The Acts of ‘Axe’

“Today, Donald Trump is victorious, and Obama is the loser,” contends Tablet’s David Samuels. “In fact, he looks physically awful—angry and gaunt, after a summer and fall spent lecturing black men, and Americans in general, on their failure to vote enthusiastically enough for his chosen heir, Kamala Harris, the worst major party presidential candidate in modern American history.” On the other hand, Obama “didn’t simply back a losing horse.” Falling “in sudden defeat was the entire structure he [Obama] had erected over more than a decade, and which was to have been his legacy.” Samuels has a theory on how it all came about.

“Rapid-onset political enlightenment,” originated with David Axelrod, whose father was a psychologist and whose mother was a top executive at the Young & Rubicam ad agency. “Permission structures,” which derive from advertising, were Axelrod’s “secret sauce, the organizing concept by which he strategized campaigns for his clients.”

Axelrod needed to convince white voters to overcome their existing prejudices and vote for candidates they might define as “soft on crime” or “lacking competence.” This was first tested in Axelrod’s 1989 campaign for Mike White as mayor of Cleveland. He won “by convincing a mix of educated higher-income white voters to vote for the black candidate.” That was repeated in 2008 with Obama, who was then reelected in 2012. Last year, Samuels discussed POTUS 44’s legacy in “The Obama Factor,” a marathon interview with David Garrow.

In Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Garrow revealed that Obama’s Dreams from My Father was a novel, not an autobiography or memoir, and the author a “composite character.” Obama “wants people to believe his story,” Garrow explained, “For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him.”

Dreams lifts details from I Dreamed of Africa and African Nights by Italian writer Kuki Gallmann, a longtime resident of Kenya. Samuels spotted a scene right out of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, but it’s not just about plagiarism. The composite character had “turtles all the way down” in the White House and was still running the country.

“That’s something people still seem loathe to admit, even to themselves,” Samuels laments, “in part because it puts them in a state of dissonance with this new kind of controlled consensus that the press maintains, which is obviously garbage. But if you question it, you’re some kind of nut.” So it took guts for Samuels to admit, “there was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.” (emphasis added)

In this marathon interview, “Obama’s narrator” David Axelrod comes up only once, and nothing from either man about “permission structures.” That invites a look at what “Axe,” as he is known to clients, had to say about the composite character. In the 2015 Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, Axe left the key by the front door.

His father Joseph Axelrod fled anti-Jewish violence in eastern Europe and in America listed his political party as “Communist.” David’s mother Myril wrote for the leftist PM, home to Stalinist scribes such as I.F. Stone, a Soviet agent who claimed South Korea invaded North Korea. Myril left journalism for advertising and her son credits “much of my professional success to the drive and skills I drew from her.”

Axe left journalism for advertising and “on the whole, I was surprised at how easy it had been to trade in those tools for a new career.” The new ad man became communications director for Sen. Paul Simon but “I frankly doubted America was ready for a jug-eared bow-tied liberal as president,” particularly one who worked on a balanced budget agreement with President Reagan. The ad man wanted someone on the far reaches of the left, and that would take some work.

For a presidential candidate, Axe contends, authenticity is an “indispensable requirement” and “biography is foundational.” The former journalist “felt more comfortable, and proficient at, telling stories than I did creating the ads that were state-of-the-art in Washington.” In due course, Axe teamed with his dream far-left candidate, as David Garrow discovered in his research for Rising Star.

“They’re terrified of people poking around Obama’s life,” a reporter told Garrow.  “The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it’s not entirely true. So they have to be protective of the crown jewels.” And as Garrow told Samuels, the composite character “wants people to believe his story.”

Dreams introduces Barry Soetoro, stepson of the Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, who his mother, Ann Dunham, married in 1965. Readers also meet Barry’s beloved “Frank,” the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, disguised as a happy-drunk poet. As Garrow explained in Rising Star, “Davis’ Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive.” In the style of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), the composite character could have simply adopted an Africanized name. Instead, he claimed to be the actual son of the Kenyan Barack H. Obama, once a student at the University of Hawaii.

By the end of Dreams, the Kenyan is a nameless “Old Man.” He passed away in 1982 and in all his writings from 1958-1964, now housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, Obama’s supposed father makes not a single mention of an American wife and son. So no surprise that the composite character president never read them.

Instead of an authentic biography, Axelrod and his client crafted a fake story that readers and voters were simply to believe. The unbelievers were targeted with powerful incantation: racism.

“Personal attacks against Obama” Axelrod explains, “have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African American.” Criticism of Obamacare, “was rooted in race: a deep-seated resentment of the idea of the black man with the Muslim name in the White House. The facts notwithstanding, to them, health reform was just another giveaway to poor black people at their expense.”

And so on, enforced by sycophantic media, with McCain, Romney and millions of other mainstream Republicans falling obligingly in line. That enabled the composite character to fundamentally transform American into a place where the outgoing president selects his successor and deploys the FBI, Justice Department, and CIA against her opponent. Obamacare was a device to transform the nation into a place where instead of getting what you want you get only what the government wants you to have. The composite character was the Pangloss president, exhorting the people not to believe the evidence they see with their own eyes.

That continued under the Pétain-like president, Joe Biden, a waxworks figurehead for the composite character’s third term, as Samuels recognized, which is the disaster we are living through now. David Axelrod was the major voice urging Biden to step down from the 2024 presidential race on behalf of the composite character’s choice, Kamala Harris. Her loss was a “sudden defeat” for the fictitious character’s entire structure. That’s not what Axelrod envisioned back in 2015.

“Few of the decisions he [Obama] had made would satisfy the politics of the moment,” Axe wrote, “but at home and abroad, Obama was playing a longer game.” So the disaster we are living through now is what the composite character had in mind all along. His entire structure has suffered a “sudden defeat,” but parts of it remain. In the intelligence lexicon, for example, a fake biography such as Dreams from My Father is known as a “legend.”

Obama’s pick for CIA director was John Brennan, a voter for the Communist Gus Hall. In Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad, Brennan, confirms the fundamental transformation of the CIA into a partisan political force. Witness Brennan and other CIA bosses contending that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation,” which they all knew was false.

Brennan gets support from Neutering the CIA: Why U.S. Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences. According to author John Gentry, a former CIA analyst, the intel forces that triggered the attack on Trump “remain intact, available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president,” which has now happened.

American voters gave Donald Trump full permission to downsize the deep state, and the CIA and FBI are sure to push back the hardest. Trump has survived two assassination attempts, but it would be foolish to deny the possibility of others, particularly before January 20.

In the style of Kash Patel’s plans for the FBI, Trump would do well to make CIA headquarters a “museum of the deep state” and develop an agency that will truly protect the nation. In the year to come, we’ll have to see what happens.

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