 Good evening! What a nice crowd tonight. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Elizabeth Christian, I'm president of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, and I really want to welcome you to the LBJ Library. You're in for a treat tonight. Our program is an evening with David Axelrod. Mr. Axelrod will be interviewed by Mark Uptegrove, director of the library, and an esteemed presidential scholar and author himself. David Axelrod, who just celebrated his 60th birthday three days ago, and he celebrated by going on Face the Nation, I think, is a political consultant and director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. He was a chief campaign advisor to Barack Obama during the campaign for the presidency in 2008. After Obama's election, Axelrod was appointed senior advisor to the president, and Axelrod left the White House position in early 2011 and became the senior strategist for Obama's successful re-election campaign in 2012. His recently released memoir, Believer, My 40 Years in Politics, is both hitting bestseller lists and stirring controversy. Within seemingly moments of its publication, Mr. Axelrod was in the news. He writes in his book that Mr. Obama was not being truthful when he said he opposed same-sex marriage in 2008. I'm sure Mark Uptegrove may have a question or two about that up his sleeve tonight. Please help me welcome David Axelrod and Mark Uptegrove to our stage. Well, David, welcome to Austin. Great to be here. Great to be here at this site. You've read the book, so one of the seminal events of my childhood was to attend the inauguration of Lyndon Johnson in 1965. So to come here and talk about this book is really meaningful to me. We're delighted to have you. And we brought some decidedly unchicago weather. Yes. I've been very lucky on this tour. I got into Boston in between two blizzards. I left Chicago just before the sub-zero temperatures hit and headed out to California. So I'm and we're going to Dallas tomorrow and apparently the ice will have cleared by the time we arrived there. So I'm doing well so far. You got 70 degrees and a full house. This is Texas Hospitality here. Yeah. Well, I've been feeling it. Thank you. Thank you. There's a photograph of you attending LBJ's 1965 inaugural. But you write in the book, you start in the book by talking about a seminal experience, which is you in New York City, Stuyvesantown, perched on a mailbox, watching then candidate, John F. Kennedy, work toward the presidency. Talk about that moment. Well, I grew up in a place called Stuyvesantown in New York City. It was a housing development that was built for returning war veterans. And my mother, when my mother was at work, there was a woman who took care of me, an African American woman named Jesse Berry, a really spectacular person. Classic story came up from the South, very little formal education, took care of other people's kids so that she could take care of her own. And she kind of raised me and she heard that John F. Kennedy was coming to Stuyvesantown. This was 10 days before the 1960 election, which tells you how long ago it was that a Democrat was campaigning in New York 10 days before the election. But New York was a battleground state then, which just shows you that states can become battleground states usually. And so I went out with her, she took my hand, she put me on this mailbox in 20th Street, which was this huge boulevard generally filled with lots of cars, was now filled with people. And this very charismatic man, red-haired man jumped up on a platform and started speaking, and his voice was booming off of the buildings and everybody was paying rapt attention. And I was five, I didn't understand everything he was saying, but I did understand that this somehow was very, very important that he was talking about the country and the future. And that was it. I was hooked and I started becoming, you know, I followed everything about him, the election, and when his brother Robert ran for the Senate in 1964 in New York, I was out there working for him, not as a strategist but as a handing out leaflets. And the following year, just to show you that I'm not a died-in-the-world partisan, I broke with the Democratic Party when I was 10. And I went to work for John Lindsay, who was running for mayor of New York, who was a liberal Republican, and you must have like a museum of natural history here or something. They probably have one of those stuffed in on display. But in that same year when I was 10, I had a cousin who had worked on the Kennedy campaign in Colorado, and she came with a lot of the Kennedy people to Washington. She knew a lot of people in politics and she got tickets for the inauguration. And it was an incredible trip because I not only saw the inauguration, but she took me to meet a Senator Abe Rybakov of Connecticut. And I stood in his office and maybe you'll be here one day. And I thought, oh, this was better than, you know, that was like Disneyland for me when I was 10 years old. And I met Byron White. Was there white? Was there white? Yeah. And I was, honestly, I was as interested in his football trophies as I was in it, which shows I wasn't a complete geek when I was 10 years old. But yeah, so it was a, it was really an incredibly exciting time. And the world was so vital then, you know. You didn't question whether politics mattered because so much of consequence was happening in those years. And it was clear that who the leader was and who your leaders were made a difference. So how did you wind up becoming a campaign strategist? You had gone into it. Well, I took a detour. Right. I took a detour. You know, I went, I moved to Chicago to go to the University of Chicago. And I went for three reasons. One was, I knew it was a great university. The second was one was that it was 600 miles or more from New York. So I knew my parents wouldn't surprise me with a visit. And then the last reason was that it was a great political town. And, you know, they're just in 68 in that tumultuous democratic convention, historic for its calamity. The last of the great big city machines was still alive there. Richard J. Daly was still the mayor of Chicago. And there was this budding black independent political movement that was very much centered around where the University of Chicago was. My disappointment was when I got to the University of Chicago, where I now work and run an institute of politics, I couldn't at that time find anybody who wanted to talk about anything that happened after the year 1800. And so in order to set my interest in politics, I started writing for local newspapers. I got a job in the summer back at one in New York. I knocked on 75 doors, got a gig at a local newspaper where I could do everything. And I went back to Chicago and used the clips to get myself a job as a political columnist at a local newspaper that was foolish enough to hire a 19-year-old to write about it. And that was the beginning of a career in journalism. I spent eight years at the Chicago Tribune. And I was the political writer there and a city hall bureau chief and columnist. And then in 1984, started getting a little concerned about the direction journalism was taking. The wall between the news side and the business side had broken down. They were very much concerned about their margins more than they had been, less about the stories. I loved being a reporter, but I didn't know how long I was going to be able to do it the way I wanted to do it. And a fellow named Paul Simon came along. Some of you may remember him. He was a congressman from Southern Illinois, kind of the Orville Redenbacher of Illinois politics, had big horn-rimmed glasses and bow tie. And later a senator. He was running against Charles Percy, who was a three-term incumbent senator. Percy had been elected as kind of a moderate