Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  I suspected that Obama, who seemed relieved just to get all these nagging concerns off his chest, received exactly the political counsel he expected. What he didn’t expect was that his private ruminations would quickly leak. Only days after our meeting, two reporters working on a campaign book, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, inquired about the president’s Bulworth list, on which they were shockingly well informed. While their account wouldn’t appear until after the election, the breach of trust was truly distressing.

  “Why would anyone on our team do that?” Obama asked, more hurt than angry. I was just angry. “Because that’s how people in this town certify their own importance,” I told him. “You should read these folks the riot act at the next meeting and walk out.” I was late for the next session, and by the time I arrived, the president already had come and gone, after delivering a dressing-down to the group for what he viewed as an unforgivable show of disloyalty. As a result, he told them, he would no longer participate in such meetings. For the rest of the campaign, our strategy sessions were restricted to a handful of key players.

  It only compounded our frustrations when nervous party insiders, many of whom had not supported Obama in the first place, lobbied publicly and privately for the president to boost the ticket by asking Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to swap places. As secretary of state, far from the political fray, Hillary now polled far better than Biden or, for that matter, the president—and, or so the argument went, would add some needed pizazz to the ticket.

  I thought it was preposterous.

  Obama and Biden had forged an extraordinary working relationship. The president had handed his VP the nightmare assignment of managing the Recovery Act, and he had done a remarkable job, ensuring that it came off better than anyone had a reason to expect. Obama also assigned Biden to work with the contentious factions in Iraq to make sure they could form a functional government. Also, Biden was an invaluable back channel to his old Senate colleagues, with whom he had friendly relations dating back decades. Buoyant and unfiltered, Biden’s rhetorical flights sometimes landed him in unexpected places, giving our press shop occasional heartburn. Yet he was as warm and caring a person as I have ever known in politics and a very savvy and effective public official.

  Obama appreciated his vice president, and the feeling was mutual. One day Biden called me into his stately office, down the hall from the Oval. “Do you remember that conversation we had at my sister’s house in Delaware?” he asked, recalling the interview in which he told Plouffe and me that he felt he would be the better president. “Well, you know what? I was wrong. The right person won. He’s an incredible guy, and I am proud to work with and for him.”

  Swapping Clinton for Biden would have been seen as weak and disloyal, I argued, when some in the campaign suggested we had an obligation to test it in polling. When we did, it made no difference. The subject never came up again.

  • • •

  In early December, Obama traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, the town where, in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt gave his rousing New Nationalism speech, railing against the excesses of the Gilded Age and calling for bold new steps to restore fairness and broad opportunity to the American economy. Now we were living in a new Gilded Age, in which rapid technological advances had generated fantastic wealth and concentrations of power, but also vast disparities in opportunity. So Osawatomie was a fitting place to throw down the gauntlet and set the terms of the upcoming election.

  “Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia,” the president said. “After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. I am here to say they are wrong.” The audience jumped to their feet, interrupting the president for sustained applause that went on for half a minute.

  “I’m here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we’re greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values. And we have to reclaim them!”

  The rousing speech was widely covered and thoroughly analyzed. Some commentators cast it as the president’s play to the populist Occupy Wall Street movement that had sprung up organically in the fall of 2011. Yet the values and themes Obama struck in Kansas were the same principles that had driven him since his days as a community organizer in the shadow of closed steel mills on Chicago’s South Side. If Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused expression of rage, Obama was arguing for commonsense rules and policies to promote fairness, balance, and a broader prosperity. His speech in Kansas not only captured the zeitgeist of the country, but also set up a critical contrast with the candidate we were likely to face in the dawning election year—Mitt Romney.

  Romney had been a runner-up to McCain for the nomination in 2008 and had continued to build an imposing fund-raising and political network. He was a former Massachusetts governor, untainted by Washington—and, at least on its face, Romney’s profile as a very successful businessman with the know-how to create jobs offered an attractive rationale for his candidacy in a country still reeling from recession.

  Yet in a race focused on economic values, Romney would also be the perfect foil. He had faithfully subscribed to Bush’s economic policies and continued to preach the same gospel of deep tax cuts and deregulation. While Obama took steps to save the American auto industry, Romney, whose late father, George, was a former auto executive and governor of Michigan, argued against government intervention in an op-ed famously titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” Also, as a corporate takeover specialist, Mitt Romney had made his fortune by downsizing companies, outsourcing their jobs, and stripping employee pensions and benefits—all while parking some of the money it generated in offshore tax havens. To his core, Romney was a devout believer in unfettered capitalism and trickle-down economics.

