Former Obama chief strategist David Axelrod has accepted the position of Senior Adviser in the White House, sources tell ABC News. Axelrod helped craft the Obama campaign's main theme of 'change', and 'yes we can'.�
Robert Gibbs is also likely to join Obama's White House as Press Secretary, and Obama would like his confidante Valerie Jarrett to play a key role. The exact parameters have not been set.
They will join Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill, who has accepted the position of Obama's White House Chief of Staff.
The following are excerpts from an article appearing in the Guardian UK on July 27, 2007:
His name is David Axelrod:
With his bushy moustache and piercing, no-nonsense gaze, the 53-year-old journalist turned political consultant has been a central presence in the presidential campaign. No one in the inner circle of Obama's aides has known the junior senator for Illinois longer; they first met during a voter-registration drive in Chicago in 1992, five years before Obama first won public office, in the state legislature. No one is closer to him. No one, except Obama himself, has had a make-or-break voice in every strategy decision during his march from outsider to front runner in the race for the White House.
For Axelrod, for reasons political, professional but also deeply personal, guiding Obama to victory. It is, say those who know him best, a 'crusade'. And it began not with Obama's formal declaration of his candidacy in front of Illinois's capitol building on a cold February day 18 months ago, but nearly five decades earlier in Axelrod's boyhood home of New York.
The year was 1960. Axelrod was five, as he would recall the experience to fellow reporters when he began work on the Tribune. He had been taken by his sister to a campaign rally, where he heard the stirring oratory of another young senator who had set off on a journey to the White House: John F Kennedy.
'David was smitten, that's absolutely the right word,' says George de Lama, recently retired news editor of the Tribune, who began at the paper alongside Axelrod as a summer intern and became a friend. 'The experience of seeing Kennedy became etched in his memory - the excitement, the sense that something really important was happening.'
Eight years later, as a 13-year-old campaign volunteer, he sold lapel buttons and bumper stickers for the short-lived presidential bid of Robert, JFK's brother.
Axelrod was born in New York's Lower East Side and raised in Manhattan. His father was a psychologist, his mother a journalist for the city's crusading left-wing 1940s newspaper, PM. His early years no doubt helped to give him not only an interest in politics, but a sense that politics mattered.
But they also embedded other qualities remarked upon by friends and colleagues in the political word he has inhabited all his adult life: a sometimes moody introspectiveness. 'Soulfulness' is the word one friend uses; a seriousness; a 'driven' urge to succeed; and an 'inner toughness'.
When he was eight, his parents divorced. When he was 19 - a tragedy he mentioned publicly for the first time only in a moving Father's Day article for the Tribune - his father committed suicide. It began: 'My father died 31 years ago ...' and described him as my 'best friend and hero', an immigrant who had fled the anti-Jewish pogroms of eastern Europe, survived an 'unhappy, failed marriage', yet never showed any signs of sadness. It ended: 'It has taken me more than 30 years to say out loud that the man I most loved and admired took his own life.'
By then, Axelrod had moved west, studying political science at the University of Chicago and, first as an intern and, from 1977, a staff reporter, to the Tribune. He spent nearly eight years there, becoming City Hall bureau chief and then the paper's youngest political columnist, before leaving to join the campaign of another Illinois senator, Paul Simon.
Axelrod, says de Lama, was not only an incisive observer and reporter, but a 'beautiful writer - which you can see in some of the Obama speeches'. But when he left the paper, 'our editor said it was inevitable - that David loved being in the game more than writing about it'.
He founded a political consultancy and soon made his mark running the re-election campaign of Chicago's first African-American mayor, Harold Washington. He has since done work for clients ranging from the current mayor, Richard M Daley, to presidential hopefuls John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. But the Washington campaign proved a template for helping other African-American mayoral candidates, leading one commentator early in the Obama campaign to remark that Axelrod had 'developed something of a novel niche for a political consultant - helping black politicians convince white supporters to support them'.
Yet in Obama, almost from the moment they met, Axelrod seemed to sense something on a far grander scale: a potential for what he described to friends as a 'historic' agent for change in American politics on the scale of the hero he had seen as a five-year-old. He helped to run Obama's campaign for the US Senate in 2004 and was also credited with helping to craft the powerful Democratic convention speech in July 2004 that put him squarely on the national political stage.
Before the presidential election season, with Obama's hat not yet in the ring, Axelrod told friends he was minded to take time off to produce documentary films. He had worked for two of the presumed front runners - Clinton and Edwards - and did not see how he could in good faith help one against the other.
Axelrod married a Chicago University classmate, Susan Landau, while working at the Tribune.
http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/article.php?p=25590
---------------------------- Sponsor ----------------------------
Use Our Ride-sharing Network!
Our service has Boruch Hashem seen an overwhelming response.
If you are able to, please do a Mitzvah and offer a ride to those
who can�t afford or don�t know how to drive.
www.theyeshivaworld.com/rideshare
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Was this emailed forwarded to you? Sign up to receive your own email notifications at
http://www.theyeshivaworld.com//subscribe.php
yid.vid.news@gmail.com has signed up to receive these notifications.
If you would like to unsubscribe, visit the url below:
http://www.theyeshivaworld.com//remove.php?email=yid.vid.news@gmail.com
