David Axelrod, former adviser to President Barack Obama, poses for a portrait at Poynter Friday. He spoke at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club to more than 300 people later that evening. (Photo by James Borchuck, Tampa Bay Times)
President Obama had to know the polling numbers weren’t encouraging. So, in the summer of 2009, David Axelrod visited the Oval Office to tell his boss that the effort to overhaul America’s medical system was taking on water.
“Yeah, but I just got back from Green Bay, Wisconsin,” Obama replied. “And I met a young woman who’s 36 years old. She has two children, and she’s married. They have insurance, but she has stage IV breast cancer now, and they’ve hit their lifetime cap. And she’s terrified that she’s going to die and leave her family bankrupt.”
Axelrod, then Obama’s senior political adviser, felt the president gently ushering him out of the office. They stopped at the door.
“That’s not the country we believe in, so let’s keep fighting,” Obama said.
That moment resonated with Obama’s confidante, who recounted it before an audience Friday night during a forum on media and politics at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club in Florida. Axelrod, now the director of the Institute of Politics at The University of Chicago, recalled his years as a journalist, political consultant and White House message maestro during the 90-minute exchange with Poynter President Tim Franklin.
Obama’s decision not to heed the polling data delighted Axelrod, who admired the president’s tendency to shelve his approval rating when the administration’s centerpiece issues were at stake (“I always say I like him so much because he listened to me so little,” Axelrod quipped). But the healthcare debate went beyond politics for him. In a previous life as a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Axelrod struggled to cover medical bills from his daughter’s epilepsy treatment that often required $1,000 in out-of-pocket expenses per month. Money was tight.
“We were among those Americans who almost went bankrupt,” Axelrod said.
So Axelrod felt especially invested in the fight over healthcare, even if the president sometimes disregarded his counsel and the counsel of his fellow advisers when things looked bleak. Axelrod recalled one particularly rough patch when Obama asked Phil Schiliro, his director of legislative affairs, for odds that Congress would pass the health care reform. Schiliro responded by asking Obama whether he felt lucky.
“And Obama just smiled and said, ‘Phil, I’m a black guy named Barack Obama, and I’m President of the United States,'” Axelrod recounted. “‘I feel pretty good.'”
During Axelrod’s remarks Friday night, the prevailing theme was one of optimism that politics — left, right or center — can be a force for positive change provided the participants are well-intentioned and willing to listen to one another. The enemy of this process, Axelrod said, is partisan gridlock and politicians who seek office for the sake of attaining status rather than a desire to change the status quo. It’s a motif Axelrod returns to repeatedly in his 2015 memoir, “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.”
But not all of Axelrod’s clients have gotten into politics to change things for the better. In 2001, he got a call from Rod Blagojevich, the now-disgraced ex-governor of Illinois who’d won a congressional seat with Axelrod’s help. Blagojevich wanted Axelrod to help him run for governor. When Axelrod asked Blagojevich why he wanted the office, he didn’t have a good answer.
“I was a little frightened,” Axelrod said. “I said, ‘well, why do you want to run for governor?’ And he said, ‘Well, you can help me with that.’ And I said, ‘look, if I have to help you out with that, you shouldn’t run. And that was the end of our relationship.'”
Blagojevich was one of several characters from Chicago that figured into Axelrod’s conversation with Franklin. At one point, the pair recalled a political cartoon that epitomized the bare-knuckle world of Chicago politics: A candidate for city council holding up a sign that read, “Vote for Roti and you don’t get hurt.” By contrast, Axelrod said, politics in Washington, D.C. are simultaneously more genteel and less forthright.
“The thing I appreciate about Chicago and Chicago politics is its bluntness,” Axelrod said. “If people were going to screw you, they’d tell you to your face.”
But by Axelrod’s estimation, bluntness won’t prove a decisive asset for Donald Trump, who routinely spouts tough talk and invective on Twitter. Franklin concluded the night by asking Axelrod to give the audience odds on Trump’s eventual election to the presidency. Although Axelrod says the real-estate-mogul-turned-politician has tapped into a base of frustrated voters, he expressed doubt about Trump’s chances of being sworn in.
By way of example, he cited Trump’s recent campaign stop in Fort Dodge, Iowa, where the candidate went off on a rant that included shots at fellow candidates Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and “these great geniuses from Harvard Law School.”
“I think it’s far more likely that he will never appear on the ballot, or that he will never be an active candidate for president,” Axelrod said.
