. >> the tale of the dueling neurosurgeons is the book. this is book tv on c-span2. >> and now afterwords with david axelrod, author of believer. he served as senior strategist for barack obama's presidential campaign and as the former senior adviser to president obama. he discusses his life and career in politics with former speechwriter for president george w. bush. ..

off the phone and related the fact that in the course of this cole said we had really surprised them with the way we were able to get the vote out to places like cleveland and milwaukee and i didn't get the sense that he was trying to be ungracious he was trying to pay a compliment and it was a parable about the different lengths to which they saw the election and he felt that it was more than what happened in cleveland and milwaukee.

i applaud the loyalty of the body man but he blew it out of proportion to. they may not appreciate how you a new a thing it is for presidents to install a cpa chief political adviser as a staffer. george h. w. bush did and put them on the white house or james carville on the staff. this begins president bush who hired karl rove and then president obama.

it is akin to what mike did for presidents ronald reagan. i've been involved in a message from the beginning of our relationship in the senate race into the messaging approach to the campaign on the speeches and policy. i don't think that it's that unusual in the white house and i don't think that began. and i think it goes back.

the presidents want someone around who understands their message and understands them and can help represent that point of view to others in the white house so that there's some message consistency. as the point president is the point of president makes. >> host: president obama has had an unhappy relationship with the imperatives and you write that in the book. were you there to remind him you don't get to govern and you have conflicts over the need to listen to people like you rather than for him to follow a more ideological? >> everybody's strength is their weakness. his strength is that he believes

that once you get elected, doing the things that you think are important to advance the country and so we often have conflicts about the need to have some of the techniques and conformity is in the presentation so a good example is the discipline of how you answer questions and getting your message out front keeping the answers short and making sure you are punching through the point you want to punch through. often times we get to the point

you are seven minutes and. >> host: you have the candidates for whom you work and not only senator obama as he was before and one of the things that runs through the book is the ethical responsibilities as a competitor who said they used the tools into the high office he would approve. what responsibilities if any did they have for the public? >> guest: the subhead that i wanted wanted on the boat was too long for the book cover was how my idealism survived all the

years in politics and as you know having read the book that my interest in politics goes back to when i was 5-years-old and came back to the community which i grew up in new york and i didn't quite understand but i knew it seemed important he was talking about the future of the country and it just seemed important at the beginning of it i approach to politics from the place. on that place. on the other hand when you are a campaign consultant you hire someone to get elected and to try to choose carefully. i confess in the book i didn't always choose right but once you are doing the race your job is to get out and you operate in a certain ethical and moral

parameters. i left campaigns where i thought i became disillusioned and didn't think they were the right candidates i quit. there's always someone less than you hoped but not so egregious that you're going to walk away from it and i found myself persuading myself in those cases that whatever they were they were better than the alternative and that is how i would motivate myself to go forward. >> host: i am thinking of an early campaign that you ran.

the theme and hope and change and unity that would appeal to the obama campaign. the problem of the city proved stubborn and then you would be tarnished by the corruption charges and one of the closest friends and allies and he was heading into trouble even before michael white but he certainly went much deeper. when you look back on that and say he's the man responsible and yet he owes a great degree his career to you. how do you feel when you look back at lex >> i would put the emphasis on the word and a entirely. a lot of the iconic structures that had brought back downtown

cleveland 35 cleveland with the stadiums and so on have their roots in the efforts to bring those things there and make them happen. there were problems involving one of his associates but i wouldn't be one to suggest that either the demise was his responsibility or that he didn't do anything good. he was an idealistic guy, not perfect but he helped get some important things done for the city and inspire people.

>> host: you rose to be one of the most important or probably the most important of the democratic consultants in the state of illinois. you were there a long. of time, generally very successfully. illinois now is in a rough situation rated 50th in its credit rating. it was one of the top three state during the great recession and it's now locked into this desperate pension situation where today --

>> host: it's one of the reasons it's filtered down. it's with the city's finances have contributed to their problem. it's the democratic administrations making unaffordable deals honestly with public employee unions.

