Summary of Believer

by David Axelrod | Includes Analysis

Instaread Summaries

• Publisher: Instaread, Inc
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781683781271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Summary of Believerby David Axelrod | Includes Analysis

Preview:

David Axelrod was the son of Joseph Axelrod, who left Eastern Europe at the age of eleven, and his wife, Myril Davidson, also a daughter of Jewish immigrants. Joseph became a psychologist with a small practice that insisted on charging patients a minimal fee. He also occasionally administered psychological tests at settlement houses. Myril, on the other hand, rose to the top on Madison Avenue as an advertising executive. Their marriage ended by the time Axelrod was eight.

David Axelrod was five years old when he became fascinated by politics after seeing John F. Kennedy at a 1960 presidential campaign rally in New York. Despite JFK’s assassination, young Axelrod continued to believe in the power of politics to effect change. He became a youth volunteer for Robert Kennedy’s 1964 Senate campaign and, later, his 1968 presidential campaign.

Axelrod attended the University of Chicago. He was drawn to the city by…

PLEASE NOTE: This is an unofficial summary and analysis of the book and NOT the original book.

Inside this Instaread Summary & Analysis of Believer:

• Summary of book
• Introduction to the Important People in the book
• Analysis of the Themes and Author’s Style

About the Author

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Themes

David Axelrod bookends his memoir of his life in politics with his first president, John F. Kennedy, and his last, Barack Obama, two idealists who ran on platforms of change and then came up against the stark realities of Washington. What comes in between is a nuts-and-bolts examination of how elections work in the United States, as reflected in Axelrod’s forty years in politics, from the decline of the Chicago machine to the rise of the Tea Party. Along the way, he shares anecdotes that range from uplifting to humorous to downright weird. Axelrod also uses examples from his experience to share insights on how to run a campaign in the twenty-first century. Whatever aspect of politics he is examining, Axelrod remains a steadfast defender of the Democratic Party’s ideals and its current standard bearer, Barack Obama. He also makes his memoir a call to action for people who want more true leaders like Obama in office, rather than the doctrinaire opportunists that he finds to be dominating politics today.

Sharing an Inside Look

Axelrod uses his memoir as a platform for sharing a lifetime of anecdotes culled from Chicago and national politics, and this is one of his real strengths. Particularly hilarious is a string of encounters he had with celebrities, such as Barbra Streisand, who advised him to remember that people, who she famously sang about, are actually stupid as he ran Obama’s re-election campaign. Weirdest of all, Axelrod also describes a time when Donald Trump called him up and announced that he could fix the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and by the way, he would like to build better ballrooms for the White House.

Axelrod has a real field day bringing to life the character of Rahm Emanuel, who was widely known as a hard-driving, hard-swearing, no-holds-barred freight train of politics. From their early days on the Simon campaign, all the way to the White House, Axelrod was amazed by Emanuel’s energy and his bluntness, both of which he traced back to Emanuel’s loving, loud and incredibly achieving family. After he became Bill Clinton’s political director, Emanuel ran afoul of first lady Hillary Clinton and appeared to be on his way out, but clawed his way back into the inner circle. So, when Emanuel sought his advice on running for Congress, Axelrod told him he should go for it. Even though he privately thought Emanuel did not have a politician’s personality, the astute Axelrod figured correctly that Emanuel would win anyway because he did not know how to lose. What Axelrod adds to the portrait of Emanuel is something that not many others have written about, which is how Emanuel, like Axelrod, changed and grew over the course of his life in politics. Emanuel stopped seeing people as just poll numbers or potential donors. In his relentless campaigning, he came to know and care about them. Axelrod also writes of admiration for Emanuel’s less-chronicled loyalty and dedication to his country. Though it was widely assumed that the ambitious Emanuel wanted to be Obama’s chief of staff, Axelrod shares in his memoir that Emanuel did not want Obama to appoint him because he wanted to keep his comfortable life in Congress, rather than have to spend so much time away from his family and leave the constituents he had come to care for. Emanuel knew, however, that he could not say no to the president when called to serve, that, for Axelrod, showed the kind of character much lacking in other politicians today.

