He was a “winner of 1989” and a “face to watch in the 1990s.” He’s one of the “Democratic Party’s rising stars,” the man “with the mysterious magic touch.” “He is now the precinct captain,” says a Democratic regular. The Sun-Times’s Steve Neal admires his ability to frame issues and calls him “the kingmaker.”
Axelrod & Associates now boasts eight employees: seven (including Axelrod) work in an industrial-chic office on North Franklin that feels curiously unfinished, and one works in Washington. Together they seem likely to continue their rise to political prominence as the premier media manipulators of the baby-boom generation.
BM: When a reporter goes over to the enemy side–joins a campaign or takes a political job–the pure of heart all roll their eyes. Did you see being a reporter as a way to get into political work, or did your thinking change along the line?
DA: Most of them were sympathetic. Everyone’s aware of the burnout aspects of journalism. I can only remember one person, an editor at the Tribune, who said, “You’re making a terrible mistake.” And I think today he’d admit that he was the one who was mistaken. It would have been a terrible mistake if I hadn’t gone.
BM: Do you think that your political views ever strayed into your reporting? Were you ever partisan?
DA: I’m involved in every campaign, and I usually do it in conjunction with one of our associates. They handle a lot of the day-to-day communications with the campaign, and I get involved with strategic consultation, and in the writing of commercials or major speeches–or if there’s a crisis I get involved. I tend to become more deeply involved on a personal basis in the last months of a campaign. That’s basically the system that’s grown up over time, and it’s worked well.
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A good example is what George Bush did to Mike Dukakis in 1988: he dominated the debate, put Dukakis on the defensive, and really dictated the terms by which people made their decision. He not only defined himself, but he defined Dukakis–in a way that I think crippled Dukakis. So while I don’t necessarily applaud either the outcome or some of the tactics, it was sort of a textbook case of message dominance, partly because of Dukakis’s unwillingness to respond, participate in the process.