Republican, but all of his peers were losing Clifford Case from New Jersey, Jacob Javits from New York. And now the Reagan Revolution was on and he was worried about hanging on to a seat and he started shifting his positions on a number of questions, including things like school prayer. And it was very noticeable. Paul was the quintessential liberal. And it was a really interesting race because Ronald Reagan carried the state by, I don't know, 90,000, by hundreds and hundreds, 500,000 votes. And Paul won by about 88,000 votes. But Paul, in a sense, when the book, my book is called Believer, Paul was a guy who inspired you to believe. And that's why I was attracted to him. He had purchased a newspaper in downstate Illinois when he was 19 years old and used it to crusade against this crime syndicate down there. And when he couldn't find anybody to run against them for office, he ran against them and got a seat in the legislature, crusaded for civil rights in the Illinois legislature in the 1950s. And his district was closer to Little Rock than Chicago. And he was a big force for political reform, which was almost as courageous in the Illinois legislature then and now. And, you know, so he was, my thought was if I was going to switch over to politics, then I wanted to go with someone who I would be proud of and who would inspire me. And Paul did that. Right. In 1992, you were asked by a friend. A friend, yes. To meet a young man named Barack Obama. Yes. First Barack Obama I had ever met. When you asked why she wanted you to meet him, she replied because I think he might be the first black president. Yes. And as I always say, whenever I go to the track now, I take the same woman with me. She obviously has a gift for spotting the winners. What were your first impressions? You did not come away with the impression that he might necessarily be a president. What were your first impressions? No, but I was very impressed by him. As I said in the book, I didn't walk away humming hail to the chief. But I didn't have the vision that she had. But what was clear was that he was a guy who really believed in public service as a calling. He had been the president of the Harvard Law Review, could have chosen any number of opportunities, any law firm in the country, any corporation would have paid him handsomely to come to work for them. Instead, he came back to Chicago to lead a voter registration drive-in and he went to work for a small civil rights firm. And it was very clear to me that he was well motivated. I always say that the world of politics divides into two categories. There's the larger category of people who run for office because they want to be something. And then there's a smaller, more admirable category of folks who run for office because they want to do something. There's some overlap. I mean, I don't want to be, you know, but it was clear that this guy felt that public service was a way to perform service and to do something and to help make the world a little bit better, communities a little bit better, the country a little bit better. And he was very serious about it. What did you come to believe that he could be the president of the United States? Well, that was a step by step process. You know, I learned a lot about him in that I went to work for him in 2002. It was an interesting time in both our lives. I'd known him for 10 years. He had been a state senator, done a great job as a state senator, gotten a lot of notice there. Then he ran an ill-conceived race for Congress in 2000, and he narrowly lost by 30 points. And so by 2002, you know, he was really facing kind of an existential moment as to whether he could continue in politics. He was deeply in debt at a young family. And I was going through my own existential crisis because I had been in political consulting then for 17 years or something. And one of my former clients whose name you may recognize, named Rob Blagojevich. I always pause here to allow for that reaction. I worked for him when he ran for Congress when he was a young legislator, and I liked him. You know, he seemed to have a real sense of advocacy. He was funny and bright. And I worked for him. But then he came to me in 2001, so he wanted to run for governor of Illinois. And I said, well, why? And he said, well, you can help me figure that out. And I said, that's not what I do. If you can't tell me, then I can't help you explain to others why you want to be governor. And I don't think you should run. But he ran and he hired a very proficient political consulting firm, media consulting firm, and they ran a state-of-the-art campaign. And he ran as a reformer, which is kind of ironic, because the previous governor also went to prison. So not painting a great picture of the land of Lincoln. And so by the summer of 2002, it was clear he was going to win. The Republican was a fine man, a conservative guy who I didn't agree with on some things, but a really good public servant named Jim Ryan. But he was, it was like watching Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. I mean, Rod was just running circles around him. And I was depressed because I thought, well, this is the level of cynicism that this business requires. Maybe I should think about doing something else. And at that moment, Barack Obama called me and said he wanted to run. He was thinking of running for the U.S. Senate. There was a Republican in place and there were going to be a lot of Democrats vying for the seat. Republican ultimately didn't run. But Obama was not a top tier candidate. There were other people who were talking to me about working for him who had more money, better name recognition. But I thought about it and I talked to my wife, Susan, about it. And I said, you know, if I could help Barack get elected to the U.S. Senate, that'd be something I could be proud of for the rest of my life. And we started on this journey together. And so I started learning about, I'm winding my way back to your question, by the way, if you can remember what it was. I do. I started learning about him during that campaign. The first big lesson I learned came in October of 2002. He was not yet an announced candidate, but I was informally advising him. And the Senate, the U.S. Senate, was voting on the authorization for the use of military force in Iraq. And almost every candidate, Republican and Democrat, were for it. And Barack got invited by the same woman who introduced me to him to speak at an anti-war rally in Chicago. And we talked about it and there were some people who were, others who advised him not to go because it was, the issue was fraught and so on. But he said, you know, I'm against it. I think it's a bad idea. So I'm going to go. So he went, it was a small rally, maybe a thousand people lightly covered. But he jotted down a speech the night before that if you go on Google now and find was probably the most prescient analysis before the vote of why we shouldn't go. You know, and he talked about a war of undetermined cost, undetermined length and undetermined consequences. He talked about unleashing sectarian strife in the region and making America a fulcrum for extremists. And all of that came to pass as we know. So, but I was so impressed with how this young state senator looked at that issue and spoke to it. In fact, years later when he was running for president, I was searched everywhere to see if anybody had any film of it. And it was such a non-event in the big scheme of things at the time that, you know, I think there was 14 seconds of news footage of it. So if I had had that woman's Betty Lou's prescience, I would have had a film crew there. But, and then so that was one thing. The next thing was he would travel down state in Illinois. As I pointed out, it's a long state and very diverse and the southern Illinois is very much the south, not the north. And I got