>> host: not find the end at the beginning. >> guest: because they had concerns about what kind of governor he would be. they asked if i would work for him and why do you want to be governor can help me figure that out. >> host: but this is inspire one man but lots of people. in the state of illinois that you did so much do you look back and say that was good work or do

you look back and say i don't know that my talents were --. the governors want my clients come the state legislators weren't my clients. the two that i worked for were harold washington who served briefly in the 80s and i think did a lot in terms of reforming the politics of the city. he replaced the city in many ways it was considered a model mayor and at the end there were fiscal issues and they were overcommitted in trying to do some of the things he did.

i'm happy to respond if you have a particular politician you think was. >> host: i don't think it's one person come it is the handiwork of many and a career in illinois politics how does one work because the state is in such -- >> maybe this is a related question -- >> guest: paul simon who i think was kind of the essence of integrity and i'm proud of him so i knew the political landscape. while i chose my candidates pretty carefully. >> host: . see think it is a characterization as to suggest that the politics in chicago or

illinois are less ethical is that a slur or does that capture a genuine problem? >> guest: there has been corruption in the chicago politics for some time and i think that institutionalized corruption from the top is not a problem that it was at the times of history but yes we had problems with corruption and one of the reasons why so gravitated to the reform side of the fact the first piece of legislation he passed in the legislature was the first campaign finance reform bill that passed in the quarter of a century what it is

they made it illegal to take the campaign contributions for your personal use until barack obama came along he could raise money and use it as your own personal income if you pay taxes on it and he ended that practice so illinois and chicago has had its problems and then you have people that come along and try to address it and those are the people i try to gravitated to. >> host: carol moseley-braun ended up being accused of medicaid fraud and he went to a prison. >> guest: other than the course of the campaign was accused of the medicaid fraud. because because i'm the one hand he was one of the most powerful

people in washington. i don't know anybody that is so relished in the process of making the law and working across party lines to deal with big questions. he went back to the advent of medicare and was close to people in both parties including the president who worked closely up to eight or nine presidents and loved it. on the other hand he got prosecuted for what i consider unconscionable stuff cashing in stamps for cash which may have been the government issued stamps which may have been the practice in the 1950s but certainly through the norms that changed and he didn't so -- >> host: if it's true there's something in chicago and illinois what is it, is that the fact that it's a great

transportation hub so there is money that flows through that didn't belong to local people and it can be siphoned off without feeling like you are taking from your constituents ask >> i don't know the sociology that led to the problems endemic to illinois in the history and i'm not willing to say that the states and localities. we don't have a vast machine.

this is a vestige but i think you do a disservice to the city to say that it characterizes. i don't think that it defines the city certainly not the city that i know today. >> host: there's a theme that runs through the campaign that i think was originally change and hope before you improved improved to hope and change there are things about class economics. it's have to be your approach to things because they all converge into the work that you did with president obama. how much of the obama campaign was waiting in your head for him and how much of it was brought to you by him?

>> guest: . i have no barack obama for 20 some odd years that i was introduced and 1992. she had met him and asked me i notice most impressive young man i want you to meet him and i said i'm happy to meet anybody he wants me to meet the fly him and he said i think he could be the first african-american president of the united states. what i found is that we shared a sensibility and i was impressed by the guy that came back and had been president of the harvard law review.

they didn't view politics as a business, they view them as a calling and so they became friends. in 2002 when i became very disillusioned because i thought they were going to get elected and whether i want to continue doing what i was doing. they had one more campaign going to run for the senate and we hooked up or down to that race

and we shared a lot of sensibility about politics and issues about an approach to politics. it was a really productive partnership and helped animate the message and my view if you are building a message if it's good to be successful it has to be authentic and built around who someone is. barack obama from the time that he was working as a community organizer before law school and cared a lot about how the economy worked and didn't work and if they wanted to impact that event and the big politics was a noble calling.