  Before Romney could face us, however, he would have to tango with the Tea Party and win over social conservatives concerned about some disturbing acts of moderation in his past. But none of his primary opponents were making an effective case against him, and we wanted Romney’s road to the nomination to be as long and bumpy as possible. So, more than a year until Election Day, we decided to take that job on ourselves.

  In a conference call with reporters, I unloaded on Romney as a serial flip-flopper; a moderate sheep in a conservative wolf’s clothing. It was a signal for the Right, reinforcing their latent concerns about Romney’s fealty. But the strategy was also a calculated risk. While Romney’s moderate past was a potentially fatal flaw for the ideologues that vote in Republican primaries, it would appeal to swing voters in a general election. We were gambling that he would have to thoroughly disown his past positions to get the nomination. And that would make it harder for him to stake out centrist positions in the fall without being ridiculed as a double flip-flopper.

  And, as we hoped, Romney responded by working that much harder to court the Right. His team apparently wasn’t worried about a future race against a president they believed to be doomed by a struggling economy. But the long, bloody and expensive primary battle, which would stretch deep into the spring, would prove exceedingly costly to Romney.

  • • •

  “I’m feeling strong,” Obama said, in a late-night call after his State of the Union address in January 2012, which reprised many of the themes of the Osawatomie speech. “I’m getting that ‘What the fuck’ feeling back!” As usual, Obama had scanned his iPad for elite comment
ary on his largely polemical speech, and his indifferent reaction to the critiques he found underscored how true that was. “They say, ‘Where are the big ideas?’ They just want me to light myself on fire.”

  There were other reasons for optimism.

  The unemployment rate, which had stood at 9 percent or higher for thirty months straight, had finally dropped into the 8s in October. January would be the third straight month of significant job growth, reducing the rate even farther, to 8.3 percent. The auto industry, saved by the president’s actions over the objections of Republicans such as Romney, was hiring again. Obama had brought the last troops home from Iraq in December and was making slow, steady progress on his goal of ending our war in Afghanistan. And bin Laden was still dead. We weren’t hanging “Mission Accomplished” banners, but when the president declared in his speech, “the state of our Union is getting stronger,” it was becoming a little harder for Republicans to evince scorn.

  While the Republican candidates continued to spar over immigration, birth control, and just how small and insignificant they could make government, our campaign spent the winter and early spring methodically planning for the general election. The innovation hub at our Chicago headquarters was swelling with a T-shirted, iconoclastic army of young whiz-kids—data analysts, software designers, social media savants—who were inventing new products and programs to expand the reach and efficiency of all aspects of the campaign. From fund-raising and field organizing to rapid response and media placement, they were pushing the horizons of Big Data and the Internet to provide us with a critical edge.

  And every so often, things would happen that recalled the enormous stakes.

  In May, a few days before Obama’s formal launch as a candidate for reelection, I got a call from the president that put all the campaign rigmarole in perspective. He had just returned from a quick, unannounced trip to Afghanistan.

  “I visited the hospital, and they said, ‘We have a young guy who was really badly hurt. But we think he can hear and understand and that it would mean a lot to him for you to say hello.’ So I go in, and this guy was wrapped up from head to toe—just a mess. And I told him how proud we were of him, and how we were all praying for him and hoped he would be back with his family soon. And I didn’t know if he was hearing me or not. But I turned to leave, and the doctors called me back. And this kid held up his arm and grabbed my hand. It was all I could do to keep from crying.”

  As thoroughly as I was engaged in the daily scrum of the modern campaign—the efforts to build a better campaign mousetrap and the cheeky repartee in the media and on Twitter that filled my days—the story of the president’s encounter with that soldier made it all seem trivial.

  A few days later, I stood with Plouffe at the campaign kickoff, staring at thousands of empty seats in the upper bowl of the Ohio State University basketball arena. “Wouldn’t have been an empty seat last time,” Plouffe fretted. It was another sign that 2012 would be different, less a lofty movement than a grinding battle to define the race.

  The next day, Biden, on Meet the Press as part of our campaign launch, changed the subject in an unwelcome way. Asked about the volatile issue of gay marriage, he said, “I am vice president of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that.”

  It was galling because, as Biden surely knew, we had been discussing the timing of the president’s own declaration of support for gay marriage. We had talked about making the announcement the following week, during an interview on The View, the women-oriented daytime talk show. Now, in a moment of candor and ebullience more than calculation, Biden had beaten us to the punch. He was asked a direct question about his own view, and the blunt-to-a-fault VP had answered with the truth.

  I tried feebly to finesse his crystal-clear declaration with a tweet that insisted Biden had merely restated the president’s position. “What VP said—that all married couples should have exactly the same legal rights—is precisely POTUS’s position,” I wrote, trying to parse the un-parsable. By the end of the week, the president had tired of taking a beating for lagging behind his vice president and summoned ABC’s Robin Roberts to the White House to make his own position as clear as Biden’s. While some on the president’s staff and campaign team were furious with the VP for his lack of discipline, Obama was not. The president was certain that Biden hadn’t intended to show him up, and refused to come down hard on his teammate for taking a position the two men shared.

