Mr [David] Axelrod has won nothing but applause for his performance during the primaries. But now that the general-election campaign has, in effect, begun, some Democrats are worrying that his magic touch may be deserting him. Why is Mr Obama stuck in the polls? And why is he less popular than his party? Some Democrats worry that he is not prepared to hit John McCain hard enough. This seems unlikely. Mr Axelrod is a product of Chicago’s street-fighting school of politics. Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist, puts him at the head of his list of “Guys I never want to see lobbing grenades at me again”.
The bigger problem lies with what has hitherto been the Obama campaign’s greatest strength””message control. Mr Axelrod firmly believes that the candidate is the message. The important thing is to tell a positive story about the candidate rather than to muddy the narrative with lots of talk about policy details.
This worked perfectly when Mr Obama was up against Mrs Clinton, a woman who agreed with him on most points of substance and whose own autobiography is messy, to put it mildly. But things are different with Mr McCain. As a Republican, Mr McCain is on the losing side of most policy issues, particularly when it comes to economic and domestic policy. But Mr Obama has still not figured out how to relate his grand rhetoric to the numerous specific policy positions that litter his website. Mr McCain also has one of the most compelling autobiographies in American politics””one that is more likely to appeal to the average American than the coming-of-age of a mixed-race child. For all his skills, Mr Axelrod may have chosen to fight on the one battlefield where the Republicans have a chance of winning.