On David Axelrod, and the End of "Axe Files"
With the exception of Jonathan Martin’s briskly-written farewell, published in Politico earlier this week, it seems the end of David Axelrod’s CNN podcast The Axe Files has come and gone without much note—which is unfortunate, but I guess underwhelmingly so, because Axelrod is the presiding presence on another (fantastic) political podcast, co-hosted by Mike Murphy and Jonatahn Heilemann, called Hacks on Tap, on which listeners get a looser Axelrod, less the professional interviewer (his role on Axe Files) and more the political analyst, prone to behaviors frowned upon at CNN: profanity, partisan remarks, laughter.
The greatest influence on my creative life was a radio personality named Michael Silverblatt, host of Bookworm on KCRW Santa Monica, whose voice was in my ear for probably at least an hour a day between the ages of 14 and 18, double or triple that number during summers when I’d be up until 3 a.m. playing muted video games and listening to a rotation of his interviews with novelists like David Foster Wallace and Gore Vidal, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster; Norman Mailer called him “the best reader in America” and yes that’s probably what Mailer said of everyone who liked his work but with Silverblatt it might’ve been true.
This’ll tie back to Axelrod in a minute, bear with me:
the reason Silverblatt’s show, his interview style, was so influential is because he showed that reading wasn’t just a rigidly intellectual experience. As a teenager I was anxious and withdrawn and nervous at being stuck in what seemed like a paradox: I was reading a lot, which adults always said was the gateway to higher learning, and my grades were terrible, which adults always said was the sign of zero learning. And so I felt stupid. Worse yet, wanting to be a writer, I was intimidated by the books that I also wanted to read. The foundational stuff.
It was Silverblatt’s interview style of reading his guest’s book deeply, formulating his own (very-personal) impressions, and then simply submitting those impressions to his guest—not asserting them as his Expert Observations—and asking them to riff as he had just riffed. And often he’d have noticed some pattern in the text, and he’d submit a really keen insight, and when he opened the floor for the author to respond they might just blink at him, and make a few seconds’ worth of throaty noises, before conceding that they hadn’t intended for that pattern to be there. Hadn’t even noticed it until now.
In other words: Silverblatt demystified books and writing. He showed that authors aren’t all great intellects—they’re mostly just eloquent about how confused they are.
Axelrod does for politics what Silverblatt did for books.
Listening to David Axelrod about politics for the past couple years I’ve gotten that same forgiving and welcoming vibe. Over the course of Axe Files’s 605 episodes he’s spoken with high-ranking government officials and journalists and tended to start off by asking them about their personal life, often touching on some shared quality or experience. By eliciting the personal he illuminates what’s human—from that foundation, as an interviewer, he sweeps away some of the bullshit. The talking points and scripted remarks dissolve. It didn’t work on Nancy Pelosi but it seldom does. (Ezra Klein just about broke through her talking points, though, if you want to hear someone pull off the impossible…)
Having started his career as a journalist of yore, sensitive to deadlines and wordcount and vocab, Axelrod then went into politics; as a campaign manager he had to master the art of messaging on a massive scale; then, in the White House, more of the same.
In other words: he’s able to communicate the essence of a political item with the clarity of someone who not only understands it well enough that, as Einstein said, he can explain it to a five year old; it’s that he conveys this stuff as somebody who appreciates the importance of getting a point across to as many people as possible. Axelrod understands that, when it comes to conveying a message to a general audience about their government, about elections and political issues, people feel stupid (“that stuff’s too complicated”), they feel bored (“how’m I even gonna notice the change?”), and they feel skeptical (“these people are all liars anyway”). Axelrod’s special gift, as a high-cost consultant, has always been Political Messaging; and now, as basically a freelance pundit, he takes that high-price gift, one that’s been recruited and honed by the call of his government, and turns it back out to the public so that
he can convey political messages without any agenda,
he can do it in a way that toes around those landmines.
Axelrod’s not disappearing from the public eye, so the ending of Axe Files isn’t really a prompt for grieving; in fact, my first impression is that Axe Files ending this is a good thing: there were a few notable moments during electinon season, he’d be kicking the shit with Murphy and Heilemann on Hacks, and suddenly there’d be a CNN-related talking point (Kamala Harris’s first sit-down interview, her town hall, etc.) and Axelrod, given the terms of his contract with the network, couldn’t comment.
My guess: he’s moving in a more uninhibited direction with his career, his best work as a commentator still ahead.