Interview with David Axelrod

This interview was conducted on February 18th, 2016. It is lightly edited for clarity. An excerpt will be published in the March 2016 issue of WUPR.

Aryeh Mellman: Today we are lucky to be joined by David Axelrod. Mr. Axelrod is a veteran journalist, campaign strategist, and former senior advisor to President Obama. He has managed more than 150 campaigns, including those of President Obama, and is currently the Director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. His bestselling memoir, entitled “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics,” was released in 2015.

Billie Mandelbaum: Mr. Axelrod, welcome and thank you for joining us. In your memoir you write that your passion for politics began when you were five years old after attending a campaign rally for John F. Kennedy. Can you take us back to that day and explain to us what exactly about that day spurred your lifelong career?

David Axelrod: Well first of all it was twelve days before the 1960 election, October 27 1960, which is noteworthy because John F. Kennedy was making 10 stops in the city of New York, 12 days before the election-a Democratic candidate-wouldn’t happen today. The only reason candidates go through New York now is to raise money.

But New York was hotly contested in that election and he was making 10 stops in New York City, and one of them was in a place called Stuyvestant Town, which was a housing development for returning war veterans, and that’s where I grew up. My mother was at work, and the woman who took care of me while my mother was at work was an African-American woman named Jessie Berry, a wonderful wonderful woman. She thought I should see this and took me out and she put me on top of a mailbox and I watched 20th street, which is this great big boulevard, filling with people and then John F. Kennedy jumped up on a platform and everybody was paying rapt attention to him and his voice was booming off those buildings and clearly it was really important. He was talking about the future and it just felt very exciting to me and I was really hooked from that moment.

I started working in campaigns when I was nine years old when his brother ran for the US Senate in New York, Bobby Kennedy. Not too many people can point to that moment; that was my moment.

AM: And can you talk about how the skill set and knowledge you gained at the beginning of your career working as a reporter has helped influence your later career as a political consultant and strategist?

DA: In writing the memoir I had to think a lot about some of these issues and some of the strains in my life, and I realized that I’m basically a storyteller, that I like telling authentic stories about who people are, what they’re about. I used to do that as a journalist and its really what I’ve done in politics. I’ve tried to help develop authentic narratives for my candidates that are really rooted in who they are, and that involves doing some reporting and questioning and then telling the story in creative ways.

BM: Before going to the national stage you worked extensively in Chicago city politics, and I know you’ve worked a lot with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has very recently come under a lot of scrutiny for allegations of the Chicago Police Department’s misconduct. Could you give us your take on the situation and how Mayor Emanuel has handled these accusations?

DA: My first job in newspapers was 42 years ago or so, I got a job when I was a student at the University of Chicago writing a political column for a newspaper called the Hyde Park Herald, and the first column I ever wrote in December 1973 was about a fight between the mayor, then Richard J. Daley, and Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, who was the leader of the black political movement in Chicago over the issue of police misconduct, police mistreatment of people in the African-American community.

It’s been a problem that’s plagued the city of Chicago for time immemorial, going back generations. It’s not new. It’s come to a head now because of the Laquan McDonald case, the young man who was killed. The Justice Department is in, and the mayor himself has a task force working on reworking the procedures involving police interactions with people in the community. So we could be at an inflection point where we can actually do something, but he’s the seventh mayor since I’ve been in the city, and some of those mayors, including one I really loved, Harold Washington, first African-American mayor of the city, seethed with rage about mistreatment of citizens. During his mayoralty, there was a police commander named John Burge who was guilty of torturing suspects. Harold wouldn’t have tolerated that, but there was a lot that happened that he didn’t know and couldn’t control.

So I’m sympathetic to this mayor because I think these problems have been long in the making. The question is what do we do with it, do we finally confront what has been such a long-standing problem for the city? I’m hopeful that we will.

BM: And how do you think Mayor Emanuel can go about rebuilding the trust in the African-American community?

