DANIEL HENNINGER: A REVIEW OF DAVID AXELROD’S BOOK “BELIEVER”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-believer-by-david-axelrod-1423527838
“Barbra Streisand tells Axelrod that the president needs to talk to people in simpler terms: ‘I hate to say it, but people are stupid.’
The Obama presidency doesn’t arrive in David Axelrod ’s 500-page memoir, “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics,” until the book is about two-thirds over. But it is worth the wait, or at least the wading.
President Obama is in the middle of his fight to pass the Affordable Care Act. This is the book’s most politically compelling chapter, though the word “ObamaCare” is entirely absent. Some in the White House, such as chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, worry that the stumbling, unpopular effort to pass the ACA will damage Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. “Rahm recommended scaling back to a plan that would cover fewer people, but garner more votes,” Mr. Axelrod writes.
When President Obama asks what the odds are of passing the most ambitious bill possible, his congressional liaison, Phil Schiliro, replies, “Depends how lucky you feel, Mr. President.”
Mr. Obama smiles and says: “Can I say this? I always feel lucky. Let’s go all in. When your name is Barack Obama and you’re the president of the United States, how can you not feel lucky?”
Mr. Axelrod’s name will be yoked forever to that of Mr. Obama, though people often misconstrue his role. Mr. Axelrod was not the Obama campaign manager in 2008. That was David Plouffe. He was not President Obama’s first chief of staff. That was Rahm Emanuel.
A fair summary of Mr. Axelrod’s role would be to say that until he left the White House in February 2011, he was in charge of the Obama “message.” Normally in politics, “message” has a particular meaning—using media to promote a set of ideas and positions. Mr. Axelrod, however, believes (thus, the book’s title) that he was involved in something larger than the mere grubwork of political messaging. Describing his position in the 2008 presidential campaign, he writes: “My role was Keeper of the Message and, I believed, the idealistic flame.”
Mr. Axelrod describes how that idealistic flame ignited early in his life, at the age of five. He was taken to a John F. Kennedy campaign rally in New York City, where he says he “somehow” absorbed the message “we are masters of our future, and politics is the means by which we shape it.” At nine, he took himself to the local Manhattan Democratic club to volunteer for Bobby Kennedy ’s New York Senate campaign.
Politics pulled him in because he sensed “it was about big, noble ideals. It was about history and historic change.” Years later—by now a Chicago political consultant whose clients had included Sen. Paul Simon, Mayor Harold Washington and Gov. Rod Blagojevich—he was working to make Barack Obama president.
It has been said that Mr. Axelrod was Barack Obama’s Svengali. Reading “Believer” made me think you could as easily say that Mr. Obama was David Axelrod’s Svengali.
“Believer” is a hagiography, a life of what for Mr. Axelrod is a saint-like figure in American politics. On the cusp of announcing his run for the presidency, Sen. Obama is asked by an associate about his plans. Mr. Axelrod writes that Mr. Obama replied: “It may not be exactly the time I would pick, but sometimes the times pick you.”
Opening his account of the White House years, Mr. Axelrod says everything he saw in Washington “confirmed Obama’s campaign critique: most members of Congress are fundamentally concerned with winning and holding on to their seats and to power.” Closing the book, he says Mr. Obama has “limited patience or understanding” for officeholders and what Mr. Axelrod calls their parochial concerns, “which would include most members of Congress and many world leaders.”
In Mr. Axelrod’s telling, Mr. Obama brought to the presidency a set of goals for health care, the economy and the environment whose self-evident rightness should have been embraced because they transcended politics and ideology. Indeed, Mr. Axelrod only once calls Mr. Obama’s goals “progressive” and merely alludes to the “Netroots,” the left-wing activists who mobilized with great success for Mr. Obama in 2008. Both Mr. Axelrod and the president thought Republican opposition to the $800 billion stimulus and Affordable Care Act was utterly base. During the health-law battle, Mr. Obama says of Sen. Mitch McConnell and the GOP leadership: “These guys are so cynical. They would take the country over the side just to score some points.”
Mr. Axelrod’s account of the Obama presidency is basically Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, to the 10th power. Even in the smallest White House groups, Mr. Obama is constantly giving Jimmy Stewart speeches: “I know things are tough right now and a lot of pundits are saying that the presidency is at stake and all of that. I don’t care about any of that. I’m not thinking about reelection.” Rahm Emanuel appears to be the only one driven a little nuts by the atmosphere of political other-worldliness.
Along the way, Mr. Axelrod tells some notable anecdotes. At a New York dinner, for example, a frustrated Barbra Streisand says the president has to talk to people in simpler terms, for the Gruberesque reason: “I hate to say it, but people are stupid.”
Mr. Axelrod says it was his idea to appoint Elizabeth Warren , “a hero to the Left,” to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
He suggests amid the financial crisis that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner prevailed against White House economic advisers Larry Summers and Christina Romer (“who generally didn’t mix”), in their advice in favor of a government intervention that Mr. Axelrod calls “nationalizing the banks.”
In one of the memoir’s most intriguing moments, he recalls Mr. Obama’s ruminations on a second term. “I’ll be honest,” Mr. Obama says, “four years of this might be enough. I won’t be run out. But if we can turn the economy around and get some things like health care done, I could see walking away from it.”
Instead, as the author of “Believer” might say, Barack Obama and the United States are still in the hands of history.
Mr. Henninger, deputy editor of the editorial page, writes the Wonder Land column.
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