait and run for mayor after Daley was done? Barack would be the perfect candidate to bridge the city’s divides. That was years off, he said. He also rejected my suggestion that he consider running in a primary against Danny Davis, a thoroughly decent but hardly impactful U.S. congressman from the West Side. A few precincts of Obama’s senate district extended into Davis’s, giving him some rationale for running in the district, which included the upscale downtown and lakefront high-rises where Obama might find support. But Davis was a friend, Obama said. Besides, “If I am going to take one last shot, I have to take it soon and it should be for something I really want to do.”