“Shivs You Can Believe In”
By NewHampster on October 19, 2008 at 4:00 PM in Current Affairs
Is the title of a sidebar in this week’s Newsweek. It is a fairly good look at the tactics of Obama chief strategist David Axelrod, whom we know as Axelrove. The title alone says a lot. If you believe in the One™, you believe in doing anything to win.
By Richard Wolffe and Michael Isikoff | NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 11, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Oct 20, 2008
The real test for any strategist: calibrating positive and negative. How David Axelrod will maintain the ‘brand.’
IT’S a bit of wisdom that Barack Obama has cited himself, but it’s also a favorite line of his chief strategist, David Axelrod, who in turn probably got it from “The Untouchables”: you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. A brooding former Chicago Tribune reporter, Axelrod has long been drawn to candidates who deliver high-minded messages of change and reform. But he doesn’t shy from using the campaign equivalent of a shiv or a pistol.
Four months ago—when the presidential race was still in its polite phase—Axelrod conducted war games. Campaign consultants drafted a “vulnerability study,” and produced a series of mock attack ads against Obama, to get a sense of what might be coming. They tested the mock commercials in focus groups. Later they developed a series of real ads to defend Obama and
take on John McCain, including several that paint the Arizona senator as being “out of touch” on the economy. When the McCain campaign started blasting Obama on his relationship with Bill Ayers, a 1960s radical with the Weather Underground who later became a college professor, Axelrod’s team had its own attack ad ready to go: a 13-minute Web video (complete with sinister whispers and menacing shadows) about McCain’s relationship with Charles Keating, the disgraced 1980s financier.
Axelrod is actually a genius. This guy has studied Rove and Framing and developed a brand message that is selling a totally unqualified person as the saviour of the universe.
“Axelrod’s holier-than-a-hack image is … soiled by a penchant for airing negative television commercials” was the assessment of a 1987 Chicago magazine profile. In the article, titled “Hatchet Man,” Axelrod defended himself as a realist. “Now, when you put on negative ads, whipping the other guy, they always say you are debasing the process,” he told the magazine. “But if you run positive media, playing up your guy, they call you an idiot.” In any case, he said, too much nastiness can backfire: “You know, negative media is like radiation therapy. It’s hard to judge when you’re curing or killing.”
Methinks this article was written before Joe the Plumber asked Obama a simple question. A simple question who’s answer BHO couldn’t find on his portable hypnosis machine.
But if McCain keeps hitting the character issue hard, expect Obama to keep hitting back, bashing his opponent as “erratic” and “unsteady.” Also expect Obama to run flat-out: the campaign is planning to buy 30 minutes of prime time on network and cable television less than a week before the vote. By then, of course, Axelrod hopes he’ll be blowing the last wisps of smoke from the barrels of his guns.
The question now after Joe the Plumber. Did Axelrove prepare for Obama attacking himself by opening his mouth when not in front of a teleprompter?
Cross posted from my Hamster cage over at Partizane
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