Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  I stood in the back of the crowd at an outdoor rally at UNC-Charlotte, where tens of thousands had gathered to hear him despite a light rain. “Some of you heard that my grandmother who helped raise me passed away early this morning,” he began. “I’m not going to talk about it too long because it’s hard a little to talk about . . . I want everybody to know, though, a little bit about her.”

  Occasionally glancing at notes he had scribbled, he spoke of his grandparents and their quintessentially American story: the Depression and war, the GI Bill and the journey west in search of a better life. Then he riffed. “She was somebody who was a very humble person and a very plain-spoken person,” he said. “She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America who . . . they’re not famous. Their names aren’t in the newspapers, but each and every day they work hard. They look after their families. They sacrifice for their children and their grandchildren. They aren’t seeking the limelight. All they try to do is just do the right thing. And in this crowd there are a lot of quiet heroes like that—mothers and fathers, grandparents who have worked hard and sacrificed all their lives. And the satisfaction that they get is seeing that their children and maybe their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren live a better life than they did. That’s what America’s about. That’s what we’re fighting for.”

  I couldn’t make out Barack’s face from a distance. Only later, when I watched the video, could I see that it was covered with tears. Somehow, a man so restrained in private had found communion in the crowd. Yet after the speech, we hiked up a hill, back to a waiting caravan of vehicles. Head down, hands in his pockets, Barack walked alone.

  • • •

  Election Day was a blur. I cast my vote in the lobby of the huge lakefront high-rise where I lived, which was a precinct unto itself. Turnout was heavy, the election judge told me. “We’re going to run out of ballots at this rate,” she said.

  While I had been traveling around the country, Susan and a rotating corps of friends had spent the entire fall at our vacation house in southwest Michigan, working precincts for Obama. When McCain abandoned Michigan in early October, the campaign asked Susan and her team to shift their focus to South Bend, Indiana, a half hour from our home. Yet Susan continued to spend much of her time knocking on doors in Benton Harbor, one of the most down-on-its-luck communities in all of Michigan. Over the years, so many had given up on Benton Harbor, an overwhelmingly black community divided by a narrow river and a shameful class chasm from St. Joseph, the white, solidly middle-class town next door. But Susan refused to turn away. “I’ve never seen such need,” she told me. “I visit these run-down homes, with mattresses on the floor and babies wandering around, and I can imagine Barack walking up those broken steps and caring about these people. I can’t imagine John McCain walking up those steps.”

  In the past, voter turnout in Benton Harbor had been abysmal. Every night, when we talked on the phone, Susan related her conversations with people there. “They’re excited about Barack, but they keep asking when the election is and where they have to go to vote. These people aren’t watching the news or reading newspapers. They’re just trying to get by each day. I worry they won’t show up.” A little after noon on Election Day, Susan called from Obama’s tiny storefront field office in the beleaguered town. She was choking up. “They’re doing it, Dave. They’re coming! Benton Harbor cast as many votes by noon as they did the whole election four years ago!”

  In the campaign’s Election Day war room, a phalanx of staff manned phone lines and computers, taking in turnout figures and then actual returns, while the analytics kids crunched the numbers and matched them with our projections. The legal team commanded thousands of volunteer lawyers across the nation, directing them to problem spots to protect our vote. The machinery was humming.

  Network exit polls, or rumors of them, streamed in throughout the day and early evening. Then we began to get real numbers. I was with Susan, who had raced home from Michigan, when I got word that the Associated Press was calling Ohio in our favor. Ohio was the ball game. Without it, McCain couldn’t win. I wrapped Susan up in my arms, closed my eyes, and hugged her so tightly I worried for a second that she couldn’t breathe. “Now you’ll never have to say you never won the Big One!” she whispered. I put one hand on Susan’s wet, smiling face and, in a straddle that was by now familiar to her, reached with the other for my cell phone to call Barack, who was still at home.

