Q&A with Axelrod

TIME recently caught up with David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s top strategist, for an interesting interview.

If you win, what would you say was the defining moment for you on the campaign, the moment when you thought Obama could win?

Standing backstage at the convention when he was giving his speech and looking at that crowd and thinking back to the four days we'd had before where I think we clearly defined what this race was about, what he was about; I was feeling good that day. I also think, in a weird way, that Monday, whatever it was, Sept. 15th, when the financial crisis really erupted and Senator McCain said that the fundamentals of the economy were strong, that was a pretty decisive moment in this campaign. I think that kicked off a couple of weeks where you saw a real strong contrast between these two candidates and I think redounded to our efforts culminating in the debates.

This last week has been full of blockbuster speeches — enormous crowds, former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, all the fireworks. You're laying it on pretty thick.

It's the last week of the campaign. We want to see and touch and talk to as many people as possible, we want to get up on as many local news markets as possible. We have an urgent message, which is: we need people to vote; we need people to get other people to vote. I mean this is momentum time. Because we're all about galvanizing people at the grassroots.

You're leading in most polls, can John McCain still comeback and win?

I think it would be foolish to the extreme to ever suggest that a campaign is over until it's over. I like where we are positioned. I think I'd much rather be us than him, I've always believed that he's on the wrong side of history... But it's not over until it's over and the worst thing that we can do is to celebrate prematurely or assume too much.

Are you worried about a Bradley effect? (Tom Bradley was a candidate for governor of California who, despite going into Election Day ahead in the polls, lost the race. Most political analysts attributed the loss to racism that voters would not admit to when asked by a pollster, though in recent years just as many analysts have questioned the existence of the phenomenon.)

You know, I don't even know what the reality of the Bradley effect is. It was 26 years ago and I have been around and involved in politics for most of those 26 years and I've worked with many African American candidates...And my experience has been, in the last four years with Obama in Illinois and in the primaries, is that I don't really see the effect. I think the really big story on race isn't the resistance that we're meeting but how little resistance there has been. People have got bigger concerns and we've moved beyond that as a country. So I don't worry about that, what I worry about is mobilizing our voters so that when people come out they understand that in many of these battleground states the race is close. It's not enough to anticipate victory; you have to earn it.

So, are you worried about a repeat of Obama's surprise loss in the New Hampshire primary?

You know, that's exactly the thing and we have to hunker down and redouble our efforts in these last four days.

So, how's the speech writing going for Tuesday night?

As we always do, we've got two drafts going, we're prepared for any exigency. They're not done, we're just starting to think about it now... [The themes will] depend what the outcome is... [but] this has been a great journey and so much has been accomplished in this campaign. We're going to have positive things to say regardless of the outcome but, obviously, the speeches are going to be slightly different if he's assuming new responsibilities and if he's not, so we'll see.

Do you expect he'll be able to deliver a speech Tuesday night or Wednesday morning?

Well, we'll see. Again, we're not taking anything for granted. It feels like we'll know something on Tuesday night, but however long it takes we're prepared to wait.

Steve Hildebrand, Obama's ground game guru, told me a while back that you'll have eight million volunteers out on Election Day. True?

We've certainly been in contact with that many people. I don't know exactly how many have been mobilized but it's pretty impressive. Whatever happens on Tuesday, Barack said to us from the beginning that he wanted a campaign from the ground up because that's the kind of politics he believes in and that's how change happens and I think that without a shadow of a doubt we have accomplished that.

What are you going to do on Nov 5?

On Nov. 5, I'm going to depressurize and begin to try and make up to my family all the time that they have lost here. And you know what else I'm going to do? I'm probably going to shed a few tears for all the people that I have spent the last two years with day-in and day-out, 24-hours-a-day, who I won't be with in the future. Because one of the really rewarding parts of this has been the collegiality and the friendships. I mean, we're like a family and I keep thinking about the end of the movie M.A.S.H. You know, the war is over and we're all glad to be going home but there's this melancholy because we're all so close. These are relationships that have been forged in battle here and these are relationships you'll cherish for the rest of your life. So I'll be relieved, I'll be happy to get back with my family. But this'll be something that I'll always remember.

Advice for Obama

On the heels of Clinton victories in Ohio and Texas, and the prospect of increasingly negative tactics on the horizon, Andrew Sullivan offers some thoughts to the Obama campaign:

1. Obama himself should not go negative directly against the Clintons. His surrogates can and should. I, for one, am perfectly happy to splash around in the muck for a while, if it means we get more transparency from the Clintons and greater awareness among Democrats of the enormous electoral risks of allowing that couple and their warring, dysfunctional teams back into the White House. But Obama needs to keep on message about his ability to say goodbye to all that, to forge a post-Rove, post-Morris politics for a country in too much trouble to be allowed to convulse into red and blue jerking knees again. The ability to go negative and positive is crucial - more crucial now, I'd say, than it will be in the fall. Limbaugh is right about this: the Clintons are far less scrupulous than McCain.

