Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  Edwards’s parents were as appealing as I had hoped, radiating the simple decency and small-town values I had seen in Iowa and all across rural America. They told their own stories, and spoke proudly of how far John had come while maintaining his identification with people who lived from paycheck to paycheck. I was thrilled.

  To my mind, John’s roots in Robbins were an important authentication of his message. Yet to Elizabeth, I learned, they were something of an embarrassment; a reminder of the unrefined “hick in a plaid shirt” her husband was before she orchestrated his transformation. Besides, Elizabeth had an almost messianic belief in John’s communication skills and felt that any other messenger would be inferior and, thus, a waste of money.

  “When they see John, they’ll respond to him,” she said with absolute confidence. “We don’t need anyone else.”

  Elizabeth was unstinting in her criticisms and lashed out at anyone she felt was failing the candidate in any fashion, from senior staff and consultants to low-level volunteers. Once, on a conference call, she opined that a spot I had worked hard on “belonged in the circular file.” The dismissive rebuke on a group call didn’t sit well with me. Before long, Elizabeth was bypassing me altogether and communicating through Hickman and his team. They would then deliver unhelpful, sometimes conflicting translations of Elizabeth’s input. Confused by the mixed signals and frustrated by the constant palace intrigue, I knew I wasn’t doing my best work and wasn’t the man driving the message, as I’d expected to be.

  Not that there wasn’t reason for tension within the campaign, which, in the fall of 2003, was languishing in also-ran territory, falling behind in the money race and ceding much of the populist support to Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean’s strident opposition to the war in Iraq, and portrayal of DC Democrats who supported it as milquetoast accommodators, had fired up the Left and inspired young voters. And under the leadership of Dean’s cyber-savvy manager, Joe Trippi, the campaign had, for the first time, turned the Internet into a potent fund-raising machine. Edwards had initially led the money race on the strength of his support from trial lawyers across the country, but by summer, Dean had shocked the political world, vastly outraising his opponents, largely through the collection of small donations online.

  By October, polls showed Dean moving past Dick Gephardt in Iowa and surging into the lead in New Hampshire. Looking for a spark, Senator and Mrs. Edwards called a meeting in Washington to discuss an upcoming vote on the Bush administration’s $87-billion proposal to fund the war in Iraq. Senator Edwards had voted to authorize the war, but with Dean riding the wave of discontent over Iraq to the top of the polls, Elizabeth saw a winning issue and was adamant that John oppose the funding. The senator and senior staff remained mostly silent as his wife hammered the point. “I didn’t think authorizing the war was the right vote in the first place,” she said, “but it would be suicidal to vote for this funding now.”

  I thought to oppose funding for the war Edwards had so recently voted to authorize would come off as politics at its worst, and I said so.

  “Senator, if you had opposed the war in the first place, you could make an intellectually honest argument to oppose this funding now,” I said, as others nervously toed the floor and averted their eyes. “I think this will look like a transparent reaction to Dean.”

  Elizabeth exploded with a combination of fury and disdain, and I could see clearly where this was heading. Edwards voted against the funding, as, in a similar reversal, did the ultimate Democratic nominee, John Kerry. Kerry’s vote and his clumsy attempt to explain it gave the Bush campaign a huge opportunity to portray the Democratic ticket of Kerry and Edwards as craven opportunists who put party politics ahead of protecting the troops. Yet if this episode proved costly to Kerry and Edwards in the long run, it had an immediate cost to me, further aggravating my already uneasy relationship with Elizabeth.

  I began to have less say in strategic decisions and even less control over the campaign’s message, until ultimately the campaign ads that ran those final weeks in Iowa were not mine.

  I was in New Hampshire observing focus groups when I got a message that Edwards, who was campaigning in the area, wanted to see me. I met the candidate in the private room of a local restaurant. It was an awkward conversation, though not one that came as much of a surprise. Nonetheless, I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut.

  “I feel like we need to add to our media team,” Edwards said. “Harrison recommended a guy he knows who he thinks could help. You’re still our guy, but we just want to bring another approach to the table.”

  That was a lie, and Edwards and I both knew it, but he was eager to avoid stories about a shake-up within his campaign. And while I was angry and bruised by the dismissive treatment, such stories weren’t in my interest, either. So I agreed to stay on and continued to act as a principal media spokesperson for the duration of the campaign. We maintained the fiction that I was the chief media strategist, though I was no longer even in the loop. I did my nimble best, but in the end I would find myself simply bullshitting when called upon by reporters to explain ads that the new team hadn’t had the courtesy to show me.

  As Dean imploded, Edwards closed strong in Iowa but finished second to Kerry, who solidified his front-runner status with a follow-up win in New Hampshire. By Super Tuesday, on March 2, Edwards was gone. Looking back, I see that Susan’s sight-unseen insights into Elizabeth and John were prescient. Mike Murphy’s admonition to spend time with Edwards before signing on was wise. I ignored them both in favor of my ego, and it was a bracing learning experience. Sometime later, I read that Elizabeth didn’t think I “got” John. Maybe she was right. I resolved that I would never again work on a presidential race unless I had a close, trusting relationship with the candidate.

