David Axelrod was the chief strategist of the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns, and served as Senior Advisor to the President in the Obama administration from 2009-2011. In 2013, Axelrod founded the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and spent a decade as Director of the bipartisan institution. Axelrod now hosts two weekly podcasts, “The Axe Files” and “Hacks on Tap,” and is the Senior Political Commentator for CNN. Axelrod sat down with the HPR to reflect on his career as a political strategist and his hopes for the future of political discourse.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: You began your career as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune, where you primarily covered Chicago City Hall politics. Then, after eight years at the publication, you moved over to campaign work and led Illinois Senator Paul Simon’s successful 1984 campaign. What motivated this move over from journalism into electoral politics? And is there anything that you learned from the trade of journalism that you think made you a better or a different type of political analyst?
David Axelrod: Journalism was an incredible foundation for everything that I’ve done in my life. And it was only when I wrote a memoir a few years ago that I really thought deeply about how foundational it was, because my role in politics as a strategist was really, at the core, storytelling. What is the story of this candidate? What is the story of this campaign? What is the story of the country, a state, a community in which these candidates are running? And where do they want to lead? And how do you tell that story in a compelling way? So, part of that involved being attuned to asking good questions that journalists do to try and get to the core of who people were and what motivated them, and what motivated their decisions when it came to voters. So it was an extraordinary foundation.
I left because, frankly, when I came to the Chicago Tribune, it was sort of at the end of the golden age of Chicago journalism. There were abundant resources. I was trained by extraordinary editors. And they gave me great guidance and also the resources to do what I wanted to do. And then there was a change of leadership about six years in. The group of editors that I had started with left. A different group came in. And there was a lot more focus on the bottom line, and there was less of a separation between the business side of the newspaper and the editorial side of the newspaper. And I just had concerns about the direction journalism was taking. And I so loved the way I was trained to do journalism that I didn’t want to do it any other way.
And Paul Simon — the politician, not the singer — came along, who was someone I deeply respected, and he was also a former journalist. He had dropped out of college, and he bought a small newspaper in deep Southern Illinois, and in that newspaper, became a bulwark against an organized crime syndicate down there. And he ran against them and got elected to the state legislature, where, in the 1950s, he fought for civil rights and political reform. And neither of those were necessarily all that popular in Southern Illinois — particularly civil rights. So I thought, if I was going to make the move, I wanted to do it working for someone who would make me proud, and he did make me proud.
HPR: Continuing with the idea of working with candidates and telling stories: As a consultant, you were pretty successful in advising several Black candidates, especially in very difficult races. Obviously, you were successful running the 2008 Obama campaign, but also, the mayoral campaign of John Street, who won in Philadelphia by a little over 7000 votes, and then the campaign of Governor Deval Patrick, who was the first Black governor of Massachusetts. Both parties have spent decades trying to recruit and win with Black candidates, and it’s been a very difficult thing for them to do, especially in places that are not predominantly Black. What do you think led to you succeeding where others have had so much difficulty in this challenge?
DA: I get these kinds of questions all the time, often relative to Obama, and the first thing I always say is, “You always look good driving a Maserati.” Deval Patrick, in the same vein, was an extraordinary candidate and a great human being as people at Harvard know. So he had a remarkable story. And he had an orientation that spoke to the larger community and eloquently about what Massachusetts could be. And that was true certainly of Obama, but also of a lot of the candidates that I represented.
None of the candidates who I worked for presented themselves as the Black candidate. They presented themselves as the best candidate, who happened to be Black. They didn’t walk away from their blackness, their association with the community, their concerns about the community. But they also spoke to the larger community. And I think there was a hunger for that. I think there’s still a hunger for people who have the ability to cross lines and bring people together. And God knows we need that more than ever today.
HPR: The Obama administration, and especially his first campaign, was really centered on this idea of change. Change became kind of a motto of the campaign. During that time, you were a seasoned voice within a fairly young and new campaign and for a fairly young candidate. What was it like to be one of the moderating voices in a campaign that was centered around this idea of change?
DA: First of all, I had worked for and with Hillary Clinton, and three other candidates in addition to Barack Obama, who were in that campaign in 2008. But I felt very strongly he did represent change, and not simply because he was African-American, but because he had opposed the war, and he had a different orientation toward politics. But we were very much focused on issues of broad appeal that had to do with the inequities in the economy, and in the war. Climate was one of those issues. And my general approach to politics is to build majorities around those issues of broad concern, and you have to have the discipline in campaigns to pursue those issues of broad concern. And that’s what we did. But all those issues involved change.
HPR: As far as building majorities, the Democratic party is in its own internal conflict right now with a split between progressives and moderates in the party. What would you say would be a good way forward in order to create unity, especially going into a very close election that will most likely be decided by slim margins in a few key swing states?
DA: If you’re asking me how do you create unity amid an issue as divisive as the Middle East, that’s one question. If you’re asking me how you create unity around the election, I mean, I think this is going to be a unique election. And I do think that nothing short of democracy is going to be on the ballot. That should unify large numbers of Democrats and Americans. And I suspect that’s the way the election is going to evolve.
You know, in terms of the issue of the Middle East, I think what’s very, very important, whether it’s in the Democratic Party, the country, or on campuses, is that we somehow find a way to understand, or at least hear each other. I have strong feelings about what happened on October 7. I also was a very public critic of the Netanyahu policies relative to settlements, and relative to two states. I feel the same today. But what worries me is that there’s such deep feelings about these issues that it’s giving rise to, instead of to dialogue, to hate. When I see rising anti-semitism, when I see rising Islamophobia, when I see it translating into threats of physical violence, that should be a concern to all of us.
HPR: Something I really admire about your podcast “The Axe Files” is that you try to invite people from both sides of the political spectrum. I was particularly struck by a recent episode you did in December with former Vice President Mike Pence. During the interview you pushed back at him regarding some of his stances on abortion, and on January 6. How do you prepare for that type of dialogue when you know that it might get controversial? How do you create that kind of civil dialogue that we deeply need right now?
DA: Well, first of all, I do push back in the spirit of trying to understand a point of view. I don’t always get there. But, I think dialogue is dialogue, it’s not trying to dominate the person on the other side of the conversation. So I always refer to my podcasts as conversations, not as either interviews or debates. And I think part of the problem we have in our politics today — I mean, there are bigger problems — but so often, podcasts and TV shows or political debates, or maybe even events on campus become performative, where people feel like they need to score points, and dominate the other person rather than making points in the spirit of honest exchange. What I tried to have with Pence was an honest exchange. I totally disagree with him on some issues; I think that was pretty clear. But I also wanted to understand how he came to where he came to on these issues. And then people can judge how they feel about what was said.
But I will tell you that I spent a half-an-hour with him beforehand, and it was really enlightening to me because what I saw was not the guy on the stage, but a warm, funny, self-effacing person. And so here’s the challenge: How do we penetrate all our differences, and find the humanity in people. And one of the reasons I started the podcast was not so much to shine a light on issues, but as to shine a light on people.
My goal with ‘The Axe Files” is that people come to know the person I’m talking to better. I want them to leave the podcast knowing who that person is better than when they came. And oftentimes, there are obscure things that animate who someone is that go to their childhood or some challenge. Or, there are moments in their life that went sideways and that they have regrets about.
But, you know, ultimately, we all share a common humanity. And everything seems to be pushing us in a direction of dehumanizing each other. So I tried to approach it that way. Sometimes I’m more successful than others. Sometimes I fail and fall short. But that’s the goal of the podcast and that’s really why I do it.
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