2. Obama needs to get out there door-to-door again, talk to the working poor, engage Reagan Democrats, explain his positions on the war, and the economy and healthcare, reiterate why he can get stuff done in a way that the polarizing psycho-drama of the Clintons cannot. Save the great speeches for later. More round-tables; get on a bus; show you can work as hard as she can. Stop looking so aloof.

3. Forget about the delegate math. Stop claiming you've won already or that the Clintons cannot win. Remember that your job is to win the argument about the future of the US and the world. Make this campaign about your kind of politics rather than the Clinton-Bush style of politics. This race will not be decided by a delegate count. It will be decided by a collective decision about the better candidate some time in the next few months. Math is not an argument; it's an analysis.

4. Make a speech about the Internet slurs. Stop ducking them. Confront them. Talk about your Christian faith and your childhood exposure to Islam. Tell people about your parents. Debunk that idiotic pledge of allegiance meme. Grab the flag pin issue by the lapels. Do it all at once undefensively. Yes, it will raise the profile of every single slur. But if you rebut them candidly, gracefully, calmly, you will defuse them. You can run but you can't hide from Internet crapola. So confront it; defeat it. Right now, on these issues alone, the Obama camp is actually captive to the politics of fear. Don't be.

Meanwhile, the Fix offers “Obama's Blueprint for Victory.”

1. Math Matters: The stark reality of the remaining contests is unless Clinton can win 60 plus percent of the vote in each, she is unlikely to overtake Obama in the battle for pledged delegates. That means that at the end of the nominating season (Montana and South Dakota on June 3 now that Puerto Rico has moved to June 1), it will take a significant majority of the superdelegates for Clinton to wind up as the nominee. Those are the hard numbers and they ain't likely to change. The mistake the Obama campaign made in the runup to the Ohio-Texas Two-Step is mistaking the math for a message. The math can be a compelling argument when it comes to superdelegates ("To choose Clinton is to subvert the will of voters") but average people are not swayed by the fact that the Illinois Senator has a nearly impenetrable lead among pledged delegates.

2. Fight Back (Politely): Although Obama said on Tuesday that he was happy with his campaign's strategy leading into the Ohio-Texas elections, it's clear that Clinton's decision to hit him hard on national security paid dividends. While Obama's message of hope and transformational politics has served him well to date, the endgame in the Ohio-Texas Two-Step suggests that it may be time to fight more of a trench warfare battle from here on out. The issue for Obama, of course, is that he has promised a different sort of campaign and runs the risk, if he is perceived as going negative, of losing some of the support he has built to date. The solution? Fight back in the most polite terms possible -- praising Clinton as an able public servant and the questions being raised as legitimate avenues of inquiry that Obama himself has had to answer. Asked about the campaign's new strategy on a conference call earlier this week, chief Obama strategist David Axelrod said: "This is not a decision to go negative. This is an attempt to see to it that both campaigns are held to the same yardstick."

3. What Are You Hiding?: The first e-mail from the Obama campaign that arrived in The Fix inbox following the Ohio-Texas Two-Step called on Clinton to release her tax returns. But, on a conference call later Wednesday, Axelrod broadened the argument -- and in the process provided a window into the wider Obama strategy in the race. Axelrod called Clinton a "habitual non-discloser" and then later said that she has a "history on non-disclosure." Axelrod never mentioned Whitewater, the controversy over the Clinton White House travel office or the behind-closed-doors health care commission that Clinton chaired in the 1990s. He didn't have to. Expect Obama and his surrogates to trumpet the message of Clinton as secretive over the coming weeks -- using her unwillingness to release her tax returns as a symbol of a broader pattern of non-disclosure during her years in political life. Clinton's campaign has effectively leveraged the good times of her husband's presidency to their benefit; Obama will now seek to convince voters that not everything was rosy during the 1990s.

4. Guilt the Press: Clinton effectively argued with the press over the final week before March 4, repeatedly suggesting that Fourth Estate was going easy on Obama. In politics, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; by Wednesday, the Obama campaign was urging the media to more closely examine the claims of the Clinton campaign. "We are going to ask you guys to do your jobs," said Axelrod. Will this reverse-guilt tripping of the press work for Obama in the coming months?

5. Electability is Essential: With Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) as the official Republican nominee, Obama and his campaign will urge voters to think about the remainder of the primary race through the frame of the November election. In his speech on Tuesday night, Obama briefly congratulated Clinton but then devoted a considerable chunk of his speech to the differences between he and McCain -- a subtle signal that Obama is still preparing for a general election race. In the days following Tuesday's votes, his campaign also sought to re-invigorate the storyline that Republicans so hate Clinton that they will be motivated -- regardless of the national political environment -- to turn out and vote against her in the fall. "There's a reason Rush Limbaugh was urging Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary Clinton in Texas," said Axelrod earlier this week. As we wrote in the Clinton blueprint, the greatest fear among Democrats is that they will somehow miss a golden opportunity to take back the White House in 2008. Clinton is pushing hard on the idea that Obama's relative dearth of foreign policy experience makes him a risk. Obama will counter with the idea that Clinton is so divisive that nominating her represents the far greater risk.