  “That sounds pretty encouraging,” he said, when I gave him the Ohio report. Suddenly my mind flashed to a story from Election Night four years earlier, when Bob Shrum congratulated John Kerry on the basis of exit polling that showed him a winner. “May I be the first to say ‘Mr. President?’” the beaming strategist famously asked his client. With that, Shrum also became the last person to call Kerry “Mr. President,” as the exit polls turned out to be wrong. “I’m not going to congratulate you yet,” I told Obama, who laughed off my disclaimer. “Whatever. I’ll see you later,” he said.

  Susan peeled off to a reception, and I headed to the war room to wait for the official results. Plouffe and I and a few other senior leaders of the campaign gathered in a small conference room with three TVs. The numbers were now rolling in, and battleground state after battleground state was falling our way. Virginia was in the bag, and even Indiana was trending Obama. Neither had gone Democratic since the LBJ landslide of 1964. The outcome was clear and decisive, but by agreement, the networks would not call the race until 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time, when the polls closed in California. As that hour approached, we stared at the TV screens, unwilling to avert our eyes for a second lest we miss the historic moment. The sound was up on CNN. “This is a moment that a lot of people have been waiting for. This is a moment that potentially could be rather historic,” said Wolf Blitzer, the anchorman who, with his bristly whiskers and swept-back hair, appeared aptly named. Then the moment came: “And CNN can now project that Barack Obama, forty-seven years old, will become the president-elect of the United States.”

  At that point it was hardly a surprise, but when I actually heard the words and saw Obama’s face superimposed next to the presidential seal, I was overwhelmed. My lips quivered and my eyes brimmed with tears. I had grown up studying the presidents as distant, Olympian figures. In the long history of the country, there had been just forty-three, all of them white men. Now my friend, this extraordinary black man from the South Side of Chicago, would be the forty-fourth! When we teamed up six years earlier, Barack was a little-known state legislator, one loss away from leaving politics and, quite probably, living a productive life in relative obscurity. Now he had made history and inspired a sense of hope the world over. I was overcome by feelings of pride in him, in myself, in my fellow campaign warriors, and in the country for thumbing its collective nose at the cynical political class and saying, “Yes, we can!” Frank Capra or Aaron Sorkin might have written such an improbable script, but what an extraordinary privilege to have lived one!

  As each network made the call for Obama simultaneously, the room erupted in high fives, hugs, and kisses. Plouffe, whose face had been a grim mask of determination for much of the past twenty-one months, was smiling like a Cheshire Cat. We emerged from the room to a loud ovation from the staff. I thought how much I would miss these kids who, with their blend of irreverence and idealism, had provided a source of energy and emotional renewal each day. “We’d better get over there with him,” Plouffe said. Barack and his family were encamped with a few close friends in a suite across the street at the Hyatt, waiting to make the short trip to Grant Park, where 240,000 people were waiting to hear from the next president of the United States.

  Walking out of the building, Plouffe was working his BlackBerry furiously. “We’ve still got some states out. We’d like to run this margin up a little bit,” he declared. We had won by a landslide, but that wasn’t good enough for my old partner. He wanted to run up the score.

  Even
in the minutes since the polls closed, it seemed the security ring around Obama had tightened. The elevator to Barack’s floor at the Hyatt was turned off, so we had to get off a floor below and take the stairs. Inside the stairwell, rifle-bearing Secret Service agents nodded at us as we walked by. Outside the suite, Obama’s gentle giant of a trip director, Marvin Nicholson, wrapped us up in warm embraces and then opened the door and led us in. Barack was sitting on the couch with Michelle and the girls, watching the news coverage, which now included spontaneous celebrations breaking out in streets around the United States and the world. “Can you congratulate me now, Axe?” he said, laughing while reaching for my hand. “I think it’s safe.”

  I had imagined this moment a thousand times. Yet when it arrived, it wasn’t so much elation I felt as a sense of awe. The last time I had seen Obama he was still a candidate. Now he was the president-elect, and even as we laughed and traded congratulations and thanks, there seemed to be a sobriety about him, as if he were already focused on the new burdens he had assumed with his triumph.

