Axelrod’s Other Job

On Monday, Politico reported that “no subject is more avidly considered in the corridors of Democratic power than the future role of his chief adviser, political consultant David Axelrod. Democrats who know the Chicago-based political consultant, the key architect of Obama’s campaign and of his public image, say Axelrod has signaled that he’ll seriously consider taking on a job in the administration.”

That’s nice.

On the same day, the New York Times published a heartwarming piece about Axelrod under the headline “Long by Obama’s Side, an Adviser Fills a Role That Exceeds His Title.”

How sweet. And how quickly they forget.

Just nine days prior, the Times examined Axelrod’s other job – the one as America’s Astroturf King, creating fake grass-roots campaigns to persuade the public that it is on the side of his rather unappetizing corporate clients. That’s the side of Axelrod that rarely shows up in profiles that invariably assure us “really believes” in his candidates’ messages.

The puffy profiles, though, are hard to square with the facts, as laid out in devastating fashion by the Times’ story earlier this month and a similar investigation by the late BusinessWeek Chicago last spring that came and went with barely a flutter.

An Axelrod to Grind

Amidst a boisterous exchange between Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod and McCain campaign manager Rick Davis on Fox News Sunday, Davis referred to an Op-Ed that Axelrod wrote in the Tribune in 2005 arguing in favor of patronage.

DAVIS: You even wrote an op-ed saying that you thought that the patronage politics of Chicago was a better model for Washington than the law and order model that we currently –

AXELROD: That is – I never – that is as untrue as everything else that you’ve said here. That is not what I said, Rick.

Is it?

The Op-Ed is no longer available online, but I have retrieved it from a newspaper database in order to take a look. The abstract:

A WELL-OILED MACHINE: A system that works? Political debts contribute to better city services. By David Axelrod, a Democratic political consultant whose clients include Mayor Richard Daley.

Fraudulent acts such as test-rigging are one thing. But if hiring of a qualified worker who comes recommended by a politician is treated as evidence of a criminal act, then [U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald]’s approach will ensure that only applicants without political involvement are considered.

Axelrod wrote the Op-Ed in question just a month after Mayor Richard M. Daley’s patronage chief “was accused of systematically circumventing a decades-long federal ban on most political hiring by secretly directing top city managers to hire ‘preselected’ applicants favored by politicians and union officials,” as the Tribune reported.

“Mayor Richard Daley’s administration illegally doled out city jobs to reward campaign workers for the mayor and other politicians in a ‘massive fraud’ that spanned City Hall for more than a decade, federal prosecutors alleged Monday.”

A year later, Robert Sorich and three others were convicted. “I think what we saw in this case was the revealing of the Chicago machine, the inner workings of the Chicago machine,” said S. Jay Olshansky, the jury foreman. “There clearly is one. It has been in existence for quite some time.”

Judge David Coar later sentenced Sorich to 46 months in prison, saying “This offense is corruption with a capital ‘C’. There is nothing good about what you did. Frankly, I don’t give a hoot if this had been going on for the last 200 years – it stinks.”

Here’s Axelrod’s Op-Ed, followed by Obama’s response.

Probamaganda

Last Thursday morning, Barack Obama announced in a video to his supporters that he would become the first presidential nominee to ever drop out of the public campaign financing system since it was introduced in a spate of post-Watergate reforms. Obama had previously pledged to campaign within the system and had never declared it “broken” up until the time he announced his decision.

Later that evening, campaign manager David Plouffe sent an e-mail to supporters saying he wanted “to add a little context to the video message you received earlier announcing that we will not participate in the public financing system for the general election.”

Like Obama’s announcement, it was an exercise in disingenuousness.

“Even though we stood to receive more than $80 million in taxpayer funding for our campaign,” Plouffe wrotes, “the system has been so gamed and exploited by our opponents that it is effectively broken.”

As if Obama was making a great financial sacrifice to righteously uphold a principle.

Of course, by opting out of the system, Obama stands to raise far more than the $80 million cap designed to even the playing field, tamp down the influence of money in campaigns, and prevent campaign spending arms wars into the future.

Instead of upholding a principle, Obama revealed his nature.

Pfleger Film

A nice nugget from Lynn Sweet on Saturday: “Pfleger is the subject of a documentary being made by Chicago-based David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist. On Friday, Axelrod told me in an e-mail that the film project has ‘been dormant for much of the last two years due to other commitments.’”

Working title: Irony Man.

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More on Pfleger (and his weird apology on Sunday blaming YouTube) over at the Beachwood.

Museum Melee

While the epic Wal-Mart battle is fading into oblivion, the epic Children’s Museum battle is about to get worse. After laying low for several months huddled with PR powerhouse Hill & Knowlton, museum officials are embarking on a new offensive – and that pretty much describes it – in its unpopular effort to move to Grant Park. Like the Wal-Mart fiasco, this fight also turned racial when the mayor (him again) accused foes of not wanting black kids in the neighborhood.

The controversy has already been a public relations disaster for the Children’s Museum, but for some reason it’s officials stubbornly blunder on like, well, children, even though downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly has suggested a couple dozen alternative sites he could get behind.

In the Tribune article, Reilly derided the museum’s new public relations effort as “an attempt to manufacture public support that isn’t there.” Maybe Hill & Knowlton will have better luck than Barack Obama media maven David Axelrod, who was previously running stealth PR operations for the museum, according to the April issue of Business Week Chicago.

The opposition remains galvanized. In an e-mail sent to supporters earlier this month, Reilly wrote: “This project is NOT on the March Plan Commission Agenda but very likely to be heard at the April 17, 2007 meeting. Thousands of community residents, Friends of the Parks, Preservation Chicago, Save Grant Park and Friends of Downtown all continue to reiterate their opposition to violating the special protections that have preserved Grant Park for 172 years.”

Preservation Chicago, in fact, has put Grant Park on its list of the city’s most endangered, um, buildings.

In an e-mail sent out on Tuesday, the organization asked those opposed to the museum move to attend the Plan Commission meeting in green shirts.

It’s an environmental message, to be sure, but it’s also the only color the Children’s Museum – which would be in line for park-related taxpayer subsidies – seems able to understand. Maybe in the confusion, the museum folk will change sides.

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Mick Dumke and Ben Joravksy at Clout City have some other ideas about how to fill up Grant Park.