"President’s closest aide feels sting of public’s disaffection" by Mark Leibovich, New York Times | March 7, 2010
WASHINGTON - Critics, noting the administration’s stalled legislative agenda, falling poll numbers, and muddled messaging, suggest that kind of devotion is part of the problem at the White House. Recent news reports have cast the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, as the administration’s chief pragmatist, and David Axelrod, by implication, as something of a swooning loyalist. Or as the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, joked, “the guy who walks in front of the president with rose petals.’’
Still, it is a charge that infuriates Axelrod, the president’s longest-serving adviser and political alter ego. “I guess I have been castigated for believing too deeply in the president,’’ he said, lapsing into the sarcasm he tends to deploy when playing defense.
No one has taken the perceived failings of the administration more personally than Axelrod, who as White House senior adviser oversees every aspect of how Obama is presented. As such, Axelrod has felt the brunt of criticism over what many view as the administration’s failure to clearly define and disseminate Obama’s agenda.
“The Obama White House has lost the narrative in the way that the Obama campaign never did,’’ said James Morone, a political scientist at Brown University. “They essentially took the president’s great strength as a messenger and failed to use it smartly.’’
It wasn't that.
It was the THIRD TERM of GEORGE W. BUSH that has soured us.
Axelrod would not discuss what counsel he offered to Obama, though he any charge that he is too infatuated with the president to recognize the political risks of his ambitious agenda.
“Believe me, if we were charting this administration as a political exercise, the first thing we would have done would not have been a massive recovery act, stabilizing the banks, and helping to keep the auto companies from collapsing,’’ he said.
Sort of proves my point, huh?
Nothing about the wars, either, huh?
But Axelrod argued that the president, confronted with “breathtaking challenges,’’ did not have the luxury of moving more slowly or methodically.
The criticism of the administration’s communication strategy - leveled by impatient Democrats, gleeful Republicans, bloggers, and cable chatterers - clearly stings Axelrod, as well as the circle of family, friends and fans he has acquired over decades in politics....
Like I care about his feelings!
My own have been hurt and wounded by this government and its mouthpiece media -- and here it is again!
Axelrod’s friends worry about the toll of his job - citing his diet (cold-cut-enriched), his weight (20 pounds heavier than at the start of the presidential campaign), sleep deprivation (five fitful hours a night), separation from family (most back home in Chicago), and the fact that at 55, he is considerably older than many of the wunderkind workaholics of the West Wing. He wakes at 6 a.m. in his rented condo just blocks from the White House and typically returns at about 11 p.m.
Unlike other presidential alter egos, Axelrod is not viewed as a surrogate “brain’’ (like Karl Rove), a suspicious outsider (like Dick Morris in the Clinton White House) or a co-president (James Baker in the first Bush White House).
Sometimes portrayed as a bare-knuckled Chicago operative, he is also a bantering walrus of a man in mustard-stained sleeves who describes himself as a “kibbitzer,’’ not a “policy guy.’’
Yup, it's all Jews all the time over here in AmeriKa's newspapers and government -- and am I ever sick and tired of it.
--more--"
