Barack's grenade-lobber: meet political strategist David Axelrod.(2008 II)(Barack Obama)

IMAGINE the following scenario: A handsome, charismatic minority candidate defeats a heavily favored Democratic insider for the presidential nomination in an acrimonious race that drags out all the way to the convention. He then finds himself running in the general election against an aging, moderate Republican senator frequently at odds with his own party.

The current presidential race? Maybe, but it's also the plot of the final season of The West Wing, which aired in 2005 and 2006. The similarities are not entirely coincidental.

Barack Obama's chief strategist, legendary political consultant David Axelrod, was fresh off Obama's successful Senate race when Eli Attie, a former speechwriter to Al Gore who was writing for The West Wing, had several conversations with him. Attie says he drew considerable inspiration from Axelrod's impressions of Obama when conjuring Hispanic congressman Matt Santos, the successful dark-horse candidate on the show. Earlier this year, the web magazine Slate even edited the speeches of Obama and Santos together into an almost indistinguishable whole.

It appears that Axelrod, after decades of tinkering in the political laboratory, finally has in Barack Obama the perfect embodiment of his ideas about what makes a candidate appealing. Sometimes it's hard to know where Axelrod ends and Obama begins--a lengthy profile of Axelrod in The New York Times Magazine observed: "When he talks about his own ideas, Axelrod has a habit of substituting anecdotes not from his own life but from Obama's ... as if his is a compounded, and cultivated, existence." Indeed, a close look at the career of David Axelrod suggests that Obama is the magnum opus of a brilliant political consultant.

Axelrod was raised in New York, the son of a psychologist father and a mother who worked for the left-wing newspaper PMin the 1940s. (David Mendell's Obama: From Promise to Power quotes Axelrod's referring to his parents as "classic New York leftists.") Axelrod began working as a journalist while still an undergrad at the University of Chicago, and was hired by the Chicago Tribune straight out of college. The paper soon let him loose on City Hall, but Axelrod wasn't content to sit on the sidelines, and many believe he used his perch to champion the 1979 mayoral candidacy of Jane Byrne. Against the odds Byrne got elected, but her mayoralty was not successful, and Axelrod's coverage turned accordingly negative.

Axelrod left the paper in 1984, citing (according to Mendell) concerns over its "corporatization" and disagreements with his superiors. When Axelrod walked away from the Tribune, he was unusually close to Chicago's influential media players and labyrinthine political establishment. Despite having no real political experience, he was almost immediately hired by Democrat Paul Simon. Axelrod helped handle Simon's ultimately successful Senate bid, and the consultant's career took off like a rocket. Of the eight candidates who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination this election, Axelrod had worked for five.

Axelrod is known for two things. One is race. He has been particularly adept at running black candidates and helping them win support from white voters. He has helped elect black mayors in Cleveland and Chicago, as well as in majority-black cities such as Detroit and Washington, D.C. In 2006 he helped elect Deval Patrick, the current governor of Massachusetts and the first black person to hold that office. Patrick's election was seen by many as a trial run for Obama's presidential campaign. The themes are notably similar. Patrick's slogan was "Together We Can." And, as Hillary Clinton's campaign noted at the time, one of Obama's speeches heavily plagiarized one of Patrick's. Axelrod was probably the primary author of both.