NY Times: Obama's Narrator

[illinoisprogressive]

Good article on Obama's close consultant, David Axelrod.
www.newyorktimes.com

Again the link up is not showing up on the computer. may have to use Avant browser.

When Barack Obama decided in January that he would run for president in 2008 and quietly began calling up his staff members and close supporters to tell them so, the choice had many effects, but one of the most immediate and parochial was that it sent Obama’s chief political and media adviser, a Chicago consultant named David Axelrod, into his editing studio. For four years Axelrod has had camera crews tracking virtually everything Obama has done in public — chatting up World War II vets in southern Illinois, visiting his father’s ancestral village in western Kenya — and there were days when the camera crews have outnumbered the civilians.

In the second week of January, Axelrod went down to his editing studio, a raw, whitewashed loft space, and began to sort through all of this tape to put together a five-minute Internet video for the initial announcement of Obama’s campaign, which would come the following Tuesday, Jan. 16. Political observers tend to dismiss bio pieces as fluff. But for Axelrod they supply a coordinating presence, a basic story to wrap the campaign around. There is precision in the fluff. Axelrod says he believes that Obama is something different: a “trailblazing” figure who “represents the future.” And indeed, so far Obama’s campaign has been steeped in his biography. This is, after all, a 45-year-old man who has written not one but two memoirs. Most of the raw videotape Axelrod has is the banal, worn imagery of politics — Obama speaking from a podium, with the familiar, angled hand gestures, or seated and listening intently, elbows on knees — and somehow from this he had hoped to wring transcendence. There was a clip he found from the early stages of the 2004 Senate campaign of Obama, microphone in hand, introducing himself to a small group of voters at a coffeehouse on Chicago’s North Side; when the candidate told them about his work in the early 1990s as a community organizer, there was a spontaneous, sustained applause. “I remember that!” Axelrod told me a few days later as we watched the finished product in his office the morning it was released to the public. “You know, we hadn’t thought that was an important part of his bio, but people really responded to the fact that Barack gave up corporate job offers to work in the community.”