it's something rather to fear. so he was a natural exponent of the message and reflected who he was. whether there were elements of the previous campaign. they gravitated to those candidates tagline when he ran for president in 1988 citizens it's time to believe again. i do believe politics and public service as a way to grab the wheel of history and turn it in a positive direction and obama shared that view. so i think it was a happy partnership between two people who shared a sensibility. >> through much of your career

the great defining theme of american politics the american middle class was frustrated by the increasing difficulty of getting ahead even maintaining the position, struggling with memory if things were different generation ago the 35 years or so after world war ii when the middle-class people just stay if you continue to stay in the same position you got better and better off and didn't have to. the advocacy for the middle-class has been one of the themes. there's a big article that you may have seen. they were the emerging

democratic majority and both published in the early part of the decade and it inspired a lot of the obama campaign thinking. he just suggested that he may have oversold his argument and there is an advantage based on the disillusionment of the voters with the experience of the past six years. this isn't a homework assigned. but if you heard these things how do you react to that? >> guest: i think this issue of the depression of wages and the increasing growth and wages and struggles to become middle become middle class and the economic mobility has been coursing through the politics for decades.

it's a constant theme and a function in a function of the forces larger than policy though they require some policy answers but it's a function of changes in our economy of the fast advancing technology of the globalization. we see the same and other advanced economies. each succeeding party has borne some of the brunt of the disenchantment about it. we just came through a massive economic crisis that was in full fury.

we've come through some tough years. i think though if you ask the average person who is fighting for the middle-class and who cares about the middle-class and made it their focus and asked whether that was the president or the republican opposition i think that you would get a pretty healthy margin in favor of the president created one of the reasons why he won a fairly substantial re- election in 2012. he lost that overwhelmingly. so i don't know. i can't say -- i think that it's a misplaced. to suggest the republican party is going to inherit the benefit of that disenchantment unless

the republican party comes up with a compelling answer. what i do find interesting is that while the republican party generally was dismissive of arguments about the middle-class inequality and economic immobility all the candidates are speaking to it which suggests to me what a powerful problem it is. >> host: i can't put it in front of you because we are on the virtually talking but c-span may be able to put it on the screen. this is a study from brookings in the early part of 2014, henry is one of the leading economists and one of america's economists on economic distribution neither of them by any means conservative and they analyzed the economic impact of the signature domestic affordable

care act. the affordable care act in first greatest benefit on the benefits on the poorest 20% of the population. it is hard to compute because you have to look at the value of the insurance guarantees that they've run this now with different computations and what comes out is basically depending how you look at it either at the bottom 20% or 30% when. the top 70 or 80% lose and the heaviest losses are actually in the middle of the economic distribution, not at the top. i think very few people will have these figures but does explain a lot of the unhappiness in the affordable care act that we have seen and when you look at other things the administration has done the president's recent initiatives of calling for the free community college taxing the savings vehicles families used to pay for four-year colleges

and his big speech in kansas in 2010 probably the most important of his presidency he announced the strategy of the public sector growth in the projects that will pay high wages to higher wages to the government workers or government contractors to trickle out to the rest of society. you look at this and say is this middle-class or is this a strategy for the beneficiaries and providers of the public services at the expense of the rest of society and is that the cause of the recent political difficulties the democratic party has had? >> guest: it's a little off topic from my off-topic from my book but i'm happy to address it. i haven't seen the study that you are referring to and i assume that applies to the distribution of subsidies. >> and the guarantees and the taxes and internal subsidies in the insurance market. i know you are at a

disadvantage. i would have given it to you before the interview. and maybe you dispute their conclusions. >> guest: i can't dispute the conclusions come i cannot here to discuss my book and thought the report that since i haven't seen it, let me just comment on what i know which is that the ability of people generally under their insurance plan because the affordable care act has certain guarantees for people under the insurance plans do not have annual caps to not have lifetime caps is vitally important to people who get seriously ill and i know something about this because just getting back to my book for a second, i don't have a care system and i have a child with significant health care concerns. but as a tremendous sense of

relief and i also dealt with the notion i couldn't get another insurance policy because my child had a pre-existing condition. that is no longer a concern and that applies to people up and down the line. the security is knowing you can get insurance at an affordable rate if you lose your job or your employer drops your insurance is a security that is important. so i can't comment on the economics that are in the report because i have integrated but i'm certain i am certain that the security the affordable care act affords not just to the bottom 20% of the people that have insurance is important now and will be in the future. >> host: you are a believer as you say and you are a systematic

