Welcome to the Pity Party
Topic: Decline of the West
Ah, the travails of David Axelrod! History isn’t working out as it was supposed to, and President Obama’s head cheerleader is in a snit about it:
In an interview in his office, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”
These intemperate comments found their way into a New York Times story about the troubles of the Obama Administration. In view of the President’s great need to garner support for his faltering health care “reform” package, they might be considered impolitic. When you’re trying to persuade hesitant Democratic members of Congress to cast a politically dangerous vote on your behalf, ranting about “rampant lack of responsibility” seems contraindicated. Well, Alexrod is by all accounts a genius communicator, so perhaps he knows best.
Axelrod is, indeed, convinced that the White House’s current problems derive from a failure to communicate. If only the right note could be struck in daily briefings, interviews and presidential speeches, America would wake up to the virtue and genius of Barack Obama. That the Obama Administration’s policies lie at the root of then problem is a concept that Axelrod simply cannot hold in his head.
Something else that I found interesting in the story was this note on Alexrod’s lifestyle:
Mr. Axelrod’s friends worry about the toll of his job—citing his diet (cold-cut-enriched), his weight (20 pounds heavier than at the start of the presidential campaign), sleep deprivation (five fitful hours a night), separation from family (most back home in Chicago) and the fact that at 55, he is considerably older than many of the wunderkind workaholics of the West Wing. He wakes at 6 in his rented condominium just blocks from the White House and typically returns around 11.
I find this rather alarming. It’s not good Alexrod—a guy who has the ear of a president—is chronically stressed, emotionally fraught and physically unfit. They used to make fun of Ronald Reagan for keeping regular hours and getting plenty of sleep. Who is really wiser though: the man who intelligently manages his energy budget, or the man who squanders it on 15-hour workdays?
Posted by tmg110
at 11:02 AM EST