a call from a young kid who was traveling with him who's they were at a VFW hall not far from where Paul Simon's district was. And the kid said, gee, we had a great reaction here. And I was surprised. And I that night I because Obama would check in every night. I said, I heard you had a great trip. And he said, yeah. And I said, boy, I'm really surprised. So why? I said, well, I know a black guy named Barack Obama from southern Illinois. I thought it might be challenging, you know. And he said, no, you know, these people are they're just like my grandparents from Kansas. You know, we talk about my grandfather who served in Patton's army and my grandmother who was a Rosie the Riveter. And, you know, we really have a good time. And I realized this is a guy who felt comfortable in any room. He could be in a VFW hall in southern Illinois, an inner city church, a Tony parlor in the suburbs, and feel very comfortable with whomever he encountered. And that was a revelation. And then the third was, and you ask, and I'm getting to it now, when I thought he could be president, when that thought process started. I mean, I had intimations of it because of our discussions about issues. I was working, I was on an ill-fated mission there working for John Edwards in 2004. I write about that and my disappointments there. But I also wrote about the fact that, you know, Edwards always seemed to want the cliff notes. And on all the issues we were talking about. And Obama wanted to drill three and four levels deep. And that impressed me. But then came the convention in 2004. You know, we got this call that they wanted him to do the keynote speech. And as soon as the call came, he said, I know what I want to speak about. I want to talk about my story as part of the larger American story. And in the subsequent weeks, he was scribbling notes down, you know, while he traveled around campaigning. When he was in the state Senate, in between votes, he'd go into the men's room and he'd be writing in there, which much freaked a lot of people out. And then he pulled it all together in a speech and sent me a draft. And I was on vacation with my wife. And this came as a fax, and I'm handing her one page. By the third page, I thought, this could be one of the great convention speeches of all time. And when he finally gave it in Boston, I was on the floor with Robert Gibbs on the floor of the convention. And like halfway through, I saw the reaction of everyone around me. And, you know, they were totally engaged and, you know, crying and cheering. And I said to Robert, you know, this guy's life just changed forever. And maybe our lives have changed forever, too. Because I had been in the hall in San Francisco in 1984 when Mario Cuomo gave his keynote speech. And I saw what happened with his career. You know, he immediately was propelled into the presidential discussion and so on. So I thought that, you know, there was a future there. I never thought it was going to be in 2008. We only came to that late in 2006. And even then, I told Obama that I was worried that he, you know, A, I didn't know how he would take the constant. I said, I don't know whether you're Floyd Patterson or Mohammed Ali. I don't know if you can take a punch. And because he had been, we were running in the Senate race against through a series of calamities on the Republican side. They imported Alan Keyes from Maryland to run against him. And the theory that somehow we had a charismatic African-American candidate. So they could, if they could import their own, that somehow they could contend with him. And Keyes was, you know, an eccentric character. And we were always 40 and 50 points ahead. And yet he got under Obama's skin like nobody had ever seen. So I was kind of worried about that. And I also was worried. I said to him, I don't know if you're pathological enough to run for president. And I say that I'm fully aware that I'm in the Johnson Library Museum. But, you know, there's a certain drive associated with running for president. I said to him, I've worked with, like I think at one time, five of my former clients or clients were running for president in 2008. And I said, I know these folks and a lot, you know, I know they're going to pull themselves out of bed at four in the morning because they have to be president. I said, I don't sense that in you. And he said, no, I, you know, actually being Barack Obama, it turns out to be a pretty good gig in and in and of itself. And he said, I like being with my family. I like being with my friends. I like flopping down and watching a football game. But he said, if you're going to do public service, do it at the highest level you can and have the greatest impact you can. He said, if I get in, I'm competitive enough. And I will do what I need to do. And eventually he did. It was a hard adjustment. But you learn about someone, you can never predict how someone's going to handle the pressures of a presidential campaign. And I learned a lot about him along the way. So there were things that happened during that campaign that tested him in ways that left me thinking, boy, this guy really could be president. And I think people saw him pass those tests, which is why they ultimately were willing to let a guy who had been in the state senate four years earlier become the president of the United States. And not only did you learn that he could take a punch, but in his campaign office, he had a photograph of Muhammad Ali. Standing over Sunny List. Yeah. Yeah. So he identified. But one of the, one of the times, you know, the times that I learned about him were almost always in our down times. And that's when you find out about who people are. One was when we lost, you know, the New Hampshire primary to Hillary Clinton. You know, we had won the Iowa caucuses. It was a magical thing, miraculous, unbelievable event, you know, just beautiful night, you know, filled with innocence and hope. And there was this sense that five days later was the New Hampshire primary. The momentum was inexorable. And we would just, you know, we would just come into the state like a conquering army and then dictate the terms of surrender. And that's, unfortunately, that's the way we campaign. You know, instead of being close to the ground like we had been in Iowa, you know, we were kind of presumptuous. Whereas Hillary, who had been presumptuous, was now close to the ground. Right. And she stung us there. And, you know, when the results came in, the last poll we had seen of our own, we were eight points ahead the Sunday before the Tuesday primary. So the first precincts came in from Manchester and our New Hampshire coordinator, state directors, looking at them, and he just turns ghost white. And so what's up? He said, well, if these numbers are right, we're not going to win. And it turns out we lost by two points and Pluff and Gibbs and I were kind of trying to decide who was going to go up and tell Obama. And we finally agreed to do it together. We went up, he was up having dinner with Michelle. And we knocked on the door because it was bad enough that we had to tell him, but we didn't want to tell her. So we asked him to come out into the hall, which I think was a clue to him. That maybe something was amiss. And he came out to the hall and we said, we're going to come up a little short and we had a discussion as to what happened and why. And he leaned against the wall and kind of smiled whanley and said, well, it's just going to go on for a while, isn't it? The next day we were in Boston, we drove to Boston in the morning for a lunch and that was supposed to be this triumphant victory celebration fundraiser. And everybody there was just stunned. And Obama stood up, not a note in front of him. And he said, I know a lot of you are disappointed and surprised by what happened in New Hampshire. But I've been thinking