Former Obama chief strategist David Axelrod has accepted the position of Senior Adviser in the White House, sources tell ABC News. Axelrod helped craft the Obama campaign’s main theme of ‘change’, and ‘yes we can’.
Robert Gibbs is also likely to join Obama’s White House as Press Secretary, and Obama would like his confidante Valerie Jarrett to play a key role. The exact parameters have not been set.
They will join Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill, who has accepted the position of Obama’s White House Chief of Staff.
The following are excerpts from an article appearing in the Guardian UK on July 27, 2007:
His name is David Axelrod:
With his bushy moustache and piercing, no-nonsense gaze, the 53-year-old journalist turned political consultant has been a central presence in the presidential campaign. No one in the inner circle of Obama’s aides has known the junior senator for Illinois longer; they first met during a voter-registration drive in Chicago in 1992, five years before Obama first won public office, in the state legislature. No one is closer to him. No one, except Obama himself, has had a make-or-break voice in every strategy decision during his march from outsider to front runner in the race for the White House.
For Axelrod, for reasons political, professional but also deeply personal, guiding Obama to victory. It is, say those who know him best, a ‘crusade’. And it began not with Obama’s formal declaration of his candidacy in front of Illinois’s capitol building on a cold February day 18 months ago, but nearly five decades earlier in Axelrod’s boyhood home of New York.
The year was 1960. Axelrod was five, as he would recall the experience to fellow reporters when he began work on the Tribune. He had been taken by his sister to a campaign rally, where he heard the stirring oratory of another young senator who had set off on a journey to the White House: John F Kennedy.
‘David was smitten, that’s absolutely the right word,’ says George de Lama, recently retired news editor of the Tribune, who began at the paper alongside Axelrod as a summer intern and became a friend. ‘The experience of seeing Kennedy became etched in his memory – the excitement, the sense that something really important was happening.’
Eight years later, as a 13-year-old campaign volunteer, he sold lapel buttons and bumper stickers for the short-lived presidential bid of Robert, JFK’s brother.
Axelrod was born in New York’s Lower East Side and raised in Manhattan. His father was a psychologist, his mother a journalist for the city’s crusading left-wing 1940s newspaper, PM. His early years no doubt helped to give him not only an interest in politics, but a sense that politics mattered.
But they also embedded other qualities remarked upon by friends and colleagues in the political word he has inhabited all his adult life: a sometimes moody introspectiveness. ‘Soulfulness’ is the word one friend uses; a seriousness; a ‘driven’ urge to succeed; and an ‘inner toughness’.
When he was eight, his parents divorced. When he was 19 – a tragedy he mentioned publicly for the first time only in a moving Father’s Day article for the Tribune – his father committed suicide. It began: ‘My father died 31 years ago …’ and described him as my ‘best friend and hero’, an immigrant who had fled the anti-Jewish pogroms of eastern Europe, survived an ‘unhappy, failed marriage’, yet never showed any signs of sadness. It ended: ‘It has taken me more than 30 years to say out loud that the man I most loved and admired took his own life.’
By then, Axelrod had moved west, studying political science at the University of Chicago and, first as an intern and, from 1977, a staff reporter, to the Tribune. He spent nearly eight years there, becoming City Hall bureau chief and then the paper’s youngest political columnist, before leaving to join the campaign of another Illinois senator, Paul Simon.
Axelrod, says de Lama, was not only an incisive observer and reporter, but a ‘beautiful writer – which you can see in some of the Obama speeches’. But when he left the paper, ‘our editor said it was inevitable – that David loved being in the game more than writing about it’.
He founded a political consultancy and soon made his mark running the re-election campaign of Chicago’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington. He has since done work for clients ranging from the current mayor, Richard M Daley, to presidential hopefuls John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. But the Washington campaign proved a template for helping other African-American mayoral candidates, leading one commentator early in the Obama campaign to remark that Axelrod had ‘developed something of a novel niche for a political consultant – helping black politicians convince white supporters to support them’.
Yet in Obama, almost from the moment they met, Axelrod seemed to sense something on a far grander scale: a potential for what he described to friends as a ‘historic’ agent for change in American politics on the scale of the hero he had seen as a five-year-old. He helped to run Obama’s campaign for the US Senate in 2004 and was also credited with helping to craft the powerful Democratic convention speech in July 2004 that put him squarely on the national political stage.
Before the presidential election season, with Obama’s hat not yet in the ring, Axelrod told friends he was minded to take time off to produce documentary films. He had worked for two of the presumed front runners – Clinton and Edwards – and did not see how he could in good faith help one against the other.
Axelrod married a Chicago University classmate, Susan Landau, while working at the Tribune.
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13 Responses
Great!
Now we have two Jews close to Obama who will be blamed when ‘change’ is all that’s left in your pockets. Just what we need these days. More Jewish exposure.
