Obama Message Maven Finds Fingers Pointing at Him

[depakid]

David Axelrod was sitting at his desk on a recent afternoon — tie crooked, eyes droopy and looking more burdened than usual. He had just been watching some genius on MSNBC insist that he and President Obama’s other top aides were failing miserably and should be replaced.

“Typical Washington junk we have to deal with,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview. The president is deft at blocking out such noise, he added, suddenly brightening. “I love the guy,” he said, and in the space of five minutes, repeated the sentiment twice.

Critics, pointing to 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 Mr. Axelrod, by implication, as something of a swooning loyalist. A “Moonie,” dismissed Mr. Axelrod’s close friend, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. 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 Mr. Axelrod, the president’s closest aide, 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 or shown the strain as plainly as Mr. Axelrod, who as White House senior adviser oversees every aspect of how Mr. Obama is presented. As such, Mr. Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed message maven, has felt the brunt of criticism over what many view as the administration’s failure to clearly define and disseminate Mr. Obama’s agenda and accomplishments for the country.

“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.”

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/us/politics/07axelrod.html?hp

[ProSense]

1. Ah, the MSM

The criticism of the administration’s communication strategy — leveled by impatient Democrats, gleeful Republicans, bloggers and cable chatterers — clearly stings Mr. Axelrod, as well as the circle of family, friends and fans he has acquired over three decades in politics as a consultant and, before that, a reporter for The Chicago Tribune.

<...>

Chris Lehane, a former top aide to Vice President Al Gore, says the administration should tell a clearer story. “They have been enormously capable in dealing with the day-to-day challenges of the government,” Mr. Lehane said. “But they don’t seem to get the credit they deserve for that because they’ve communicated no overarching big idea or philosophical framework of where they want to take the country.”

Others question what happened to the Mr. Axelrod who so effectively marketed Mr. Obama, the candidate, as a change agent. He and some defenders, though, say that trying to explain a president who is dealing with a fusillade of difficult governing issues is far different.

“In a campaign, you’re not held to the same standard of actually doing what you say you’re going to do,” said Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director and Obama campaign adviser. Mr. Axelrod can still sound like the self-described idealist who developed Mr. Obama’s campaign message, expressing impatience with what he calls “the gritty pragmatist school that says you have just got to accept the system” in Washington. “I’m not surprised that there are people who never liked us in the first place trying to have a big ‘I told you so’ about how you really can’t change the system,” he said.

link

With all the breaking rumors, the Republicans who now see the light, the "I told you so" crowd, Lehane and Dunn are correct: the message is being drown out by the MSM, with the blogs echoing every bullshit report, and the predators (who have never had any love for the President and Democrats) are making a lot of noise. It's easy for the MSM to create confusion.

[depakid]

4. I actually feel a bit sorry for Axelrod

He's got to deal with a president who is either:

A. Woefully naive and attempting to "model" some form of etiquette to recreate an ideal style of government that never existed outside of some pie in the sky scholarly legal theory texts; or

2. Is unwilling or incapable of doing what's required to control the narrative due to his overly conciliatory, unilaterally compromising and conflict averse nature.

Of course, the default position to the increasingly obvious problems is to blame the media- but since neither the administration nor the Dems in congress are willing to even broach the topic of media divestment and re-regulation, he pragmatic course is to deal with it effectively as it is in real life.

In other words- as the research (and political results) demonstrate time and time again actually works.

[ProSense]

5. I don't think he needs your pity. n/t

[depakid]

6. Not pity, sympathy

It's a tough bind to be in- and Axelrod's no spring chicken.

[DCKit]

2. Dave needs to chill and to learn to laugh at the nonsense.

They lose their power when you laugh at them - especially when they're interviewing you live and you call BS.

[tularetom]

3. Rahm Emanuel is not a "pragmatist" - he's a compromiser

And rumor has it that those "recent news reports" that have cast him as a pragmatist were planted by Emanuel himself through liberal media hacks like Dana Milbank.

For some reason I'm guessing that Emanuel has taken a dislike to David Axelrod and that's why we're seeing stories like this one.

There is indeed a cancer on the presidency and it's name is Emanuel. He already fucked up the House by getting a bunch of DINO's elected that can't be counted on to support the party platforms. He needs to be removed before he destroys Obama's presidency.

And don't tell me he's doing exactly what Obama wants. Obama does not want this kind of crap surrounding every move he makes and it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out where it's coming from.