DA: I think there’s only one way and that’s to solve the problem. I think you have to rebuild trust between the community and the police. You do that with the selection of a new police superintendent, a new police chief, who will promote reform. You do it by promoting closer relationships between police and the community, more collaborative relationships. Because it’s not just a matter of stopping police shootings of citizens, it’s a matter of doing a better job of stopping citizens from shooting citizens, and that’s going to require greater cooperation between the police and the community.

Right now both the community and the police observe their own codes of silence and its really harmful in both crime fighting and in dealing with issues of police misconduct. So I think there’s a clear path; doing it, as I said, you’re fighting against generations of practices, so its challenging, but the path is clear.

AM: Turning now to 2016 and the upcoming election, what do you think are the biggest issues at stake in the presidential election?

DA: One of them apparently is going to be the Supreme Court unless the Senate decides they’re going to act on the president’s nominee, and that’s actually added an element to this election that nobody anticipated.

Let me say what I hope it would be about; whether it’ll be about that or not, we’ll see. We have long-standing challenges in this country that go to changes in the economy, and this has gone back not just one administration, but decades. The revolutionary growth in technology, globalization, that have marginalized large numbers of lesser-educated people whose middle class jobs have been essentially made obsolete. Wages have been flat. Median income today is about what it was in 1999. Ninety percent of Americans haven’t effectively seen a wage increase in two decades, and we all know about the growing gulf in inequality that’s plaguing the country.

We need to seriously confront these questions and I hope that that will be front and center in this election. It’s certainly front and center in the Democratic race. I think it’s front and center in the minds of most Americans, so therefore I hope that it will ultimately be what this campaign turns to.

AM: Thinking a little bit more about that, acknowledging that these are long trends, what specifically has President Obama done during the time he’s been in office, to address this issue?

DA: Well there are some big things. I think health reform has been the biggest counter to inequality that we’ve seen in quite some time. He’s made changes in our tax system; upper income people are paying more than they were paying before, and he’s expanded things like the Earned Income Tax Credit, so working people who are out there in the marketplace are not living in poverty because of changes in the tax system. [He’s expanded] childcare tax credits, he’s expanded the Pell grants, which are really important for lower income students who want to get a college education.

But look, I think there’s a lot more work to do, there’s no question about it. When he came to office, we were in the midst of an epic economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression, and job number one was to keep the economy from collapsing and that’s where a lot of his efforts had to go, and he was successful in that; we’ve had 71 straight months of job expansion, the longest stretch in history, and yet we haven’t yet licked this issue of wages and that’s the thing that we really need to think about as a country, what do we do about that.

BM: In this Democratic race, we’ve seen two different campaign styles. We have Hillary Clinton’s pragmatism and Bernie Sanders more populist, revolutionary style. What do you think are the pros and cons of each campaign style?

DA: Well I’ve been really impressed with what Bernie Sanders has accomplished in this campaign. No one would have predicted six months ago that he would be where he is today. And I think he’s been very very focused on this issue of inequality, and he’s been talking about these issues for a very long time so there’s a fundamental authenticity to his message, and I’d guess he has a lot of supporters on this campus as he does on every campus in the country.

I think Hillary Clinton has an argument in that having served in the White House during the first two years of this presidency and having been with him when he miraculously was able to pass health reform, but understanding that he had to compromise in order to do it. I have a keen recognition of the compromises one has to make in order to move forward in a very freighted political system.

Bernie Sanders likes to talk about Franklin Roosevelt as his political hero, and Franklin Roosevelt deserves to be in that pantheon of political heroes, but I’m always reminded of the fact that when Franklin Roosevelt passed Social Security, he passed it in a form that essentially excluded almost every African American worker in this country, and he didn’t do it because he felt that was the right end result, he did it because it was the best he could do, and he thought that we could improve on it as we went along, and that was the decision president Obama made about the Affordable Care Act.

So it’s not a very inspiring, soaring message to say that we can’t go as fast as you’d like to go, and one of the reasons why I like working with young people at the University of Chicago is they don’t have a lot of patience. They want to see change and they want to see it quickly and they want to see it dramatically, and they don’t want to hear about the problems of the political system.

