Sandy Quinn’s posting of Dick Morris’s column about Barack Obama’s readiness to be president is well worth reading. The column reflects what seems to be the conventional wisdom developing here in Washington: that anyone who can run such an efficient and effective a campaign (much less starting from practically behind square one in terms of recognition and organization) is ready to be POTUS.
Of course Sandy Quinn himself is no mean observer, having been engaged in every Republican presidential campaign since he emerged on the scene as the leader of Youth for Benjamin Harrison.
Senator Obama is clearly a man of exceptional ability and presence. He also is an excellent judge of talent. His choice of Chicago’s David Axelrod to conceive and execute his candidacy accounts, in no small part, for its great success so far.
Axelrod is a colorful New Yorker who started out as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and ended up as the Chicago Tribune’s chief political writer. He has worked for Paul Simon, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emmanuel, Chris Dodd, Tom Vilsack, John Edwards, and Deval Patrick. The latter gig supplies an Obama/Patrick link that is far more important than just some shared rhetoric.
Axelrod got to know the young Obama some fifteen years ago when a local Democratic party activist got them together for a voter registration drive. The still young pro saw the great potential in the still fledging pol and has been following him around with cameras and sound crews ever since he entered the US Senate in 2004.
Axelrod, in his early fifties, has delegated managing the Obama campaign to David Plouffe, one of the partners in his consulting firm AKP&D Message and Media (Plouffe is the “P”).
There are lots of interesting insights and colorful asides to be found in Ben Wallace-Wells’s profile of Mr. Axelrod — “Obama’s Narrator” — which appeared last spring in The New York Times Magazine.
One of the things that occurred to me on reading this article was that the spectacular Obama career trajectory (the Democratic nomination and the US Senate seat after only a few years in state politics) was based on two surprising scandals.
His path to the nomination was cleared when his major opponent, a millionaire liberal who was leading in the polls, was suddenly poleaxed by the revelation that his ex-wife had accused him of physical and verbal abuse and filed for an order of protection. The Chicago Tribune called nominee Obama “the beneficiary of the most inglorious campaign implosion in Illinois political history”.
That November he ended up creaming carpetbagger Alan Keyes because his nominated Republican opponent, millionaire businessman Jack Ryan, had to withdraw before his campaign even got started because of the sudden revelation that his ex-wife had claimed he had forced her to visit sex clubs.
Anyone thinking “third time unlucky”?