about this. And he said, we were a little bit too much like Icarus flying too close to the sun. And he said, you know, change is never easy. Change is hard. You've got to work for it. And he said this was a message to us that we got to get back close to the ground and fight this out and grind it out and make the case for why it's important. And then he made this, he went on to talk about why it was important. Everybody was on their feet. But to see a guy rally like that, and it happened again after this state of Texas dispatched us in March. Texas and Ohio had primaries the same day. We thought that if we could beat, and the Bill Clinton said if we don't win both, then she's going to have to get out of the race. And we poured $20 million into those weeks. We took a lot of shortcuts and campaign in ways that I thought were probably unworthy of us in retrospect. And in terms of like male pieces and snarky male pieces and the kind of politics that we had sort of disdained. And we lost. And we were flying back to Chicago and he says I want to see everybody in the office tomorrow afternoon. And we don't know. We're like going to a sentencing hearing, we think. And he comes walking with a yellow legal pad, which was his custom when things weren't going well. He'd call a meeting and he'd have a yellow legal pad with meticulous notes on it. He come in and sit down and he said I can think of a dozen things I could have done better in the last few weeks. And I bet everybody in this room can think of a dozen things they could have done better in the last few weeks. So I'm not here to yell at you guys. I'm not here to fix blame. He said I want to figure out what we can do better down the line. And we had this great discussion for two hours. He got up, walked, started walking out of the room. He turned around and he said now I'm not yelling at you guys. I want you to know that. And then he turned and started walking and turned around against it. He said of course after blowing 20 million dollars in two weeks. He said I could yell at you. He said but I'm not yelling at you. And he laughed and left and you know everybody would have run through a wall. But every time we were down he picked us up. And the biggest one and I'm feeling guilty now because you have that look like you put a quarter in and you're getting more than the three plays you paid for. You're the one that came to hear not me. But the whole Reverend Wright incident was such a revealing incident episode to me as you'll remember ABC News had put together a compendium of tape and some other outlets as well of Reverend Wright, the president's then pastor from some of his sermons and you know they've gone through 30 years of sermons. They found some very incendiary things and they put it together in like his greatest hits reel and put it on national television and all hell broke loose. And this was on a Thursday and the president was in what they call a voter drama in the center where you know just a series of votes that went to one in the morning and you know we tried to convey to him the ferocity of this but it was hard to do. And then he came back to Chicago the next day and he ultimately did some cable TV interviews and he got a feel for just how pernicious this was and dangerous and he called David Pluff and me that night it was a Friday night and he said I want to make a speech I want to do a speech on race and Reverend Wright and race in our politics and and I want to do it I think I have to do this no later than Tuesday morning and he said and I've got to write it and so he was scheduled the campaign all day Friday I'm sorry all day Saturday we had a film shoot on Sunday and Monday he was scheduled the campaign in Pennsylvania because we were now in the Pennsylvania primary and we couldn't cancel any of it and so when are you going to write it he said don't worry about it just set it up I know what I want to say so we set it up for the Constitution Center in Philadelphia on the theory that if you're going to go down go down on a big stage and you know Saturday night he dictated an outline to John Favreau his very fine speech writer John put it in some order but Sunday night the president or then Senator Obama began working on it after he put his kids to bed worked on until like two or three in the morning and we left at eight for Philadelphia he can't and the speech was half done campaigns all day till 9 30 at night we arrive at the hotel in Philadelphia and he goes to his room to continue to write and I went to the bar to drink honestly because it seemed like the prudent thing to do where I found like a lot of the national press corps who had descended like locusts on Philadelphia on the theory that this could be the end of the Obama campaign and I went to sleep and I woke up at two or three in the morning and I looked at my blackberry and I stood in the dark reading the speech he had sent the speech just a short while earlier and I'm scrolling through and scrolling through and it was a little like when I read that convention speech I was just blown away by the power of it and the honesty of it and I emailed them back and said well this is why you should be president and the next morning when he was going to make the speech you know the Constitution Center was filled with supporters and also the media the supporters were very tense everybody was tense and and Obama said to me in the green room you know he said I'm going to make this speech and either people will accept it or they won't accept it and if they don't accept it then I won't be president of the United States but at least I'll have said what needs to be said and he said and that's worth something he said so you know take it easy and he went out there and you know of course the speech ended up not just putting a lot of that to rest but it really was a presidential level occasion and speech and people got a chance to see how he handled you know pressure and so you know on those days I really began to see the grace under fire that you need to not just to get elected president but to be president. We remember him for that brilliant speech in Philadelphia but we also associate his campaign with the catchphrase yes we can. Yes. A line that you crafted and that was almost rejected by the candidate himself but for his very prudent wife talk about that. Yeah it was the first ad we did in two it was actually 2004 it was the first ad we did for the Senate we didn't have very many ads and this ad was about the barriers that he had overcome in his life the improbable barriers that he had overcome in his life and both in his personal life and as a legislator and it finished with the lines and now they say we can't change Washington I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message to say yes we can and I loved the line yes we can because it was about us and not him you know it was positive and optimistic at a time of great incitism we were saying you know what we actually can make a difference but he got to the end of the first reading of the script and he said yes we can yes we get is that too corny and like my heart stopped you know because I really loved it and I made the case for why we should do it and he he's still kind of not sure and he turns to Michelle who was sitting on the steps in this home where we were shooting the ad because she had come to see him shoot his first ad and she just had her hand on her her chin on her hands and he said Mish what are you thinking she just kind of slowly shook her head and said not corny and so he said great let's go you know so all my high-priced advice was not worth all that much but he had a lot of faith in her and I always I always you know years later I saw some young person in Terrier Square holding up a sign saying yes we can too and I was thinking thank god Michelle Obama was in that room that