But our Founding Fathers built this system that was intended to slow down change, that was intended to work in a very lumbering way when there were great divisions in the country, and that’s where we are today. So you do have to make some acknowledgement of that, and I think in that sense, Bernie, who’s been in Congress for 25 years, is not acknowledging the reality that he knows to be the fact.

AM: Do you see Bernie Sanders’ popularity among Democrats as an implied criticism of the Obama administration over the past several years?

DA: I think there’s some of that. I think the left has been frustrated with him. Bernie put his imprimatur on a book that just came out called Buyers Remorse: How Obama let Progressives Down. I don’t agree with that, I think it’s been an incredibly productive seven years in which we’ve seen dramatic change, even in the midst of very difficult times, politically and economically.

But there are people on the left, just as there are people on the right, who don’t like compromise, who are frustrated with the system, who believe-and by the way, this I thoroughly agree with-that money plays too large a role in our politics. They express disappointment about Obama, because Obama is still quite popular. Even those who are frustrated still seem to like him, among Democrats his approval rating is between 80 and 90 percent.

So Bernie has submerged some of his criticism. In 2011 he was among those on the left who thought maybe there should be a primary challenge to the president, and he did write a blurb for this book. But he’s dismissive of those things now, or at least he downplays them. But yes, I think there are some people within the Democratic Party who are critical of the president.

BM: Yesterday you tweeted “Watching this portion of the Democratic campaign for president, it could properly be called ‘black votes matter.'” As someone who’s worked with several African-American politicians on their campaigns, what role do you think race and identity will play in 2016?

DA: I’ve devoted a lot of my career to working with minority politicians who are trying to break barriers. The president was one, Deval Patrick the former governor of Massachusetts was another, and many mayors around this country; it’s something I feel deeply about. But also, having been involved in those races I know race is still fundamentally an issue in our politics, it has been since the beginning of the republic, it’s still there.

That is a thing that courses through our politics on the Republican side in a fundamentally negative way among some constituencies there, constituencies that Donald Trump has tapped into, perhaps more than others. It courses through politics on the Democratic side because this great inequality has fallen more heavily on minority communities, as well as inequities in our criminal justice system, and our health system in so many different ways.

So there’s a fundamental frustration within minority communities, and I think what they’re saying in this Democratic race is they don’t want to be taken for granted. What I was commenting on is the spectacle of now that we’re beyond Iowa and New Hampshire, that both these candidates are frantically communing with African Americans as South Carolina approaches. And I understand it, I get politics, but it’s hard to miss the shift in their focus.

AM: Talking about qualities important for presidential candidates, obviously you were with Obama since the early stages of his political career and he didn’t have much experience when he ran for president. Could you critique a candidate like Marco Rubio for not having enough experience or would you argue that experience really isn’t that major a factor?

DA: I don’t think you can generalize and say you have to have this many years in office or this many years in Washington in order to serve. I think that wouldn’t be right. Part of the test will be the campaign itself. Honestly, I had great faith in Senator Obama. I had seen him over the course of eight years in the legislature and three years in the US Senate. I knew him as a friend, I knew he was incredibly thoughtful and [deep], and he proved himself in the course of his presidential campaign, the longest race in history.

Marco Rubio will be tested in the coming months and we’ll see how he handles those tests. He had a little bit of a stumble in New Hampshire, but people do have stumbles. Nobody races through a presidential race error-free, so I wouldn’t condemn him for that. But the question is exactly how much depth does he have, and he’ll be tested along the way here. It may not work out for him, but he’s in the enviable position right now of maybe becoming the default position for the so-called establishment Republicans, and they may rally around him after SC if Governor Bush doesn’t do well and Kasich probably won’t do well there. You can kind of see that train moving out of the station, but whether it can catch up to the other trains, the Trump train and Cruz train remains to be seen.

BM: Do you think the Trump train can be derailed?

DA: I got out of the predicting about Donald Trump business a few months ago. I thought he was going to be gone by now. I think I misread him and I misread the country and I misread my own writings because I wrote a memo to Obama in 2006 telling him that the outgoing president would define the election and people tend to choose the remedy, not the replica. So the person whose qualities are most the antithesis of the incumbent tends to find some toehold, and there’s no one more of an antithesis to Barack Obama than Donald Trump.