thinker. you come up with these broad themes into their tremendously powerful. how do you reality check and say i know i am writing the music. there are people across the way writing ability or ask. how do i test the matter of my own conscientious belief, the reality of my music? >> guest: by a concern obviously is not just in the music but also the impact of the policies. i am not an economies that there are problems that i think are important that the president felt was important and that the country felt was important and

are those problems going to be addressed. one thing i would say though is the goal is to set forth these challenges and problems and provoked a discussion. i see the republican party now introducing the alternative to the affordable care act but there is an acknowledgment that there were significant flaws in the system and we are having a debate about the issue of the viability of the middle-class and this economy and what we can do to help secure a broad and inclusive prosperity. that's a step forward for the country and republicans and democrats are participating. maybe they have different prescriptions. that's the nature of democracy and we have to fight those who would at least immigration reform is another.

people are unhappy with the step the president took that at least the mainstream of american politicians and voters said let's go back to where we were. so part of that leadership is identifying big challenges and moving the country forward and it may propagate debate. there may be imperfections in the approaches that are taken and they have to be protected over time. but at least you are talking about the big challenges facing the country and what the obama campaign was about in 2008 was to try to tackle some of these things. you may not like his prescription for health care but you have to at least give him credit for taking it on because there was no political calculus that provoked him to do that and the political calculus was on the other side of the book and my own discussions with him

about the difficulties were in moving forward on healthcare and yet he took that on and i admire him come he took it on because he felt the health care system would implode if he didn't and this was something that was urged just by people concerned about the uninsured were the underinsured by the budget people that felt if we didn't reform the culture system it would implode and he took on the political risk to do that. he took on the political risk to intervene and that is another chapter or another story in the book to save the american auto industry at the time that it was on the verge of collapsing. it was controversial then and it was on the popular than. it isn't on the popular now. people don't look back at that as a mistake because it has come back.

>> host: to talk about the challenges you face raising children and to talk about some self-examination about whether you about your ambition to damage your wife who spoke up and wasn't just speaking i salute that you give her great credit for accommodating and making sacrifices. at the same time i think it is intensely personal. it is very circumspect. but every once in a while you left a day along some daylong some of the issues in the white house and those outside have been reverberating on the conflict and there's a famous story about the tensions from valerie jarrett and the staffers you worked with on the president senatorial and earlier campaigns. >> host: i want to ask as you look back on it now you tell the

told the story that rahm emanuel implicit aerie particular to get her into the senate and that is one of the things that led to the downfall. largely in order to get her out of the white house because as you explain that rahm emanuel felt to have someone acting as a senior adviser with the formula for trouble. since then there's been a lot of chuckle. valerie jarrett has become one of the more controversial members of the administration also the administration has circulated the memo about her magic that would have given credit to the court of the family in north korea. was he wrong or do you think that he was onto something? >> i think that he had legitimate concerns based on the clinton administration that it's hard to manage people on the

staff who have been independent personal relationship with the president and the first lady and i've said before that has its challenges and i will say also that there is benefit and many presidents would say the same, there's a benefit with someone whom you have a long history who is fundamentally loyal and is unquestionably in your corner and he has the relationship. they go back a long time and there is value to that. so, i understood his concern and he did work very hard to persuade valerie to run for the seat but obama was giving up in order to become president and at the end of the day was the president who wanted her in the

white house and i've not heard him ever suggest that he regretted that decision. >> host: how has it been for the subsequent staff? the date kind of difficult to manage as rahm emanuel felt it would be? >> every one of the chiefs of staff has dealt with that relationship in their own way but they all recognize the value president feels valerie brings and they work with her and with him to make it work. >> host: we are recording at a time there is great controversy over the pending invitation to the israeli prime minister benjamin mehta and -- benjamin netanyahu. the relationship to the the president of the united states and minister of israel has never