day or this guy would have had nothing to put on his sign you talk about the Obamas were here last April and their their telephones throughout our exhibit that revealed the conversations of that President Johnson had throughout the course of his presidency and Mrs. Obama listened to a recording of President Johnson talking to Ladybird Johnson in which she's critiquing what was his second press conference and she gives him a B plus and she put the phone down she says Oberoks got to hear this and he picked up the phone and said some things never change talk about the relationship between the Obamas they seem exceptionally close and she seems to be his most trusted advisor yes and and frankly I'd be surprised if she gave him a B plus on his press conferences she's a hard grader I think they've they've got a you know they've got a great relationship he really has you know she's an extraordinary story in her own right she's raised on the south side of Chicago her father was a city worker at the water filtration plan and he had multiple sclerosis at an early age and you know drag he dragged himself out of bed every day for 35 years or something because he wanted he wanted something better for his kids and he you know he you know they bought a home they they end she and her brother ended up at Princeton and they came from a neighborhood where very few people went to college and she excelled wherever she went at Harvard Law School she went to work for the city of Chicago for Mayor Daley and then she headed something called public allies which was a an organization that encouraged public service volunteerism and so on and you know so he he just had max he has maximum high regard for her and her judgment and it really means something to him I also felt and I wrote that he you know Michelle made great sacrifices for his career he she was a very accomplished professional she had a job at the University of Chicago hospitals when he has community relations vice president when he decided to run for president and she ended up giving up that job and moving in her whole her own sort of structure as someone who really prized her independence and he was always sensitive to that and the fact that for many of the years that he was in politics in the state senate and in the US senate he was not home a lot so and that's something that I identified with because as I wrote in the book I you know I visited a lot of sacrifices on my own family which are you know that was one of the hardest parts of the book was confronting that so for all these reasons you know there's a closeness there and she is you know very frank with him and but he he he believes and I think he's right that she has this very keen sense of how real people think as opposed to you know the conventional wisdom bubble in Washington because of the way she was raised she's very commonsensical and there were more than a few times that he'd come into meetings in the oval office and tell us what Michelle had said the night before and they were almost always sensible things that helped frame discussions right what is the most indelible moment to you in that historic 2008 campaign well one of them was that speech in Philadelphia one of them was that Iowa the winning the Iowa caucuses another was when we won the South Carolina primary because there's a lot of tension swirling around that primary it was we had you know we were locked in a very she had won New Hampshire we had split in Nevada and now South Carolina was really important and because of the large african-american population there there was an expectation that we would win that primary but there was also a sense that you know white voters could coalesce against us that was at least the conventional wisdom and there was a misguided poll NBC had the day before the South Carolina primary that showed our white support collapsing and there was there was a lot of speculation you know now our folks were very confident but but it was there was this Paul hanging over and there was President Obama Senator Clinton had this very vituperative debate in Myrtle Beach that week Bill Clinton had done some edgy campaigning and there was a lot of back and forth around that and so by the time the primary rolled around it just there the the heavy kind of cloud of race hung over the primary and I was sitting with with Michelle Obama actually doing some filming waiting for the exit polls to come back and I looked at my blackberry and I've gotten some of them and I'm staring at it and I'm saying like oh my god I can't believe this and then she's like what and I said no this can't be right she's what what and I said it says we're gonna win by 30 points she hit me so hard she said don't ever do that to me again but there was something incredibly great about that night because you know this there was this multiracial audience in a state that been you know sort of a cradle of the Confederacy and and people had resoundingly rejected that you know the conventional wisdom so that was a very meaningful time and then ultimately Grant Park you can't ignore that and the thing that I remember about that and that whole night was something that people who have worked with President's Elect probably all since which is how almost in an instant something changes you know when I went in to see Senator Obama after the results were in in his hotel suite there was a sobriety about him there wasn't there wasn't a lot of high-fiving and fist pumping in the air there was this sobriety as if he you know was taking in the responsibilities that he had just won the right to assume and they were and he knew you know we didn't know the full extent of it but he knew how heavy the load would be because we were already you know sort of sliding into the into the economic crisis and you know it was to see a guy who I had known for so long assume this mantle almost instantly was a palpable thing and you know if you're an if you appreciate history there that was a moment and I saw it in the park that night when he spoke that suddenly this wasn't a campaign anymore he was the leader of the country right the art of campaigning is very different than the art of governing so what was the biggest adjustment for you when you moved into the White House well first of all I had not had a kind of you know I've been a newspaper reporter for eight years and I was you know I was good enough at it so they didn't really care where I was I mean I could file from bars bowling alleys you know wherever as long as I got the story and a lot of times I got the story in bars and bowling alleys but and then I was a political consultant and I ran my own business so I'd never actually had a desk job and I'd never been really part you know when I was a reporter that we were like paid iconoclass we were they've relished the fact that we all challenged authority and so on but you know I was actually reluctant in some ways to go to Washington and be part of the government because I knew that my you know I would have to restructure my life in a big way and I said to the president elect you know I've constructed my whole life so that I could tell anybody I wanted to to go let's say jump in the lake for purposes of this event and I said you really can't say that to the president of the United States and he said no you really can't but he said but these are all the reasons why you know you've worked all your life for the and you know you he was very persuasive but at the end of it he said and one other thing you can't tell me that just don't do it in front of anybody else so that was one adjustment the other is you know there is nothing quite like working in the White House at any time but to come there when we did was you know we were first of all a triage unit dealing with an economy and we were told that there was a one in three chance of a second great