• David Axelrod, Believer: My Forty Years In Politics, Penguin Press, 2015, 509 pages, $35.00.
David Axelrod started as a journalist, but he faced a serious problem. A key aspect of journalism is to expose unpleasant realities politicians want concealed. As Believer: My Forty Years in Politics shows, “Axe,” as Obama calls him, would be more comfortable concealing the unpleasant realities that diligent journalists seek to reveal.
As communications director for U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., Axelrod was surprised “how naturally I’d adjusted to my new role.” But at that point he wasn’t all in, explaining: “I frankly doubted America was ready for a jug-eared bow-tied liberal as president.” With Barack Obama it was a different story.
“Barack personified the kind of politics and politician I believed in,” Axelrod explains. He cites the “fundamental conviction,” that everyone who’s willing to work should get a fair chance to succeed. Since Barack Obama and David Axelrod did not invent that conviction, which everybody shares, something else is in play here.
Axelrod notes that his mother wrote for PM, a daily newspaper with a “decidedly leftist bent.” The “progressive literati” in his parents’ milieu included journalistic icon I.F. Stone, but the author does not note that Stone hobnobbed with the KGB and authored The Hidden History of the Korean War, which charges that South Korea invaded North Korea. Believer does not take issue with any of leftist ideas, including the support of command economy and backing of the Soviet Union’s repressive and expansionist policies.
Born in 1955, Axelrod drew inspiration from the Kennedys, particularly John F. Kennedy, elected president in 1960. After JFK’s assassination, brother Teddy might have picked up the torch, Axlerod says, but for the “scars of Chappaquiddick, where, in 1969, a young woman drowned in Teddy’s car after he drove off a small bridge and fled.” The young woman was Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, and readers will find the best account in Leo D’Amore’s Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-up.
Obama supposedly personified the kind of politics Axelrod believed in, but Believer fails to mention Obama’s long-time mentor Frank Marshall Davis, an old-line Stalinist who counseled Obama until the end of the 1970s. For the story on Davis, readers should see The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor by Paul Kengor of Grove City College. In Obama’s 1995 Dreams From My Father, Davis appears simply as “Frank,” but Frank disappears entirely in the 2005 audio version of the book. Believer is silent on any role Axelrod may have played in that caper, but the political strategist could not avoid another mentor.
In Chicago, Barack Obama had hundreds of churches to choose from. He picked the church of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a man known for “fiery jeremiads filled with bitterness and vitriol and anti-American slanders.” That is quite charitable. As Obama’s strategist, Axelrod had a problem when Ben Wallace-Wells of Rolling Stone wrote, “This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from.” So “radical” politics was the kind Axelrod and Obama both believed in, but that is not how Believer spins it.
Obama was “no dreamy reformer,” the author says. Both idealistic and pragmatic, he was “ready and willing to do what was necessary to advance his political and legislative goals.” That is probably the truest sentence in Believer, but Axelrod does not follow up with an outline of the IRS crackdown on conservative groups and the massive surveillance campaign on all Americans under a supposedly transparent administration.
Axelrod, after all, is a “believer,” and that is in the sense of the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” and Eric Hoffer’s classic The True Believer. True to form, Axelrod freights his account with hagiography. Obama is “brilliant and honorable and motivated by the best intentions.” Obama “could transcend race and class divides with a remarkable ability to appeal to our common values, hopes and dreams.” And so on. Obama’s Audacity of Hope was “written with the narrative skill of a gifted novelist.”
Believer concedes that Obama faced “withering criticism from all corners,” including the left, but Axelrod explains, “I was witness to a different and truer picture.” In his view Obama boldly rescues the economy and builds new energy industries. The Solyndra failure escapes notice, since that would sully Axelrod’s portrait of an “undeniable path to a recovery.” The fair shake for all finds fulfillment in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new federal bureaucracy to accompany new entitlements such as Obamacare, here portrayed as an unalloyed blessing.
Axelrod has little tolerance for unbelievers, those Tea Party types and “right-wing provocateurs.” Criticism of Obamacare, for example, is “rooted in race: a deep-seated resentment of the idea of the black man with the Muslim name in the White House. The facts notwithstanding, to them, health reform was just another giveaway to poor black people at their expense.” Beyond that, “some folks simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of the first black president and are seriously discomforted by the growing diversity of our country.”
For such a true believer, with not the slightest trace of doubt in his mind, it’s all that simple. David Axelrod is not a man to speak the truth to power, the role of the journalist. On the other hand, his book confirms that the former journalist adjusted naturally to his new role of concealing or altering the truth on behalf of the powerful. Sooner or later, some brave insider will give readers the real story.
Lloyd Billingsley is a contributor to Carolina Journal.