been worse than it is today and the relationship between the united states and israel has rarely been under more pressure than today. refer a couple of times to paul simon who was elected to the senate in illinois you think 1988. >> guest: 84. >> host: 84, sorry. he defeated percy and one of the big things of that election is that you and rahm emanuel used the issue against charles percy and in favor of paul simon. what would david axelrod of 1984 and how would he analyze the relationships today? >> guest: first of all we didn't use the issue as a messaging issue at least as a macro messaging issue. it was a source of the other a lot of fund raising for senator simon who was viewed by some of

the organized communities as a stronger supporter then percy was. i told the story in the book after one of the leaders offered to subsidize me in business as a consultant and was happy with the way the campaign came out and i said it obviously was a great offer to a young guy that had no other means to start a business, but i asked if that meant that there were a republican who, or any candidate good on israel but bad on everything else could work against them and they said yes and i opted out of that so i am uncomfortable with that kind of arrangement where one issue however important it is is so

dominant and that is how someone is evaluated. but in terms of the current situation, i would dispute one thing. there has been friction between president obama and the present mr. benjamin netanyahu. it's important to note in terms of military assistance and other support military to military cooperation and so on this is far from a bad time. the level of cooperation is as great or greater than it's ever been and people on both sides would see that. president obama believed when i was there into celebes i'm sure that it is important to resolve the issue between the palestinians and israel for the long-term security as the jewish democratic state and i think at

times he was frustrated because he felt that netanyahu was confirmed by the diplomatic efforts pushing the peace process forward and it created friction between them. >> host: has there ever been a presidential prime minister relationship as bad as this one? >> guest: i don't know. i remember he lost the prime minister ship once before because of his poor relationship with president clinton,, so isn't new for him to have a testy relationship with an american president. >> host: she may wind up in minister ship because of his relationship. >> guest: pays visit to the united states congress was very much part of that campaign and i think that he was looking for

this visit and this event to try to help them in what had not been a campaign moving in the right direction and there's still a there is still a great controversy about it as you know because you are a student of the israeli press as i am. there's a tremendous amount about what's happening to the relationship and many view his trip here as a needless provocation. he got in violation of the kind of nonpartisan relationship between the two countries. >> host: when netanyahu got into that crisis that you mentioned, it damaged him very much because they trusted bill clinton as a friend of israel. today the pole for the post winds of 60% or more think president obama will sign any deal though matter how bad. he is not regarded in that way and when he gets on bad terms it doesn't hurt them the way it did

when he got on that terms with bill clinton. >> guest: there's a great deal of concern about the relationship between israel and the united states in part because of the actions of the prime ministers so again we can debate about this stuff and i hope we can talk more about my book while i'm here. >> host: here's a question drawn from your book. you talk about your opposition to cynicism and your how you remain a believer in the best of politics and yet you've used that cynicism that you found as a political tool and i want to ask about a story i find it

disturbing you work for the free election in 2003 he was the mayor of philadelphia at that time. he found a bug in his office and you masterminded the campaign to reelect him and he said john ashcroft and the attorney general was trying to pick the mayor of philadelphia. they won in a landslide which they were proud of. the fbi investigation to continue. 15 people in the street circle were sent on corruption charges. his brother went to prison on tax evasion charges and of course as you know the attorney general doesn't decide who the fbi investigates. >> guest: first of all david, there's a purpose and respected record and republican.

just as the department practice has been not to surface these investigations in the final weeks of an election people around the justice department would tell you if they were going to place a listening device in the office of a high public official, that rises to the level of the attorney general selects said that issue aside. john street was never prosecuted or convicted of anything and it was a tremendous disservice to him a month before the election. it was going to be surfaced once the bug was found it was going to be surfaced.