depression so every day we were involved in trying to save the economy and taking vital signs and pushing buttons to try and and reverse the slide and then you know we were involved with two wars raging a terrorist threat I wrote in the book about the night before the inauguration I got a call from Rahm Emanuel who was our incoming chief of staff and he said call me on a landline and I did and he said we've been with Chertoff and bush homeland security people all day and there's a bonafide threat a concern about an attack on the inauguration and we think it's serious enough that the president-elect should have a short statement in his pocket in case we have to disperse the crowd and if he needs it the secret service will tap him on the shoulder and he'll go up and and he'll read it but I can't have any of the speeches I can't read any of the speech writers into this so you have to write it so I wrote this and he said by the way you can't tell anybody so I wrote this out and all the night before we went to the inauguration I heard sirens in the night wondering if this was related to the threat and in the morning my wife and Susan and my son eat one of my sons Ethan and were scheduled to go with the bushes and the obamas to the church services before the cross street from the White House before the before the inaugural ceremony traditional ecumenical service so all I wanted to do is tell them not to go because I didn't know what was going to happen and I was so torn between my responsibility to keep my mouth shut and you know my love for my my family but so they went nothing happened but and I did meet the president behind the podium I went to do television interviews and then I met the president behind in the speaker's office before the ceremony and I handed him this envelope but you know did nothing in campaigns that prepares you for that right and or the constant pressure and of working in an environment where every single thing you do is consequential every issue you're working on is consequential which is you know both exhilarating and and oppressive in a way right so you know I came away from that experience respecting anyone who's ever served there whether I agree with them or not because the the responsibilities are awesome and the consequences are great there are many who claim that the man we elected to the presidency in 2008 was not the man who came to the White House in 2009 what's your view on that uh no I think you know if you asked me for a word that would there's so many adjectives I could use to describe Barack Obama but one of them is consistency he's a and you could hear it in the stories I had told before but he's a very consistent person his values are consistent his goals are consistent I think that uh that question is rooted in this whole issue of partisanship versus bipartisanship because we ran on a platform of ending the gridlock and you know kind of unstinting partisanship in Washington and we were so successful at making that case that we actually swept in huge partisan majorities in both houses and uh so uh the Republican party made a strategic judgment that was shrewd if not admirable they looked at the horrible set of choices we were going to have to make the crisis we were facing uh and they said you know what won't we let them solve this because then we can run against the solutions and the crisis is going to take a long time to resolve so in 2010 the economy is not going to be recovered and this gives us our best chance to come back and get off you know out from under where we where we are and you know what I regret that because I think in time of national emergency we should be able to find partners uh and um but it was a shrewd strategy and uh and you'd have to say at least for the Republican party in the short run it it worked um they also forced the president to act on a more partisan base to be a more partisan figure and you know I mean I get the question off and well could what could you have done could you have tried harder you know and you know there's no doubt that some of that is true that we could have you know we we felt like we we uh we were in a time of such crisis that we didn't have a whole lot of latitude you know that we just needed to go and solve problems but you know we could have you know we I guess we could have done more um I know on health care on health I'm sorry more to foster unity yes well or to try and encourage it yeah yeah yeah I guess the same thing um the uh on health care we actually held the health care vote out for like five or six months while the senate finance committee grappled with it because Senator Baucus who was the chairman of the committee felt like he could forge a bipartisan bill and we were interested in that it was a big piece of business and it would be great to move forward on a bipartisan basis there was a lot in the bill that Republicans had supported in the past the the exchanges for example um and the president would meet with Republicans one of them sat on his couch and said and you know they agreed on a lot and the president said well we seem to agree on a lot can you support not unless you can get 10 other Republicans because I can't stand alone on this at one point in the fall of 2009 uh we were hopeful that Olympia Snow the senator from Maine moderate Republican would join us because she said she might and there were things she wanted changed president said yeah I'm willing to make those changes she said he said I'm willing to call it the snow bill he said he said hell he said she can move into the White House Michelle and I'll get an apartment and said so it wasn't that there wasn't a desire for bipartisanship but there really was a strategy on the other side not to indulge bipartisanship and you know at the end of the day so at the end of the day I never believed that we were one beer or one golf game or one movie in the White House theater away from peace and harmony in Washington I don't think that's true right what do we not all presidents are complex the lbj was certainly among them among the more complex and enigmatic that seems to be how people describe Barack Obama but what do we not appreciate or understand about Barack Obama one of the things by the way parenthetically before I answer that question that people often say is you know when there's when the congress is knotted up and so on it's always like why can't he be more like lbj that that comes up often and of course Lyndon Johnson was a master of the senate he was a master of the parliamentary process he was you know he was as good as there was at that but it also was a different time sure the composition of the congress was different the tools that were available to a president you know to to reward and punish were were different so it's not really an apt parallel I also hasten to point out that when we did have large majorities as Johnson did that we the president had probably as productive the first two years as anybody since Johnson when he became a president here's what I would say about Barack Obama and I sort of hinted at it before I think he's the most extraordinary ordinary person I know you know he he really does value love being with his family you know one of the things he gets criticized for in Washington is that he doesn't socialize enough but one of the deals that he made with Michelle and himself was that if he won that he it would be the first time they'd be under one roof because you know and that he would be home for dinner every night and he's very he's he's very faithful to that he comes home for dinner with his daughters every night at 6 30 spends time with them after dinner they probably probably less now that they're teenagers I'm sure they're not begging for more time with dad but but the and you know he he has really good friends and you know and he's very close to the friends