Marketing - The Ax-man cometh

David Axelrod is the architect of Barack Obama’s presidential run

ONE of the great ironies of the Obama campaign is that the man responsible for crafting the candidate’s hope-filled image is one of the unhappiest-looking men in American politics. David Axelrod persuaded a reluctant Barack Obama to embrace the “Yes We Can” slogan. He insisted from the first that the campaign should be built on the twin pillars of “hope” and “change”. But with his sad eyes and drooping moustache, Mr Axelrod has a perpetual air of gloom hanging over him.
He is currently the leading member of one of America’s most powerful clubs—the consultants, spin-meisters, string-pullers and behind-the-scenes operatives who run political campaigns. They are not elected to anything. But they shape American politics just as surely as their glad-handing front-men. Some of them, like Karl Rove (who worked for George Bush until last year) and James Carville (Bill Clinton) in the current generation, and Lee Atwater (George Bush senior) in the previous one, become famous; most of them are perfectly content to grow fat and powerful in the shadows.
Mr Axelrod’s formal title is “chief strategist”. But that hugely understates his influence. He has known the candidate for 16 years, longer than any of the other political operatives around him. He has helped to craft his image, put together his political team, provide him with national political connections and generally turn him into the phenomenon that he is today. In a political campaign that prides itself on its lack of hierarchy, “the Ax”, as he is generally known, is first among equals.
Mr Axelrod has been the leading political consultant in Chicago for more than two decades. He helped run Richard Daley’s successful campaign to reclaim his father’s job as mayor of Chicago; he also helped Rahm Emanuel, now one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful figures, to win his congressional seat. Mr Axelrod’s local success earned him a national reputation. Since 2002 his consultancy has worked on 42 primary or general-election campaigns around the country and won 33 of them—an 80% success rate. He has worked at one time or another for five of the Democratic candidates in the recent race (Mr Obama plus Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Chris Dodd and Tom Vilsack). One of his specialities is “packaging black candidates for white voters”. His list of black successes includes John Street, the former mayor of Philadelphia, and Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, whose speeches sometimes bear an uncanny resemblance to Mr Obama’s. One possible weakness, though, is that his expertise is mainly weighted towards winning urban battles.
One of Mr Obama’s luckiest breaks in a luck-laden career came in 2003, when Mr Axelrod agreed to run his Senate campaign rather than that of another potential client, Blair Hull, a fabulously rich investor. Mr Axelrod immediately grasped that he could sell his new client, with his mixed-race background and Ivy League pedigree, to both Chicago’s “lakefront liberals” and its black working class. He simultaneously set about using his contacts in the Washington press corps to present Mr Obama as a national star in the making.
Mr Axelrod has succeeded in imposing extraordinary discipline on the campaign. The Clinton campaign was a nest of hissing vipers, in which egotistical operatives such as Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson spent their time pursuing contradictory strategies and leaking to the press. The Obama campaign, by contrast, has been miraculously free from such woes. Mr Axelrod cleverly decided to install his friend and business partner, David Plouffe, a man who relishes the mechanics of getting out the vote, as campaign manager, creating a highly effective “axis of Davids”.
This discipline has been particularly notable when it comes to message control. The Obama campaign has stuck to the same message through thick and thin: when they were 20-plus points behind Mrs Clinton in the polls, and when they were racking up a succession of victories in February. This allowed them to create a clear brand identity for their neophyte candidate, even as Mrs Clinton dithered between presenting herself as a warrior queen, ready for a 3am call, or a put-upon everywoman fighting off tears.

Mr Axelrod has won nothing but applause for his performance during the primaries. But now that the general-election campaign has, in effect, begun, some Democrats are worrying that his magic touch may be deserting him. Why is Mr Obama stuck in the polls? And why is he less popular than his party? Some Democrats worry that he is not prepared to hit John McCain hard enough. This seems unlikely. Mr Axelrod is a product of Chicago’s street-fighting school of politics. Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist, puts him at the head of his list of “Guys I never want to see lobbing grenades at me again”.
The bigger problem lies with what has hitherto been the Obama campaign’s greatest strength—message control. Mr Axelrod firmly believes that the candidate is the message. The important thing is to tell a positive story about the candidate rather than to muddy the narrative with lots of talk about policy details.
This worked perfectly when Mr Obama was up against Mrs Clinton, a woman who agreed with him on most points of substance and whose own autobiography is messy, to put it mildly. But things are different with Mr McCain. As a Republican, Mr McCain is on the losing side of most policy issues, particularly when it comes to economic and domestic policy. But Mr Obama has still not figured out how to relate his grand rhetoric to the numerous specific policy positions that litter his website. Mr McCain also has one of the most compelling autobiographies in American politics—one that is more likely to appeal to the average American than the coming-of-age of a mixed-race child. For all his skills, Mr Axelrod may have chosen to fight on the one battlefield where the Republicans have a chance of winning.