  • • •

  While I was in Wisconsin for Edwards, just weeks before the Illinois primary, I had a drink in the bar of Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel with Dan Balz, the veteran political writer for the Washington Post, and talked to him about a candidate I strongly believed in.

  “I’m working for a guy running in Illinois who’s going to win and make a real impact nationally down the line,” I told Balz, a thoughtful, thorough throwback to the golden age of political reporting. “His name is Barack Obama.”

  “Barack Obama?” Balz mused. “Interesting name. I’ve never heard of him. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  Barack might still have been a well-kept secret in Washington, but his talents were evident to all those who worked with him and, increasingly, to voters in Illinois.

  It was a revealing experience to work with Obama and Edwards at the same time, as they wrestled with many of the same policy issues. Edwards was a stellar performer on the stump, but his one-on-one interactions with people were plastic, and out of the public eye, his interest in the substance of issues was thin. He wanted only as much information as he needed to glide by—and he was bright and glib enough to glide a long way. Once he locked in his lines, Edwards delivered them flawlessly, repeating on cue every word, every inflection, every catch of the throat, and every tearful eye. It reminded me of the old George Burns adage “The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

  Obama was just the opposite, drilling three and four levels deep on issues to hone his thinking, changing up his stump speech from stop to stop because he felt inauthentic sticking to a script. At one strategy meeting, he engaged my old partner, Forrest Claypool, on the issue of school vouchers. A strong believer in market solutions, Forrest was interested in vouchers as a means of improving educational opportunity for inner-city students.

  “Forrest, I have supported charter schools, but not vouchers because I worry about siphoning off resources from public schools, where they’re needed,” Obama said. “But make the best case for that position. A lot of these students you’re talking about are poor black kids, like the kids in my state senate
district. I don’t want to casually throw away good ideas if they can help.”

  For the next forty-five minutes, Barack and Forrest engaged in a riveting colloquy on school choice. It was thrilling to watch these two brilliant, passionate politicians earnestly exploring an issue they each cared deeply about. I, and the rest of Obama’s campaign team, sat transfixed by their exchange. I could not have imagined John Edwards carrying on the same conversation or, indeed, wanting to. “Barack has a beautiful mind,” Forrest said admiringly as we walked to our car after their “debate.”

  Still, Obama’s interest in policy sometimes weighed him down. Susan and I held a fund-raiser for Barack at our apartment during the Senate primary. We raised about eleven thousand dollars, which was significant for Obama in those days. When Barack spoke, I thought his remarks were too elevated and lacked an emotional connection. I sensed he was talking up to what he thought was the level of the crowd. Afterward, I was honest with him. His speech should be consistent and connecting, not calibrated up or down depending upon an assessment of the audience.

  “You call me every night from the road with these moving stories about the struggles people are facing,” I said. “Why don’t you share them in these speeches? They animate the things you’re fighting for. It isn’t an intellectual exercise.”

  Obama didn’t enjoy my critique, but—to his credit—he took it to heart. As he developed his stump speech, he increasingly relied on the stories of the people he had met across the state. He became less the professor and more the advocate, standing up for folks who were fighting to join the middle class and the many who were struggling to stay there. And once he found that groove, Obama, a brilliant storyteller, was a natural in bringing others’ stories to life. The narrative wasn’t new. For Barack, the impact of a changing economy on everyday people had been an animating concern since his days as a community organizer.

  One person who saw this firsthand was John Kerry, now the Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting. He had come to Illinois shortly after our state’s primary for a big fund-raising event and watched as Obama brought down the house. The next day, Kerry got a closer look at Obama as the two campaigned together at a job-training site on the city’s West Side. Thinking ahead to the Democratic National Convention, Kerry made a mental note of this rising star.

  Meanwhile, Obama’s opponent and the Republican’s rising star, Jack Ryan, collapsed after his own divorce file was released, detailing steamy allegations that he had forced his ex-wife to accompany him to sex clubs.

  Obama’s talent was beyond dispute, but his luck was beyond belief. Moseley Braun’s improbable decision to seek the presidency instead of the Senate seat had made Obama’s candidacy possible. Though he would have won the primary regardless, Hull’s implosion surely didn’t hurt. Now Obama’s well-regarded Republican opponent was being forced to drop out, leaving the state GOP in disarray.

  “This guy must sleep with a horseshoe under his pillow,” I told my partners.

  Not long after, Obama was on a campaign swing in Southern Illinois when his cell phone rang. It was Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry’s campaign manager. Cell service being what it was downstate, it took three calls to complete one conversation, but the offer came through loud and clear—would Obama be the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention?

  “Yes, that’s great,” Obama said quickly, before the call got dropped again. “I’d be honored to do it.”