he's had he the the guys he grew up within Hawaii who would come periodically some of his college friends I was invited to some of his birthday parties when all of them would descend there and there was such a genuine closeness you know and a lot of them they're guys and a lot of it's around sports and it's but you know he is you know maybe the smartest person that I've known but he's also very grounded and normal in a way that you don't expect in someone who's made it to that place and I'm not sure people fully grasp that right you look ahead to 2016 you wrote in a strategic memo yes in the 2008 campaign of Hillary Clinton for all of her advantages she's not a healing figure the more she tries to moderate her image the more she jeopardizes herself in the nominating fight and compounds her exposure as an opportunist and after two decades of the bush clinton saga making herself a candidate of the future will be a challenge to those factors so you think you think that's germane or something well those factors come to bear next year look I think the times change right so among the other things I talked about was that she had been a supporter of the war in Iraq and as Obama had opposed it that was a defining issue in that campaign I think people at that time I always say mark same thing which is that the and I write about in this book I have a theory of presidential politics that the election is determined in many ways by the qualities of the outgoing president when the president is retiring no matter how excuse me no matter how much people like that president they almost always look for a the remedy not the replica they look for someone who has the qualities that they missed in the last president in 2008 Barack Obama was the perfect counterpoint to George W. Bush you know who you know was perceived as seeing the world in manikin terms black and white you know he had been harshly partisan was the view and very much welcome the special interests into the White House and so all of that he was a great counterpoint to that and people were looking for someone who would really challenge the politics of Washington I think in 2016 people are going to look for someone a little less nuanced a little someone who sees a little less gray and and someone who rather than challenging the system in Washington it may is perceived as being more adroit at managing the system in Washington so I think this is an environment in which someone like a Hillary Clinton may be more viable than she was in 2008 but I've also said two things about her and she's a she's a friend I mean I know that sounds odd because we were involved in that campaign 2008 and I'll let her speak for herself as to whether she considers me a friend but she actually was the patron saint of an organization that my wife started called Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy because of the struggles we had with my child throughout her childhood and Hillary spoke at the first fundraiser helped us organize a national conference on curing epilepsy I worked in her senate race in 2000 I was involved in that race so I like Hillary and I know her pretty well I think but what I saw in 2007 was a candidate who was so weighted down with this presumption of inevitability that she was very cautious and unrevealing and unconnecting and when she lost the Iowa caucuses that changed she became as I said earlier you know much more connecting she was much more revealing of her own struggles and vulnerabilities and much more identifying with other peoples and I thought she was a much more compelling candidate a scary candidate from my standpoint being on the other side the other problem for her in 2007 was that the whole candidacy got out in front of the rationale for it so she was running but it wasn't clear why exactly other than that you know social advancement social promotion I guess they call it in schools and there's a danger of that here as well you know you have ready for Hillary and I've said many times ready for what you know it's not defined it has to be defined that's going to be her challenge if she becomes a candidate to very clearly from the beginning outline her vision for the future of the country what she thinks is important where she wants to lead and to to do it in a way that is not cautious but connecting and ventures some if she does those things I think she's going to be a very very competitive candidate but those are the challenges yeah we'll take questions for Mr. Axelrod in one moment I'll ask you at the New York Times wrote of you earlier this month over the course of 40 years in 150 campaigns Mr. Axelrod has earned a reputation on both sides as one of the good guys how do you get in a business as as dirty as politics can be and remain one of the good guys I send out really nice holiday gifts no I I look I think I hope those of you who read this book get a sense that I really enjoy people who are in the arena you know like Teddy Roosevelt said the honor goes to the man in the arena and the woman in the arena he didn't say that I added that and I enjoy people who who are in politics and you know I admire even if we have different views I admire them for and I don't ever doubt whether they love the country as much as I love the country you know just in case Mayor Giuliani is here so you know so I've maintained a lot of close associations one of the great things about the Institute of Politics I run at the University of Chicago now is you know I have people coming in all the time from all factions Mitt Romney's coming there in April and I'm really looking forward to that there was a day recently when I moderated a discussion in the morning with Elena Kagan and in the afternoon with Tim Phillips who runs the Koch Brothers organization Americans for Prosperity and it's fun to have that range and I appreciate you know even if I disagree with people I appreciate them as actors in this great national exercise of democracy so that's I think why you know Mike Murphy who was nice enough to write a blurb on the back of the book who's now deeply involved Republican strategist deeply involved in Governor Bush's campaign now he and I we've had many many campaigns against each other I mean some of them pretty brutal but we always even during those campaigns maintained our relationship and friendship and I I have great admiration for him and you know so I I hope one of the things you can take away from this book is that we can actually disagree without hating each other which is something we've got to recognize you know your book is aptly titled believer and you write very movingly both in the beginning and the end of the book about why you still believe talk talk a little bit about why you're still in actually the subtitle of the book that I wanted was how my idealism survived 40 years in politics because it has you know there were times when it flagged and I told you about one in 2002 fact at the end of the 2012 election on election night I said to President Obama thanks for thanks for letting me get my idealism back but at the end of the day you know the epigram on my book is from Robert Kennedy and it's the future is not a gift it's an achievement and that's what I believe I think this is the process through which we we grab that wheel of history and turn it ever so slightly in the right direction it doesn't move quickly it's like turning a battleship around but but what a great thing that we can do that my father was an immigrant from Eastern Europe came to the U.S. when he was 12 and I you know in the summer of 2009 I went back I went to Russia with President Obama I stood there with other dignitaries as the Russian army band played our national anthem it's always moving to hear your national anthem played on foreign soil but I was really kind of moved standing there because it was the eve of what would have