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Main Man: Axelrod and Obama before addressing voters in Erie, Pa.
OBAMA

Shivs You Can Believe In

The real test for any strategist: calibrating positive and negative. How David Axelrod will maintain the 'brand.'

 

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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.

People who know Axelrod were not surprised by that level of preparation. He's got a long history of hard-hitting campaigns. Jill Long Thompson, who won an Indiana congressional seat in 1989 with help from Axelrod, says he taught her the value of going negative. "I was raised in a United Methodist family, where you're told if you don't have something positive to say, you don't say it," says Thompson. "His take is that you have to say it, point out those not-nice things when it's the truth." One of the more effective ads Axelrod produced in that campaign portrayed the GOP candidate, Dan Heath, as a cardsharp not to be trusted by voters. Axelrod's style "bordered on outrageous," says Heath, now a judge in northeast Indiana. "It relied on an ignorant public that doesn't have time to check the ads."

"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."

The real test for any strategist is how to calibrate the positive and the negative. With Obama up by 11 points (52 to 41 percent) in the new NEWSWEEK Poll, Axelrod wants to maintain the "brand"—a candidate who can appeal in red and blue states, who can pull people together, who aims for a more noble sort of politics—while also showing that Obama is tough enough to govern in a dangerous and uncertain world. Change is good; "Obambi" is not. The smart approach for any Democrat at this stage—with the economy crashing around an already unpopular Republican White House—may be to play it safe. 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.

With Sarah Kliff

© 2008

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Member Comments

  • Posted By: Krohn @ 11/02/2008 11:14:37 PM

    The Wall Street crisis was planned the night of Obama's meeting at Bill Ayres home to put Obama in The White House. Together they put a beautiful plan into place.

    This Strategy was first elucidated in the 1966 issue of 'The Nation' Magazine by a pair of radical Socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

    David Horowitz summarizes it as:

    "The strategy of forcing political change through an orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of Capitalism by overloading the Government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
    unquote

    Obama begin with ACORN by funneling millions into their organization. He then trained ACORN to stage protests in banks to force them to issue risky loans or they would be threatened to face racial charges. ACORN was trained to intimidate financial institutions into giving ???Ninja??? loans to people with NO assets, NO job and NO income, who couldn???t afford these loans.

    That caused the housing bubble two years ago it was by ACORN's actions they were able to destroy our credit system.

    As this played out, D-Barney Frank and D-Chris Dodd were able to cover up the millions of improvident loans to these bad risky house buyers. And Barney Frank and his chums successfully were able to block all of President Bush's attempts to put a rein on this problem.

    So Fannie & Freddie was forced to purchase all these failed subprime mortgages.

    Then both Frank and Dodd denied that there were any problems, and refused the Bush Admin. requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and they were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the 'minute they failed'.

    Democrats then blamed Bush saying it happened on his watch knowing it would hurt the Republican Party in the election setting it up that Barack Obama could use this to his advantage.

    Karl Marx once compared a Revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface.

    Barack Obama is that Marxist mole !

  • Posted By: wendydk @ 11/01/2008 7:37:38 PM

    What is most troubling in todays political climate is the promotion of hatred as a philosophy. The emergence of an ultraconservative dogma relies increasingly on the encouragement of mass hostility aimed at one group in particular - Americans with progressive political views. Liberals are spoken of with the kind of dripping contempt and virulent hostility that used to be associated with racism and sectarian religious strife. Liberals are viewed not fellow Americans citizens concerned with the future of their country, but as ideological enemies that need to be destroyed - and eaten if possible. This view is fundamentally anti-American.

    This right-wing sect manifests a complete lack of empathy toward other Americans whom it defines as its ideological enemies. Its core beliefs are absolutely impervious to reason and are unleashing ugly and violent impulses. What makes their zeal so dangerous for our country is their willingness to do serious damage to our precious American Democracy in their quest for absolute power.

    -The Assault on Reason (2007)

    SOUND FAMILIAR? IT DOES TO ME AND I AM SICK OF IT. IF YOU ARE TOO, VOTE OBAMA/BIDEN ???08

    www.republicansforobama.com

  • Posted By: wendydk @ 10/31/2008 11:05:43 PM

    How to bring down a democracy: the steps toward totalitarian rule, in the order followed by Hitler and the Nazi Party SEE IF THEY SOUND FAMILIAR.

    1. Improvise an attack (or take advantage of an attack) on the country
    2. Declare the country under attack by an enemy; real or improvised
    3. Force legislation that limits civil liberties and gathers broad powers unto government
    4. Brand dissenters and peacemakers as unpatriotic and browbeat them into submission
    5. Keep the fear factor high to make the public easier to manage
    6. Institute massive propaganda campaigns using state-controlled no-longer-free media and fear of government retribution
    7. Law enforcement and government personnel are used to spy on, control and break dissent 7. Institute the equivalent of a national homeland security department, overseen by one person with unlimited powers
    8. Confiscate all firearms from the citizenry
    9. Institute the mass murder and imprisonment of any who resist the new ideology.
    10. Launch pre-emptive strikes into other countries in an attempt to spread the new ideology

    Sound familiar? It should, its not only the direct path of Hitlers rise to power, but also parallels the events starting with and following 9/11. President Bush was very familiar with the game plan, as his Grandfather and his Grandfathers father-in-law were supporters of Hitler and Nazism, both before and after the war.

    Of course, theyve skipped a couple of the items on the list, but theyll get to them if theyre allowed to remain in power, because it will be the only way for them to retain power.

    The Reichstag Fire: the funeral pyre of German democracy parallels 9/11 and the loss of American civil liberties

    http://www.essortment.com/all/nazireichstag_rghx.htm

    THE BEST REASON TO VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA THIS ELECTION YEAR

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