  “I would have preferred doing this on my own terms, but it is what it is,” he told me the night before his interview with Roberts. “I know Joe screwed up, and when I have lunch with him tomorrow, I’m going to talk to him about it. It was sloppy. But, you know, I can’t be too hard on him. He was speaking from a bigheartedness.”

  As in 2008, my role in our newly launched campaign was the message overseer. That meant providing guidance to our folks engaged in battle every day and working with my Ocean’s Eleven team, back and humming, to flesh out the story we’d be telling in our advertising. We knew we would be under constant attack on TV, not just by Romney but by third-party groups that—thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling—had been unshackled to spend to their heart’s content. Our mission was less to defend the president than to ensure that people understood the choice. That meant aggressively defining Romney, his record and views—and doing that before he had a chance to repackage them for the general election. We persuaded the president that we should front-load our ad buy, taking the risk of having a lighter TV presence than originally planned for the final months of the campaign.

  “Every impactful ad I can think of in presidential elections over the past thirty years aired before Labor Day,” I told him. “That’s when the Swift Boat ads ran against Kerry. Roger Ailes ran most of the ads that sunk Dukakis in the summer of eighty-eight. People don’t know Romney. We have to fill in the picture and do it with force before the end of summer. We can always raise more money. We can’t raise more time.”

  After a month of positive advertising about the president’s leadership, we launched a new flight in June recalling Romney’s economic record as governor. If, as he had been suggesting, he had the secret sauce to repair the economy, how had it worked out in Massachusetts? The answer from our research team: not so well. Under his tenure as governor, the state fell from thirty-sixth to forty-seventh in job creation. When Romney left office, Massachusetts ranked number one in having more per capita debt than any state in the nation.

  Our ad makers had a field day taking the Romney record apart. In order to spotlight their good work, we decided to stage a press conference and rally at the State House in Boston, featuring local officials who could attest to Romney’s weaknesses as governor. Our communications folks urged me to attend mostly as bait for the national news media. Yet it wasn’t just reporters I lured.

  In setting the rally on the State House steps, our team had neglected to calculate that Romney’s national headquarters was just a few blocks away. As I walked over, someone casually mentioned that there might be a few protesters. I was confronted by what was more like a mob: a herd of young Romney workers who had angled on over to “welcome” me personally to Boston—even if they didn’t get my name right.

  “Tell the truth, Axelfraud!” they shouted, as I took to the podium. The hecklers were only about fifteen feet away, forcing me to shout over them. I kind of enjoyed this theater of the absurd. But the whole thing looked ridiculous on TV—as the president reminded me when he called that night.

  “I see you had an interesting day,” he said dryly. “It didn’t look like a very good expenditure of your time.”

  If the event was a flop, our ads were successful
in establishing some initial doubts about Romney, his public record, and the image he was selling as an economic savior. There were larger and more damaging questions to come about his business record. Romney had made a fortune as the founder and chairman of Bain Capital, a private equity firm that bought underperforming businesses, forced management and operational changes to wring out greater profits, and then sold them, often at a tidy profit. Those changes often involved wage and benefit reductions for workers, bankruptcy filings to reduce pension obligations, and the outsourcing of plants to low-wage nations. While these practices had helped enrich Romney and his partners, workers—including many who had devoted much of their lives to a company—were sometimes left in the lurch. It was ground zero for an economic values argument.

  A super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich had released a vicious video attacking Romney on Bain during the primaries, and we began to revive the issue with the media in May, as a prelude to ads we planned to air in June. Yet Bain, a company with a bipartisan set of partners, had a lot of powerful friends on both sides of the aisle. Without warning and apparently much forethought, Bill Clinton sprang to Romney’s defense at the end of May. “I don’t think that we ought to get into the position where we say, ‘This is bad work. This is good work,’” Clinton said on CNN, before praising Romney’s “sterling business career.”

  We were furious, and conveyed that message through Clinton’s staff. When the former president arrived in Chicago a few days later for a meeting of his Clinton Global Initiative, he summoned Messina and me to his hotel. “Guys, I am really sorry,” he said. “I just kind of wandered into that one. You know, the truth is, I’m a little rusty.” Clinton muted his commentary after that.

  No one is immune to gaffes, as Obama would demonstrate a few days later. Nearing the end of a press conference in the White House Briefing Room about worse-than-expected jobs numbers, the president served up a choice sentence that would quickly find its way into Republican ads.