By Steve Rhodes
The New York Times recently ran a Sunday magazine story about David Axelrod, the Chicago media manager for Richard M. Daley and Barack Obama, among others. Axelrod, who recently wrote a Tribune Op-Ed column defending patronage, is perhaps the chief man behind the Obama curtain. Let’s take a look.
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“When you finish watching the [announcement] video, you don’t have a particularly good sense of Obama as a politician (you might be able to say that he’s for change), but there is an intimacy – you have been drowned in his life, and you feel as if you know him,” author Ben Wallace-Wells writes.
“Axelrod says that the way to cut through all the noise is to see campaigns as an author might, to understand that you need not just ideas but also a credible and authentic character, a distinct politics rooted in personality.”
COMMENT: Cult of personality is the new politics? Maybe getting serious about politics should be the new politics.
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“When the first major profile of Axelrod appeared in Chicago magazine in 1987, three years after he left a high-profile job as the lead political reporter for the Chicago Tribune work as a political operative , the article (“Hatchet Man: The Rise of David Axelrod”) began by comparing him to an ‘exotic rodent.'”
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“What David is basically doing – and this is somewhat new for Democrats – isn’t trying to figure out how to sell policies,” Democratic media consultant Saul Shorr told the Times. “It’s a matter of personality. How do we sell leadership?”
COMMENT: Maybe exhibiting leadership would be a good place to start.
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“It seems bizarre to consider now, but there was a time, just about three years ago, when Barack Obama was a pretty obscure black candidate for statewide office, and his political fortunes seemed to obey the regular, racialized rules of urban politics.”
Posted on May 15, 2007