been my father's 99th birthday and to think that he and his family fled tyranny with nothing and just and came to America fought very hard to get there because of their faith that this was a place where they could practice their faith freely and where there was opportunity and now I was coming back his son as senior advisor to the president of the United States you know or I think of that woman Jesse Berry who put me on the mailbox and you know I was I was on the John with John Stewart a few weeks ago and I said I always think about what she might have thought about the fact that this little boy she put on the mailbox ended up working for the first black first African-American president and he very quickly said I'm sure she'd be very disappointed which is why we'll miss him of course so you know we have seen this country change itself for the better again and again and even in these six years that have been so rankerous in many ways you know when we came to office there were 180,000 troops in Iraq in Afghanistan another 15 the the economy was cascading to disaster the American auto industry was on the verge of collapse I saw the president make a series of decisions each of which were as unpopular as they were necessary courageous decisions to save the economy and now we're in a much different place our healthcare system was you know was we saw double digit inflation or near double digit inflation every year millions more people uninsured every year he took on something that seven presidents tried and seven presidents failed and now you know we're on this path that we're reducing the numbers of people who are uninsured holding back inflation healthcare inflation and there's so many things I could talk about that are different today and we've seen recent examples the change in the policy toward Cuba immigration reform and the the agreement with China on climate change that may unlock real progress globally these are big things you know on the climate change and I apologize for rambling on this but this is sort of the essence of what this is all about I was on a program as I'm mourning Joe actually and and Joe Scarborough said why is he working on climate change it's at the bottom of our NBC Wall Street Journal poll of people's concerns and you know I just had this I had a this beautiful granddaughter in October and I was thinking about her and the fact that she's going to be alive at the end of this century and I read around that time of the president's agreement with China that if we don't act in a serious way by the end of the the century the planet could be largely degraded and I'm thinking what am I supposed to do what are we supposed to do you know tell this child from the grave that we would have done something about this but the NBC Wall Street Journal poll just wasn't just wasn't good enough so I'm proud of the things that we were able to do even in this very difficult environment we've made progress and of course the president's election himself speaks to that progress so I still believe very much in our ability to do that and I still think it's a very noble calling to try yeah so that's why the book's called believer we have time for two questions yes sir David my question is about personal responsibility you know I think a lot of people are concerned about where entitlement stops and personal responsibility starts what is your thoughts on how to make that more of a national discussion well I think it should be a national discussion and you know one of the things that people remember from the president's campaign and in his speeches the speech at the convention was when he talked about the fact that parents have responsibilities for their children to help teach their children and personal responsibility is you know is a value that we as a country have always embraced and stood for but we also have to create an environment in which people who exercise personal responsibility and try as hard as they can and work hard can actually find opportunity and I think this is the great challenge of the the 21st century we have had seen such profound changes in our economy that have created enormous opportunities for wealth but have also marginalized large numbers of people so that people are working harder but they're not getting ahead people we now I've read that there's a seven percent chance that if you were born in the fifth quintile that you know the poorest quintile that you'll ever get out of it I think that president Johnson would be ashamed of that fact given the war on poverty that he started 50 years ago so there's no doubt that we should demand personal responsibility and we shouldn't encourage an ethic that says you can you you can simply rely on the government to support you but we can't do that without making the other effort to make sure that people get the education and training they need to make sure that we're making investments in research and development and infrastructure and the kinds of things that builds an economy in which people have their best chance a tax system that rewards work by expanding the earned income tax credit there's so many things we can do that would honor our values so we don't it's not just the value of personal responsibility we have to honor but larger values or other values as well because they all work together last question yes during the election 2008 it appeared that there was a real paradigm shift going on that the movement was from power over to power with that the movement was I'm sorry from what to watch power over to power with or top down to side by side sharing of power the yes we can yes and yet I don't know how long it took to take to find out about the partisanship that would be the ranker of the first administration but the choice of Rahm Emanuel seems to be a direct contradiction of of the president's approach in his campaign that's part one of the question and the second part is were there was there really enough support in his administration for that kind of approach given the fact that there had to be a lot of Chicago politicians who were a part of his administration well first of all let me say that I've known Rahm almost all his adult life and most of mine so you know I'm biased in this regard but he's probably one of the most able people that I know and what we were faced with in 2008 coming into the YS and I was as much I was a keeper of the flame of the campaign message but what we were faced with was an epic economic crisis like none we had seen since the great depression two wars raging and a series of other crises and a very ambitious agenda on the part of the president and Rahm was someone who knew how to navigate that environment and get things done and there was no option but to get things done the option the the other option would be to let the country spiral into into depression to forego some of the priorities of the president like health reform to to drift on some of these issues related to the war Rahm whatever your views of him and whatever his idiosyncrasies and those have been widely discussed and in my own book I discussed them he also is a guy who gets things done and I don't think we would have gotten nearly what we got done in those first two years without him so the president made a decision faced with the set of circumstances that we were faced with to find someone to be the chief of staff who could drive that very very critical agenda forward in a short period of time and he got him in Rahm Emmanuel who deserves a lot of credit for a lot of what we accomplished so that may not be a satisfying answer but but it happened but it's what I believe the the book is believer now number two on the New York Times bestseller list congratulations on that and a great book thank you so much for being here tonight thank you thank you so much thank you thank you appreciate it thank you