Preview
  • Believer

  • My Forty Years in Politics
  • By: David Axelrod
  • Narrated by: David Axelrod
  • Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (636 ratings)

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Believer

By: David Axelrod
Narrated by: David Axelrod
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Publisher's summary

The great strategist who masterminded Obama's historic election campaigns opens up about his years as a young journalist, political consultant, and ultimately senior adviser to the president

The man behind some of the greatest political changes of the last decade, David Axelrod has devoted a lifetime to questioning political certainties and daring to bring fresh thinking into the political landscape. Whether as a child hearing John F. Kennedy stump in New York or as a strategist guiding the first African American to the White House, Axelrod shows in Believer how his own life stands at the center of the tumultuous American century.

Believer begins in the inimitable world of 1960s New York, but rapidly moves west. As a young newspaperman in the Chicago of the 1970s and 1980s, Axelrod reported on the dissolution of the last of the big city political machines, along with the emergence of a Black, independent movement that made Obama's ascent possible. Seeing the golden age of Chicago journalism collapse, Axelrod switched careers to become a political strategist, working for pathbreakers like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and morally conflicted characters like John Edwards. For better and worse, Axelrod helped to redefine the techniques by which modern political campaigns are run.

The heart of Believer is devoted to Axelrod's 20-year friendship with Obama, a warm partnership that inspired both men even as it propelled each to great heights. As senior adviser to the president, Axelrod served during one of the most challenging periods in national history and worked at Obama's side as he battled an economic disaster, navigated America through two wars, and fought to reform health care, the financial sector, and our grid-locked political institutions.

©2015 David Axelrod (P)2015 Penguin Audio
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Critic reviews

"Would Barack Obama have been elected president without David Axelrod? That question is less far-fetched than it may seem...what emerges is important: a portrait of political campaigning that is more like what we hope than what we fear, that rises above the machinations and muck...a stout defense - indeed, the best I have read - of the Obama years.... Judging from his first book, Obama has the talent to write the best presidential memoir in modern tunes. It is worth waiting for. But for now, David Axelrod has written a highly readable, uplifting account of the candidate he loves - and, reassuringly, has shown politics can still be a calling, not a business." (New York Times Book Review, David Gergen)

"Axelrod, liberated from the constraints of messaging, is warm and wry, loyal to Obama without being uncritical, and occasionally acid in his appraisals of others - now-Secretary of State John Kerry, political consultant Mark Penn and former Sen. John Edwards will not be among this book's biggest fans. It helps that Axelrod can write. A journalist before he was a political consultant, his book is revealing..but best of all, it is well told - the work of a capable, professional storyteller." (The Los Angeles Times)

"Mr Axelrod has uncommon insights to offer." (The Economist)