so my view of john street and the race in philadelphia was here was this guy that was instrumental in saving the city from financial disaster in partnership with had been no come here was a guy that has mayor .-full-stop some promises to get abandoned cars off the street and afterschool programs and do many of the things that were desperately needed in that city. so i battled as hard as i could for him and it was his opponent who ended up in the legal difficulties after the election and ended up having to pay some 2 million-dollar fine for the things that he was involved in. so if the question was probity he never wound up under indictment. >> host: but the person being investigated by it before he

could be charged or would have been charged with don't know of course. >> guest: like i said street was never in diet or convicted of anything. and his opponent had some legal problems but it's probably not in your research. >> host: one of the things when you write a book like this and you have a long life ahead of you and you have, you know told many stories, the book that maintains the life that is going to go on you move into the remains in place. so you are moving now and as a new distinguished academic career, important man, democratic party politics. the party is converging on the person that you and your campaign beat in 2008 and the story of how your campaign beat

hillary clinton's operations and you quoted from a memo at the time for the vulnerability in 2008. she's not a healing figure the way she trusted moderator imaging compounds for exposure as an opportunist and after two days of the sawgrass making her campaign a future will be the challenge. those words on paper how do they fit with your life in the new era of the democratic party clicks >> guest: every period in politics is different. i don't think hillary clinton was in a strong position in 2008 in part because she supported the war in iraq and president bush's's decision to go into iraq and that was a defining issue within the democratic party. very hard to be the nominee of the democratic party having taken a position. she also -- people were looking outside of washington and

outside of the sort of day-to-day tug and pull that was going on and obama stood apart from all that and that made him a strong candidate and people were looking for someone who challenged the system in a way that he was willing to challenge the system. i think that every election a matter whether the president is popular or unpopular it is defined by the outgoing incumbent and never do people choose the replica of what they had the always choose the remedy. barack obama was seen as the start starkest remedy to george w. bush because he was more nuanced in his thinking and because the policy positions he took and he stood apart from a system that people were unhappy with. i think in 2016 people were going to be looking for someone who can manage the system.

there may be less of a belief that someone can come in and thoroughly change the system they want someone who can manage the system and move the country forward who they feel is skilled and equipped and experienced enough to do that i think that is a circumstance that favors hillary clinton so 2008 wasn't the right environment i think 2016 is and i think by the way that may be a benefit that flows through governor bush and perhaps some of the others that are seen as people who are good mechanics in terms of dealing with the political process and might be able to work in the system better than they perceived that the president had >> host: this is a choice people in politics used to make a lot and does you no more nowadays they make a choice to

cash in and i'm sure with your record of success the options are enormous. you said no to that and that's unusual. why? >> guest: because i have done well enough in life that i don't feel like i need to do that. i never viewed this politics as a business as i said earlier i viewed it as a calling and i felt the best use of my time would be to try to inspire young people to get involved in the political process. there is a great deal of skepticism, not cynicism but skepticism about politics because of the nature of what we've seen in washington and because frankly they've come up in a generation when if you see a problem you organize people on social media. by the become of things

government should look at as a potential way to approach some problems in a different way but they are skeptical about politics and government and the value as a means to solve problems. i always say to these kids congress is going to meet with them over without them as the state legislatures, city councils governments overseas and they are going to live with the consequences of the decisions and those that are made will be very consequential affecting all the equities they care about from right to left. i have students at the university of chicago against the political spectrum. we are going to be a better country if they invest their efforts in trying to steer the country in the direction they think it should go through the political process not necessarily as candidates but as advisers and journalists and commentators. but in the public arena that is the best use of my time because

for all its messiness coming into the leave me while we talk about the fractious nature of our times, you are a student of history, you know that it is replete with examples. i sit here in new york city and across the rivers were sitting vice president shot and killed the former treasury secretary over what was largely political. so i want to encourage these kids to make a difference in the political arena and make this a better and stronger country and that to me is more inviting than making a bunch of money trying to trade on my profile or connection. >> last minute. you are a writer began as a newspaper man.

will there be another, what's next? >> guest: well david, you are a writer too so you know if you write a book and it's like my wife describes childbirth to me. it's very painful when you go through it and you can't imagine doing it again but then you're pretty happy with the product and overtime, the memory of the pain recedes. so i'm not making any prediction about what i might do next in terms of writing but i'm pleased to have had the opportunity to reflect on my life and career and share those reflections in the book. >> host: and it is very personal and i think people will find it illuminating and you cover a lot of ground over a lot of time. thank you for the generosity with your time today. that was after words booktv signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by

journalists, public policymakers and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday handed 12 a.m. on monday. and you can also watch "after words" online. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the tv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. here's a look at upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country.

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