I've been following it for some time.

I don't watch MSNBC anymore, refuse to help their ratings by even one viewer, but I check out the great work Dan Abrams is doing on Crooks and Liars. Were it not for him the excellent 60 Minutes piece would have just dropped into the cable dustbin and never been mentioned again.

On creating an authentic character for the candidate:

There are a variety of problems of political communication that the industry's operatives spend their time obsessing over. One, which obsessed James Carville, is persuasion: How do you persuade people who believe one thing to believe another? A second, the big one for Joe Trippi, is commitment: What motivates your party's loyalists to go to the polls in larger numbers? But Axelrod has become animated by a more basic challenge of political communication, the problem of breaking through, of sounding different and new. Axelrod says that the way to cut through all the noise is to see campaigns as an author might, to understand that you need not just ideas but also a credible and authentic character, a distinct politics rooted in personality. ("David breaks them down," Peter Giangreco, a Chicago direct-mail consultant who often works with Axelrod, told me. "Who is your mother? Who is your father? Why are you doing this?") This, Axelrod says, is what Karl Rove understood about George W. Bush. "One of the reasons Bush has succeeded in two elections," Axelrod says, "is that in his own rough-hewn way he has conveyed a sense of this is who I am, warts and all." For Obama, because of Senator Hillary Clinton's far-greater experience and establishment backing, this is a particularly essential project. "If we run a conventional campaign and look like a conventional candidacy, we lose," Axelrod says.

Lessons learned from previous elections:

Every veteran political operative has his batch of lessons learned. From his experience running the antic, aggressive Emanuel's campaign for Congress, he realized that the way to deal with your client's perceived flaws is to embrace them and not run from them. When he ran Tom Vilsack's campaign for governor of Iowa, he learned that the smoothest way to beat back a staunch social conservative message is to attack not the content but "the over-the-top negativism" that often accompanies it. From some advisory work he did for Bill Clinton during the 1996 campaign, when he wrote the memo that introduced the phrase "Bridge to the 21st century" into the political vernacular, Axelrod learned that for a Democrat the future always trumps the past. He says he also learned from Clinton that a pol's biggest task is "to narrow the distance between the people and government." From a distance, he watched Karl Rove help George Bush win two terms as president by "understanding that every election is a reaction to the last president" and then in 2004 by "figuring out how to make Bush's stubbornness into a political virtue."

The product of a journalist/advertiser and a psychologist:

Axelrod and his sister, Joan, grew up in Manhattan, the children of two Jewish liberals -- a mother who worked as a journalist at PM, a left-wing newspaper of the 1940's, and later ran focus groups for an advertising firm, and a psychologist father.

On how Clinton helped Susan Axelrod's epilepsy foundation:

"She couldn't stop talking about what she had seen," Susan Axelrod recalled. Later, at Hillary Clinton's behest, the National Institutes of Health convened a conference on finding a cure for epilepsy. Susan Axelrod told me it was "one of the most important things anyone has done for epilepsy." And this is how politics works: David Axelrod is now dedicated to derailing this woman's career.

The term "identity politics" is particularly salient this cycle because we have two candidates representing typically under-represented communities, but I have yet to hear much analysis of how identity effects the voting habits of white men.  The underlying presumption seems to be that white men do not vote on identity while minorities do. This presumption is both incorrect and offensive.

After all, Clinton and Obama and their supporters aren't playing "identity politics" any more than John Kerry's supporters did in 2004, or George W. Bush's did in 2000. It's absurd to suggest that the Andover-Yale-Harvard-bred Bush adopting a swagger and thickening his Texas accent, or John Kerry riding a borrowed Harley onto The Tonight Show set, was anything other than identity politics. And after several early primaries, as it became clear that white men most strongly supported John Edwards, nobody accused them of playing identity politics. Nope, that distinction is reserved for people who have historically not been in positions of political power. In short, you can't be a white guy voting for another white guy and still play the identity game.

Basically, salon owner Jacob Neal kicked the Obama campaign and Alfre Woodward (co-star of "Desperate Housewives") out of his salon for shilling Obama.

What is important to note about this is that Neal had no idea what was going on, and when he confronted the Obama campaign staffer, the staffer stupidly said (remember, they said this to Jacob Neal's face) that "Jacob Neal cleared it for the Obama campaign and Woodward to be here." The sheer audacity of the Obama campaign shines again.

Self-parody at its finest, in my opinion:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=38DOBtl2H74

The tracking poll of a Houston T.V. station showed Hillary in the lead in Texas, the only state where the ad is showing...  It was only a one point change from the day before....

The Zogby tracking poll shows a 2 point erosion with Obama now only 2% ahead.  Zogby said Friday's polling was very hard on Obama.....

So, maybe the daisy chain ad redux will work....The problem is that in order for Hillary to win the nomination, she will need to convince superdelegates to vote for someone with fewer elected delegates.  In order to do that, it will take weeks of division.

2. Isn't a large part of the economic woes in this country caused by the fact that companies have moved their manufacturing facilities to China and the jobs with them? And isn't that more of a problem than NAFTA?

US presidential candidate Barack Obama dropped another hint about his foreign-policy thinking on Thursday, saying European governments had to pull their weight in Afghanistan and not rely so much on the United States to do the "dirty work" against Taliban fighters.

Pull their weight? What an outrageous crock.  Is that any way to treat allies that are doing us a favor?

Link to Turkana's post on this

link