I do notice that he’s done well, but he’s done well in a crowded field, and you don’t see any primaries where he’s above 50 percent. There was a Wall Street Journal poll today, and there are others that say something different, but the Wall Street Journal today suggested that he was losing a little bit of altitude and that if he had a one on one race with either Rubio or Cruz that he would lose by double digits; I think Rubio was beating him 57-41 and Cruz 56-40. So we’ll see how this thing unfolds. But he’s certainly a phenomenon.

Today’s story was him tussling with the Pope. You know, the conventional political playbook says don’t pick a fight with the Pope, that’s not good politics. But he certainly treads where few others will go and it seems to work for him, so we’ll see what happens.

AM: Do you think given how the Republican race is going, with the party elites seemingly out of touch with the party base…that the Democrats have the same problem?

DA: I know Hillary Clinton was resistant in one of the debates when Bernie Sanders suggested that she was part of the political establishment. She said she was amused by that; I was amused that she was amused, because clearly she’s part of the political establishment, and she needs to embrace who she is.

I do think there is an anti-establishment quality to the Sanders campaign, that’s undeniable. The one thing I would say is that the Democratic party is a much less alienated party than the Republican party, much less angry about the status quo. I think that’s because we’ve had a Democratic president who most Democrats like, and I think there is a focus on the part of Democrats to build on that progress and to not let it go backwards. That’s different from the Republican party where there’s a nihilist thing going on.

BM: Given all the talk of partisanship and gridlock, how do you maintain your idealism and [remain] a “believer” in the power of politics?

DA: Its a good question, its one of the reasons why I wrote a book. Amid all of this I’ve also been witness to what politics and government could do. John F. Kennedy said in my encounter with him when I was five, and I hasten to add that I didn’t remember this from when I was five, but through the wonders of Google I now know what he said. He said “I’m not running on the platform that says if you like me everything will be good or easy. Being an American citizen in the 1960s is a hazardous occupation, filled with peril but also hope, and we’ll decide in this election which path we take.” That’s what I believe. I believe we can make a difference, we can grab the wheel of history and we can steer that wheel and we can make a difference, and I’ve seen it happen.

The Affordable Care Act is an example of that. Millions of people mobilized across this country and elected Barack Obama president because they felt that he was someone who was willing to risk everything for the things he believed in. He believed we needed to reform the healthcare system and he took great political risk, more political risk, frankly, than I wanted him to take in order to pass the Affordable Care Act. And now I constantly run into people who tell me their stories, oftentimes with tears in their eyes, about how their lives were saved because they were able to get insurance, and they would never have been able to get insurance before. So it’s hard not to be idealistic when you have those encounters.

My view is: look, its a tough, messy, sometimes discouraging process, but at the end of the day its an opportunity to do good things that can help people, that can help the country, that can change the world for the better. I’ve seen it happen time and again in the last seven years in ways that I think we’ll come to appreciate more and more as time goes on. And so I’m still a believer.

AM: Given that belief, can you tell us a little bit about the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and what you’re hoping to achieve there?

DA: Well its very much related. The young people that I know, by and large, are among the most public spirited that I’ve met since I was a kid in the 1960s, but they are very skeptical as to whether politics is the way that you can actually change things. You’re of that age, so you get a lot of ‘let’s create an app,’ ‘lets engage in social media.’ I have great respect for those tools and they’re amazing. The things that you can do today as individuals and as small groups are amazing, but it’s no substitute for government.

And I always tell the kids that I work with: Congress is going to meet with you or without you and they’re going to make decisions about all the equities you care about. Look at the Supreme Court decision, which is going to be so fateful on so many issues, be it abortion rights, or guns, or climate change, or labor rights, and so many other things. It is not, to me, a viable option to walk away.

My role at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics is to try and make that case, bring in people across the political spectrum, but people who can inspire and put young people in internships where they can get hands-on experience, bring in visiting fellows who will mentor them, and it’s been great, it’s been a great experience. I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing than what I’m doing now.

BM: Thank you so much for joining us.