Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

Shortly before midnight in Chicago, Romney called. We gathered around Obama as they spoke. Obama said the appropriate things, congratulating his opponent on a hard-fought race and wishing Romney’s family well. He was unsmiling during the call, and slightly irritated when it was over. “He said, ‘We were surprised. You really did a great job of getting the vote out in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee.’ In other words, black people,” the president said. “That’s what he thinks this was all about.”

  Before we left the suite, he wanted to make one more call. “Can someone get Bill Clinton on the phone?” Four years earlier, they had gone after each other hard, and it had taken time for those wounds to heal. Yet now they had become true allies, even friends—and maybe most important of all, they were peers, among a handful of living men who had known the burdens of the American presidency.

  “Bill,” the president said. “I’m just calling to say thanks. You were the MVP of this campaign.”

  When we reached the event site, I scrambled out of the motorcade to look for Susan. For the second straight Election Night, we had crossed signals and been separated. We finally met up in the tangle of staff and friends who were penned off at the side of the stage where Obama would speak. Susan said that she had encountered the president and First Lady backstage and shared a warm embrace.

  “I’m happy for David,” said the man who was our friend long before he was our president. “He’s going out a winner!”

  I winced a little when Susan shared Obama’s words. The winning was sublime, but “going out” was a jarring reality. On this night, surrounded by the White House colleagues and campaign warriors with whom I had marched for six long years, it was hard to accept that the moment had finally arrived and this vital, intense part of my life was ending.

  I had much to look forward to in my new life. I had already agreed to launch an Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, where I would have the chance to inspire a new generation—one desperately needed—to consider careers in the public arena. And I was excited about spending more time with Susan, our family, and wonderful friends, whose company I had sacrificed so often for too long.

  I contemplated just where this long journey had left me. I certainly wasn’t the wide-eyed little boy on a mailbox anymore. I was hardened and sobered by enough battles to know that democracy is more than fluttering flags, swelling music, and inspiring words. It is a tough, messy business, always demanding and often disappointing. Still, as I gazed up at my friend the president, who had made such a difference, I knew that there was no other work I could ever do that would mean so much.

  EPILOGUE

  MY MOTHER DIED IN January 2014 at the age of ninety-three. She left this world just as she lived—on her own terms. Four days before she passed, I got a call from a hospice doctor. “Your mother has made a decision,” he said. “I told her that if she stopped taking her heart medication, she would die within a few days. And that’s what she wants to do. She’s very much at peace with her decision. If you would like to say good-bye, you should get out here right away.”

  Congestive heart failure and old age had taken their toll. Mom was weak and often confused, but just aware enough to hate what her life had become. She had willed herself to live long enough to see Obama’s second inauguration, and had hoped to attend. Yet, tethered to walkers, wheelchairs, and oxygen tanks, she was in no shape to travel. My sister staged an “Inaugural Gala” in Mom’s building, so she could wear her gown and brag about her son one more time.

  When I arrived at her assisted-living apartment in a Boston suburb, she was as upbeat and bright as I had seen her in years. “I’ve had a great life, Dave,” she explained, having blessedly forgotten or simply overlooked long periods of personal unhappiness, including a difficult marriage and our own tenuous relationship. “I’ve done everything I wanted to do. It’s just too hard now. It’s time.”

  We spoke for hours about her life and mine, about her grandkids and how pleased she was with their progress in life. Never one to forget a grudge, Mom asked for a piece of paper so that she could sketch the seating arrangement at the rehearsal dinner before my wedding, thirty-four years earlier, and point to the exact spot where Susan’s uncle stood when he toasted “my wonderful niece and the nebbish she’s marrying.”

  It was one of the best talks we ever had, and as mom slipped away, I passed the time looking through the files and memorabilia she had maintained for some seventy years. There were yellowed newspaper clippings and magazine stories she had written in the ’40s and ’50s, articles from trade newspapers announcing her appointments as she climbed the ladder in advertising, and seemingly every note of thanks or commendation she had ever received from editors, clients, and bosses.

  Those files revealed so much. I could see in them the prodigious drive that had made her a professional success, but that had also robbed me as a child of her focus and attention. All her talent was reflected in those pages, but also her painful insecurity and insatiable need for approbation. It was impossible to escape the plain fact that, for better and worse, she had passed the good and bad on to me.

  Yet, nearing sixty, I was looking back at my mother’s life through a more discerning lens, with greater understanding and less resentment. Those last days also were a stark reminder of the fleeting nature of time, something that seems infinite when you’re young and in such a hurry to get somewhere that you’re incapable of appreciating life’s sublime gifts.

  I value those gifts more now. Susan is alive and healthy, and I’m grateful every day for her and the life we share. Once, we dreamed of a day when Lauren might be happy and healthy, too. Today, miraculously, she is, having been seizure-free for fourteen years. Every day, that makes me smile. Our boys, Michael and Ethan, who were tested and sensitized by their sister’s struggles, have become fine men, with successful careers of their own. Mike married the lovely Liz, and baby Maelin came along in 2014, casting her new grandparents in her enchanting spell.