  After acknowledging the magnitude of the role, Obama turned and said, “I know what I want to say.” He clearly had been giving this serious thought, having heard weeks earlier that he was being considered for the coveted slot. “I want to talk about my own story as part of the larger American story. I want to talk about who we are at our best.”

  In the coming weeks, Barack worked on a draft whenever and wherever he could. He would write in longhand on car rides around the state. He would duck into the men’s room off the state senate floor to jot down lines in between votes. One evening in July, he e-mailed me a first draft after having worked into the early morning hours.

  Susan and I were on vacation in Italy, but my office faxed a copy to our hotel in Florence. As I read each page, I passed it on to Susan for her reaction. By the third page, we looked at each other with the same thought. “My God,” I said. “This is going to be one of the greatest convention speeches ever.”

  I knew Barack was an exceptional writer. Dreams from My Father, the memoir he published at the age of thirty-three, was a powerful and poignant work, and when I finally got to see the written speech, I felt the same emotional tug. He had crafted something that contemplated America’s promise and potential through the lens of his own extraordinary experience. Tracing the paths that brought together the son of a Kenyan goatherder and the daughter of small-town Kansas, Obama spoke not only of his parents’ “improbable love,” but of their “abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.”

  “I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents’ dreams live on in my two precious daughters,” he said. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”

  Then he shared the stories of people he had met across Illinois, to ask if America today was living up to its promise. He spoke of the factory workers who saw their jobs shipped out of the country; the father struggling to afford the lifesaving medications his son needed; the student who “has the grades, has the drive, has the will, but doesn’t have the money to go to college.”

  The language was fresh, honest, and suffused with enduring American values. Among its most memorable moments was his assault on the red state/blue state mind-set that had divided Washington and our nation’s politics.

  “The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them,” he had written. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us standing up for the red, white and blue.”

  There were only two problems with this brilliant speech. The Kerry convention planners, in their desire to keep the program running on time, had allotted just eight minutes for the keynote, and Obama’s draft clocked in at four times that long. “I can’t do it,” Obama grumbled. “It’s ridiculous. If they insist, I don’t think I should speak.” After a great deal of haggling, we agreed to a seventeen-minute speech. And while Obama hated cutting the words he had so lovingly crafted, the edits made the speech tighter without sacrificing its power.

  The second problem was that Obama had never spoken in an arena before and had it in his head that he wouldn’t be heard unless he bellowed. One of the strengths of the speech was that it was at once elegant and conversational. It didn’t sound like a political speech, but with Barack doing an imitation (and not even a very good imitation) of an old-time tub-thumper, his soaring prose didn’t take flight.

  We still had plenty of work to do when, less than seventy-two hours until his big moment, we took off from Springfield in a private plane bound for Boston: Barack, Michelle, me, and Robert Gibbs, the campaign’s new communications director.

  For Gibbs, the return to Boston was a satisfying redemption. He had quit the Kerry campaign in November during a messy shake-up. We had a big hole in communications to fill after the primary, and Giangreco and others who had worked with Robert were effusive about his talents. The tough, quick-witted Alabama native swiftly became a mainstay of our campaign.

  Our mission on the fligh
t was to brief Obama for his maiden appearance the next morning on Meet the Press with Tim Russert. Russert was a masterful interviewer with a well-earned reputation for using exhaustive research to confront his guests with their own past statements and deeds. Gibbs and I took turns firing questions at Obama, laying the traps we anticipated in Russert’s signature prosecutorial style. As is often the case, Michelle kept Barack loose with good-natured ribbing, teasing him when he complained that his favorite drink was not on board. “Aww,” she said, with mock compassion. “Poor Barack.” He broke up in laughter.

  The next morning, Obama aced the exam, handling Russert’s crafty questions like a pro. Later that day, he began rehearsing his keynote with an expert speech coach, Michael Sheehan. Michael had studied as an actor to overcome a childhood stutter and transformed himself into one of the foremost media trainers in America. He was a fixture at Democratic conventions, setting up training booths beneath the rostrum where all the major speakers would prepare. I had known Michael for years and privately had confided Obama’s habit of over-orating. “First lesson: Let the microphone do the work,” he told Barack. “You don’t have to shout. You’ll be heard in the hall. But you’re really speaking to twenty million people at home. Have a conversation with them.”

  With each repetition of the speech, Barack became more relaxed and conversational, adding pauses, nuanced phrasing, and natural gestures to accent his points. Soon his performance rivaled the quality of the words on the page. “This is really, really good,” Gibbs whispered to me between takes. “He’s definitely got it.”

  The only hiccup came when Kerry’s team sent a crew-cutted young speechwriter to iron out a small turf problem. Jon Favreau, then just twenty-three, explained that Senator Kerry had a phrase in his speech that was similar to one in Obama’s draft and they needed Obama to cut his version—or, in other words, to take one for the team. “Just get in there and tell him,” Gibbs advised the doe-eyed rookie.