A Primer for Politicos

Along with his inside look at people in politics, in this book Axelrod provides straight-up guidelines for running political campaigns as well as examples from his own experience of what to do and what not to do, both strategically and ethically. The first step is to know pros and cons of the candidates and be comfortable supporting them. Axelrod learned this lesson early on when he worked for a self-serving young man who ran for the New York State Assembly without clear goals other than being elected. Axelrod was not happy about it, but he liked collecting the wads of money that the candidate’s wealthy father was willing to pay. The lesson was reinforced by his interaction with Rod Blagojevich, a likeable guy who did little once elected to Congress from Illinois. Axelrod realized he could not help Blagojevich run for governor after he asked Blagojevich why he wanted the job and Blagojevich had nothing, instead asking Axelrod to give him some reasons to spout when asked. Axelrod later used this lesson when helping Obama whittle down vice presidential candidates.

The next step for the operative is to test potential campaign themes in early polling, and trust what the polls are saying. Axelrod cites as a negative example the insistence of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign on listening only to polls that favored them in 2012 that led to the very public and ultimately embarrassing plans for victory celebration, not to mention serious errors in judgment along the way.

The political operative then needs to choose the two or three positive themes that play best with targeted voters who have been determined to be key to victory. The Obama campaign, for example, went for a coalition of liberals, blacks, Hispanics, women, and young people. From that, the operative needs to build a consistent overall message and keep the candidate on point at all times. Axelrod’s worst nightmare happened when Paul Simon, a kindly gentleman whose niceness had been measured as one of his strongest positives, insisted on going negative in his Senate race against a smooth Republican, Chuck Percy, who had been attacking him relentlessly. Axelrod realized, correctly, that Simon had to avoid negativity and stress his liberal steadfastness against Percy’s changing positions. Another word of advice comes here, as Axelrod painstakingly researched every single thing that Percy had done in his political career.

Not missing any detail is the next lesson Axelrod shares. He blamed himself for the controversy that dogged Obama over his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose incendiary sermons surfaced during the campaign, much to Axelrod’s surprise and dismay. Axelrod had instructed his team to get videos of Wright’s sermons so they could take immediate action to blunt their impact if it ever became an issue. However, this project was never completed and they were left unprepared when the sermons did, in fact, become an issue. He always considered himself fortunate that Obama took charge of the situation by giving a profound talk about race in America that actually ended up elevating his standing with many voters. Another cautionary tale revolves around the failure of top Democrats, Axelrod included, to realize that the proto-Tea Party was coalescing around Sarah Palin and to understand how quickly it would become a force that would change the political landscape, pushing the Republican Party to the right and away from any possible compromise or bipartisanship.

One important detail that cannot be overlooked, according to Axelrod, is that no matter how strong a candidate is, voters are looking for something different when an officeholder is leaving after many years. This can work to a new candidate’s advantage, but will deflate later election campaigns. Axelrod learned this in 2012 when he struggled to come up with a message that would work amid lowered empathy and expectations for Obama, as well as the emergence of the Tea Party.

For the political operative whose candidate does win, Axelrod advises that governing is much harder than it looks from the campaign trail, and much less exhilarating. He saw this with his client Michael White, a reformer with high hopes. White was mayor of Cleveland for years, but could not do much to stem the tide of urban decay there. Axelrod learned the same lesson first-hand in his heartburn-inducing first two years in the White House. At the same time, he shares his steadfast belief that campaigns help voters to define what the future should be, and that government still can be an agent for positive change.

The final message is to stay human, as Axelrod puts it, to look at life “through a more discerning lens, with greater understanding and less resentment.” (Epilogue, EPUB)...

Table of contents

• (Untitled)
• Important People
• (Untitled)
• Themes
• Author’s Style
• References