  With the years come perspective, and that extends to my journey in politics. I can see the gray better now, not just in my hair but in the world around me.

  It makes me smile to think of the cocksure audacity it took for me to walk into a publisher’s office as an eighteen-year-old kid and assert confidently that I was equipped to share my insights about politics in the pages of his newspaper. I’m so glad I did, and so lucky he believed me, or at least took a chance on me. Reflecting back on my life, I’m reminded of the sage line: “I’m not young enough to know everything.”

  Back then, I sure thought I did.

  When I arrived on the South Side of Chicago, four years after the bloody ’68 Democratic National Convention, I saw little need for nuance. I felt the prevailing political machine was corrupt and racist and run for the benefit of the insiders and I pretty much wrote from that righteous but limited perspective.

  I wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t the whole story. The machine was greased by patronage jobs and “sweetheart” contracts and by elected officials (even judges) often slated more for their loyalties than their abilities. It was a feudal structure dominated by white ethnic ward bosses, and it left the burgeoning black and Hispanic communities on the outside looking in. Yet when JFK needed votes for the Civil Rights Act, he could count on Mayor Richard J. Daley to deliver them—and the mayor, in turn, could count on largesse from Washington with which to build his city.

  As a kid columnist, I reflexively sided with the earnest, upright do-gooders who believed that all patronage was inherently evil and that every public dollar should be awarded on the merits—and then only after rigorous public debate, rather than the bartering that sealed backroom deals between politicians. I still tend to see it that way, but I’m a little less certain and sanctimonious about it at sixty than I was at eighteen.

  As a White House aide, I had argued for the elimination of earmarks, the open-ended funds from which individual members of Congress coul
d direct dollars to projects in their district. It was a system that had been egregiously abused and had become an obvious symbol of corruption in Washington. Obama had campaigned against it, and I agreed it had to go. Yet, in my years in Washington, I learned how few tools a president and congressional leaders now have at their disposal to corral support for their initiatives. So I see the wisdom of allowing legislators greater ability to target resources within their communities. Had we at once “reformed” the system yet made it less workable and responsive?

  I’m not young enough to know for sure.

  • • •

  Back in the day, I learned that some of the beguiling rogues I covered took genuine pride in governing and ministering to their constituents, and some of the “reformers” I put on a pedestal had little feel for people or, far worse, lectured about ethics as they lined their own pockets. Most of the folks I’ve met in politics are neither pure saint nor unrepentant sinner. It was a joy to hear Dan Rostenkowski reminisce about the writing of Medicare or how he helped save Social Security from insolvency or the 1986 tax reform law he negotiated with Ronald Reagan. “The question I always asked is whether it was good law,” Rostenkowski would say. Yet he ended his career on the wrong side of the law, mostly for penny-ante crimes such as trading in postage stamps from his office and pocketing the cash. Raised in the culture of the old Democratic machine, Rosty went down like a two-bit grifter. It would be easy to write this as his epitaph, and there was a time when I would have. Yet he also was one of the most effective and impactful legislators of his time, an ebullient politician who loved the process of horse trading and knew how to work across party lines to get vital things done for the country. I’m a little nostalgic for that.

  For years, Rosty would drive home to Illinois each weekend with Bob Michel, a Republican from Peoria who would become House minority leader. It’s a quaint memory today, when the idea of senior members of the two parties sharing a meal, much less an eleven-hour car ride, would be regarded as a treasonous act. Yet Rostenkowski and Michel were of a different generation, raised during an era when Americans served side by side to save the world from fascism, an experience that bound this big, diverse nation as one. They were friendly adversaries who had different views on many things—which is, after all, why there are two parties—but neither ever questioned the other’s intentions and certainly never his patriotism or love of country.

  Another of Rosty’s friends was George H. W. Bush, with whom he briefly served in the ’60s on the House Ways and Means Committee. Decades later, the two of them, Bush as president and Rosty as chair of that powerful tax-writing committee, helped fashion a budget plan to reduce the yawning gap left by Reagan’s supply-side fiscal policies. Many analysts credit the deal with paving the way for the prosperity of the ’90s, but it also touched off a right-wing rebellion within the Republican Party that helped sink Bush and led to Michel’s ouster as GOP leader in the House.

  That putsch was orchestrated by a crafty young conservative from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, who frowned upon Michel’s moderation and his fraternization with folks on the other side of the aisle. It was a watershed event, setting in motion the mad cycle of polarization that turned the aisle between parties into a jagged divide, one that today is increasingly difficult (or, far too often, impossible) to cross.

  Gingrich doesn’t shoulder all the blame. Today’s cable and Internet-driven media, in which Americans increasingly seek “news” from sources that affirm, rather than inform, their views; the trend toward partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, making primary elections the only risk faced by most incumbents; the mind-boggling explosion of special interest and ideologically driven money in campaigns—all have conspired to make conflict in Washington more rewarding for politicians than compromise.