I Don’t understand something! Is match I read comments about Obama- it almost always negative.I Vote for McCain , but now it’s over….What ever Obama doing is negative ? How Hi could be Muslim if hi went to church ? How hi went to church if hi was a Muslim ? Hi is antisemite. But took 2 Jews his administration- also bad. Dos this Guy doing somthing good ??? We are not Prophets, let’s wait, before jump on conclusions…
homell [2]
Teh fact he took jews is not bad on his part, it’s just happend to be very bad for us. These are the left of the left anti israel and pro-socialist jews.
He is not Muslim, but he most definatly has leanings towards them, as a lot of black cristians do, besides his name of course. Alot of leftists in Israel itself have very strong Mulim leanings too, as we all know.
To say the truth, while understanding liberals is difficult, understanding the leftist jews is much more difficult.
Could you imagine seeing Arafat on TV telling his people: “Don’t listen to what I say to the world media, you just kill and kill”, and then these guys send their teenage kids to meet with theirs?! or taking packages of food and not giving them to poor jews, but to Palasteniens, for years and years?!
The only thing I could think of is, that the suffering jews went through caused some of them (and here is a lot of room for Hashkafa to explain which ones…) to develop this ‘religion’ which dictates that all humans are the same, equal, and well-meaning. They believe this “Be’emunah Shleima” in any circumstance, and expect to solve all problems, and create a war-free world. That’s why they hate religion in it’s true sense. It’s an obsticle to world harmony and equality!
(The Shinuy-Lapid was the only exeption. They hated Arabs too!)
What a wild dream!
Obama is a smart guy. He keeps his friends close and his enemies even closer. What’s next David Duke Secretary of State??? 😉
Hitler types would not have taken any Jews into the government.
Obama did.
(I am now waiting to be shot. Please do it mecifully.)
although it’s great that we will have a jewish chief of staff, there’s more to rahm.
rahm was a leading figure in both clinton’s attempt at a government-controlled healthcare system and the infamous oslo accords between rabin and arafat.
and rahm’s attitude does not quite match the “hoope” and “change ” that obama has promised. i quote:
‘Emanuel is said to have “mailed a rotting fish to a former coworker after the two parted ways.” On the night after the Clinton election, “Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting ‘Dead! … Dead! … Dead!’ and plunging the knife into the table after every name.” His “take-no-prisoners attitude” earned him the nickname “Rahm-bo”.’ and before anyone can even start claiming this is “right-wing propaganda”, this is all straight from wikipedia. look it up.
The Town Crier [8]’
The fact is that since the Oslo agreement the far left is “Anti-Israel”, in every sense of the word.
As you said: “read up on things a little before you blindly spew nonsense”.
BTW David Duke is a former Grand Wizard of the KKK.
Rahm doesn’t mean a thing towards Jews or Israel. Wake up- Iran & Venuzeula love Obama, there must be a reason and it’s not because of his love for us. Obama has said- let’s speak with these guys. They did that in WW2. Once you go down the road of appeasement there is no turning back until you are already at war!
Japan’s diplomat was
still talking in DC while the planes were in the air on the way to destroy Pearl Harbor. What does Obama want to hear from them -that the West & the Israelis are the aggressors? But let’s all pretend that this presidentcy is going to be good for Yidden. How? Obama must believe that there are two sides to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Even the leftists in Israel don’t believe this, just they give into the arabs because of their warped ideology & bleeding hearts. I can’t understand why most jews voted for Obama and at the same time most Jews believe in Israel’s survival. The commonality between Obama and these Jews is that they both think giving in is the road to peace. But the big problem with this- is that they are coming from different perspectives. Everyone wants peace, but at what price? How much do you give into the arab demands? Until there is no such thing as a Jewish state, just another socialist country with muslims and Jews like France & the UK? All the jews, even the ones who didn’t vote him are looking for the silver lining in the cloud. While I believe people should be optomistic in life, this doesn’t mean putting your head in the sand. WWII was not that long ago. “People who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
The Town Crier,
I did some reading, and you’re right about Rahm, he is not the tipical left when it comes to Israel.
Nebich, another lost Jew, following a false Messiah.
Over one third of the communist revolutionarieswho brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power were Jews, members of the “Jewish Section” of the Communist party.
They were eagerly supported by many, many idealistic, naive, secularized Jews in the United States.
Lenin’s main supporter in his revolutionary drive
was Leon Trotsky, who headed his Red Army.
The Jews, including Leon Trotsky, were all purge when they were no longer needed.
although it’s great that we will have a jewish chief of staff, there’s more to rahm.
rahm was a leading figure in both clinton’s attempt at a government-controlled healthcare system and the infamous oslo accords between rabin and arafat.
and rahm’s attitude does not quite match the “change ” that obama has promised. i quote:
‘Emanuel is said to have “mailed a rotting fish to a former coworker after the two parted ways.” On the night after the Clinton election, “Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting ‘Dead! … Dead! … Dead!’ and plunging the knife into the table after every name.” His “take-no-prisoners attitude” earned him the nickname “Rahm-bo”.’ and before anyone can even start claiming this is “right-wing propaganda”, this is all straight from wikipedia. look it up.