  Before we took off for the park, Barack suggested a victory photo with Plouffe, Gibbs, and me. When I saw it later, I couldn’t help but recognize that Gibbs and I, bloated after two years of eating our way across America, looked like nothing so much as doughy Michelin Men flanking the lean, athletic Obama and the emaciated Plouffe.

  Led by the Secret Service and Chicago police, we caravanned down a closed Lake Shore Drive past a makeshift security fence that separated us from the massive, cheering crowd. A stage was set up in the south end of the sprawling downtown park that is Chicago’s front lawn. In 1968 it had been the scene of bloody rioting during the Democratic National Convention. The searing images of police and protesters battling under clouds of tear gas defined the bitter divisions of the times. On this night, forty years later, the same park had become a moving mosaic of national unity, filled as far as the eye could see with people of all backgrounds joyously waving American flags.

  It was a sea of people with shared hopes but very different stories. Some of the faces were familiar to me. I saw Reverend Jesse Jackson, flag in hand and tears streaming down his cheeks. He could be a shameless hustler and relentless self-promoter, but the reverend also was a trailblazer who had devoted his life to civil rights. He had been there with Dr. King the night he was slain and had, himself, run two symbolic races for the White House. Now the image of the new First Family—a splendid, black family—introducing themselves to the nation, had the reverend genuinely overcome. I saw Lane Evans, a former congressman from Rock Island, Illinois, whom I had covered back in 1982, when he was an idealistic young legal aid lawyer running a seemingly quixotic race for a House seat owned by the Republicans for decades. A soft-spoken, principled liberal, Lane had been one of the few downstate politicians to stick his neck out and endorse Obama in the 2004 U.S. Senate primary. Now, just four years later, Parkinson’s disease had robbed him of his ability to walk, speak intelligibly, or serve in office, but not of his spirit or belief. So there he was in his wheelchair, braving the bedlam to be a part of it. His face was a frozen mask, but as his old friend spoke to the crowd, his cheeks were moist with tears.

  “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama proclaimed, in a speech laden with appeals to unity and bipartisanship. “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

  Though familiar with the words, I truly felt their full weight as I stood in Grant Park and heard America’s new leader warn the nation of what lay ahead: “[E]ven as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime.”

  For us, the end of this extraordinary saga was just the beginning of another—the full demand of which we could not yet fully appreciate as we celebrated into the night.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE DOGS THAT CAUGHT THE CAR

  THROUGHOUT THE CAMPAIGN, Barack told me that he felt better prepared for the challenges of the presidency than he had for the often absurd and trivial demands of running for it.

  It took enormous self-assurance—even audacity—to leap into the presidential race as a relative newcomer on the national scene. Now, having survived that crucible, Obama seemed absolutely confident in his ability to handle the job. Yet he also had a sober grasp of the enormity of the challenges ahead, and knew he needed a team equal to the task.

  Maybe if times had been different, Obama would have cast a wider net for his cabinet and staff, reaching for a band of smart outsiders to help him effect the change he had promised. However, no president in our lifetime had entered the job facing as many serious challenges—and this helped frame his thinking.

  As steward of the economy, he would need a seasoned team, prepared from day one to grapple with a financial crisis that was spiraling out of control.

  As commander in chief in a time of war, he would need an experienced national security team that could garner the confidence of the Congress, the nation, and the military itself.

  Also, as a president relatively new to the Washington he had just spent two years flaying, he would need a chief of staff who knew his way around the town.

  Confident of victory, Obama had begun thinking about his team well before the election.

  For chief of staff, he wanted someone with significant White House or administration experience along with the toughness and savvy to deal with Congress. It had to be someone with enough fluency in economics and familiarity with the financial sector to help shepherd the president’s plan to address the economic crisis, and sufficient grounding in national security to help him wind down two wars—all this and the skill set to manage a complex organization. From the start, he had one candidate in mind.