  Obama’s “hope and change” campaign of 2008 was about many important things, from ending the war in Iraq to reclaiming the American dream. Above all, though, it was about fixing the broken politics of Washington. “E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one,” he liked to say, invoking the national motto. Obama preached the gospel of one America, a diverse nation with shared concerns and a common destiny. Together, he promised, we could overcome the grip of partisanship and special interest influence that had hijacked our national politics. It was a vision he painted with inspiring passion and genuine conviction. Given who he was and the life he had led, Obama stood as a living symbol of the possibility for greater harmony and progress.

  The huge and enthusiastic crowds Obama drew—the resounding vote on Election Day that reached well beyond the Democratic base—offered genuine hope to a country hungry for change. Yet it must have been a terrifying prospect to Republicans in Washington, who are in the business of winning elections and had reason to fear that this was only the beginning. If Obama could forge the kind of bipartisan solutions he had promised as a candidate, he could remake American politics for a generation. They weren’t going to let that happen. So while most of Washington celebrated on the night of Obama’s inauguration, key House and Senate Republicans skipped the parties to meet with Gingrich and plot a strategy of relentless resistance.

  In his first two years in the White House, Obama accomplished more than any president since LBJ. Not only did he staunch the bleeding of an economy on the brink of disaster and pass health care reform, but he also saved the American auto industry, passed landmark Wall Street reform, raised fuel efficiency standards in cars and trucks, struck down the ban on gays in the military, expanded college aid and reformed student loans, paved the way for new clean energy sources, and passed the Lilly Ledbetter Law to combat pay discrimination against women. He also began to make good on ending America’s longest-running wars, negotiated a new arms control treaty, and rallied the world behind withering sanctions that would bring Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program.

  Yet his legislative victories were possible only because of the strong Democratic majorities that Obama had helped sweep into Congress. The Republicans stuck to their game plan and refused Obama cooperation from the start, compelling him to pass every major bill on party-line votes, thus denying him the claim to bipartisanship that both the president and the country desired.

  The Republicans knew the recovery would be long and arduous, and decided it was far better to blame the president’s policies than to be complicit in shaping them. Mitch McConnell openly boasted about the strategy of obstruction and thrilled the GOP base when he vowed that defeating Obama would be his top priority. Then things got worse. When Republicans took over the House in 2011 after the Tea Party stormed the election, everything ground to a halt. Small-government conservatives were edged out by no-government conservatives, and Americans witnessed bitter, partisan retrenchment that took the country to the edge of a catastrophic default on its debt. The frenetic action of the first two years surrendered to a more virulent strain of gridlock than any we had witnessed before.

  Throughout my years with Obama, I publicly deflected questions about whether the vehemence of his opposition was rooted in race. “I’m sure some people voted for the president because he is black and some people voted against him because he is black,” I would say, with the authority of one who had spent a lifetime working with minority candidates to knock down racial barriers that blocked higher offices. “The election of the first black president was a dramatic step forward for America, not a magic healing elixir.” I simply didn’t want to fuel the discussion or appear to be setting the president up as a victim.

  Still, the truth is undeniable.

  No other president has seen his citizenship openly and persistently questioned. Never before has a president been interrupted in the middle of a national address by a congressman screaming, “You lie!” Some folks simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of the first black president and are seriously discomforted by the growing diversity of our country. And some craven politicians and right-wing provocateurs have been more than will
ing to exploit that fear, confusion, and anger.

  Obama feels this, I’m sure, though it’s not in his nature or interest to dwell on it. He remains calm, deliberative, and ultimately rational, which are virtues in a president and commander in chief and were welcome qualities after the bombast and bluster of the Bush-Cheney era.

  Even so, over the years, that same preternatural cool has increasingly worked against Obama in public opinion and commentary. Calm has too often been read as detachment; deliberativeness as uncertainty. Americans, sometimes, like it when their presidents want to punch someone in the face—or at least sound as if they do. In politics and diplomacy, the ultimate rational man bent on solving thorny problems is frequently destined to frustration and disappointment in these games where the other players too often measure their moves by much different yardsticks.

  This is the way it is with all people, I’ve learned. A person’s strengths almost always have a flip side. Obama’s strengths are prodigious, but he’s not perfect or exempt from blame for some of the disappointments I hear expressed about him ever more frequently these days.

  The day after the Affordable Care Act passed, a slightly hungover but very happy president walked into my office to reflect on the momentous events of the night before.

  “Not used to martinis on work nights,” he said with a smile, as he flopped down on the couch across from my desk, still bearing the effects of the late-night celebration he hosted for the staff after the law was passed. “I honestly was more excited last night than I was the night I was elected. Elections are like winning the semifinals. They just give you the opportunity to make a difference. What we did last night? That’s what really matters.”

  That attitude and approach is what I admire most about Obama, the thing that makes him stand apart. For him, politics and elections are only vehicles, not destinations. They give you the chance to serve. To Obama’s way of thinking, far worse than losing an election is squandering the opportunity to make the biggest possible difference once you get the chance to govern.