  “I’m thinking about Rahm for chief of staff,” he said, during one of our flights in the final weeks of the campaign. “He’s got the right experience. He’s smart and tough. And he’s a friend. I really don’t have a great second option.”

  When I sounded out my old pal Rahm Emanuel, however, I detected some reluctance. “Fuck, no,” he screamed into the phone. “Absolutely not. I’m not fucking doing this, David. Tell him not to call.”

  Having brilliantly orchestrated the Democratic takeover of the House, Emanuel was on a heady trajectory. Now a member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, he also had vaulted to fourth in rank within the Democratic caucus, already functioning as its political brain. If you raised his name in any parlor in Washington, you would hear the same conventional wisdom: “He’s going to be the first Jewish Speaker of the House someday.”

  Rahm was sitting pretty. His life had settled into a comfortable, albeit fast-paced rhythm. His family was happy in Chicago. He was unbeatable in his district. Having spent nearly six years in the Clinton White House, he knew how demanding the chief of staff’s job was, even in times of peace and prosperity. He knew that the coming years promised to be neither. To a guy comfortable with his life and allergic to failure, Obama’s offer was a perilous proposition. His last comment, though, was a giveaway.

  For all Rahm’s take-no-prisoners approach to politics, he also takes public service seriously. He was the son of an immigrant and believed that when the president of the United States asked you to serve, you just didn’t say no. Whatever his misgivings, he knew that if asked, then he couldn’t refuse, which is why he pleaded with me to tell Barack not to put him in that position.

  I knew Barack needed Rahm, which meant the country needed him. So I didn’t regard it as any kind of betrayal when I told Obama, “I think he’ll do it. You should give him a call.”

  It took a few weeks of agonizing, but Rahm succumbed. He assumed I would be joining him in Washington,
as did Obama, but I was going through some agonizing of my own. I loved working with Barack, believed in him, and felt thoroughly invested in his success. The past two years had been the most exciting and gratifying of my career, and the thought of jumping off now was hard to imagine. Gibbs and many of the friends with whom I had shared the adventure would be moving on to the White House. While I could consult from Chicago, I knew I couldn’t have any day-to-day impact at a distance. As someone who still believed in the potential of politics, I knew the opportunity to serve at the highest levels of government was virtually impossible to refuse.

  Yet I had real misgivings. Lauren was thriving at Misericordia, and it wouldn’t be fair to move her. Susan couldn’t move to Washington while Lauren lived in Chicago. Moreover, her epilepsy research foundation, CURE, was growing by leaps and bounds, and her duties there required her to stay put. If I took the job, we would be living apart for the first time in thirty years. To avoid conflicts of interest, I would also have to sell the businesses I had built over a quarter century; businesses that had been an emotional hub for me.

  Odd for someone who had written and spoken the word “change” thousands of times, but in truth, I didn’t much like it in my own life. When I was just out of college and starting at the Tribune, I decided I should move out of Hyde Park, so I leased an apartment on Chicago’s North Side. Before spending a night there, though, I changed my mind, forfeiting my first month’s rent and begging my landlord for my old apartment. He took advantage of my idiocy by tacking an extra twenty-five dollars a month on my rent.

  I cherished the ability to come and go as I pleased, to be the master of my own life. I had always worked long, hard hours, but on my own schedule. I was never a clock puncher or a paper pusher. Even when I was a reporter, no one much cared if I filed my stories from City Hall, a bowling alley, or a saloon—and I filed from all of them—so long as I broke news. Also, reporting, at least in my day, was one job in which you actually were rewarded for questioning authority, a great fit with my personality. I didn’t see myself as a good company man. As a consultant, I took comfort in the knowledge that I could choose my clients and choose to quit those who offended me, which I did more than once. I was loath to surrender that freedom, which I told Barack as I tried to explain my misgivings.