Q&A: DAVID AXELROD
Transcript: David Axelrod On How Barack Obama Can Defeat Hillary Clinton

© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, February 8, 2008

National Journal's Linda Douglass sat down with David Axelrod for the Feb. 8 edition of "National Journal On Air." This is a transcript of their conversation. Audio of the full show is also available.

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Q: I want to welcome David Axelrod. He is the chief strategist for Barack Obama. Welcome, David.

Axelrod: Good to be here.

Q: So you have been getting letters, e-mails, perhaps phone requests from the Clinton campaign to participate in four more debates before the next few weeks are over. Why not do that? Why is that not good for the Democratic voters who clearly are torn between these two candidates?

Axelrod: Well, we plainly are going to debate. We've debated 18 times, so there's no doubt we're willing and eager to debate. We've debated more than any set of candidates has debated in any primary contest in the history of this party. So we're going to debate, but we'll set the schedule according to what is good for our campaign.

You know, the fact is that we want to go and meet voters. Senator Clinton has an advantage -- she is universally known, she has been on the scene for twenty years, and she is 100-percent known. We want to go and meet voters, do roundtables, do town hall meetings and the kinds of things we've been doing that have helped us grow in this campaign. It can't all be about debates, even though they have a newfound interest in them.

Q: As you know, Mark Penn, who likes to send out memos to all of us reporters -- one of the things that he has said in the last few weeks is that Barack Obama would be a riskier general election candidate because he has not been vetted. Do you think that Hillary Clinton has been sufficiently vetted?

Axelrod: Well, that's an interesting question. You know, first of all, I look forward to the collected memos of Mark Penn, because Mark's said a lot of things over the course of this campaign, and many of them have turned out not to be so. They've challenged us and will continue to challenge us, so I'm sure if there is vetting to do they are going to do it. And that is fine; we are prepared for that.

I think Senator Clinton goes into this election with some real vulnerabilities in terms of her standing, and we know that she is a polarizing figure in the country and that her ability to reach out to independent voters and disillusioned Republicans is far less than Senator Obama's, and we're going to need to do that to win. In terms of whether Senator Clinton has been vetted, there are all kinds of issues that I'm sure have yet to be explored.

Q: Such as?

Axelrod: Well, I think transparency is going to be an issue. I'm sure there's going to be eagerness to pore over these records of her White House years that so far have not been disgorged by the Clinton library, and other such questions. I think the Republican Party has expressed almost uniformly an interest in having her as the nominee, and they'd love to repeat a lot of the same controversies and explore new ones. And one of our points is, we can't afford, with all the issues we face in this country, to replay those same old battles. We've got to get past them, and try and focus on the country's problems instead of continuing the political wars we've seen in Washington for the last two decades.

Q: You know, Senator Obama said yesterday that the Republicans are probably prepared to back up with a truckload of dirt to use on her. What does that mean?

Axelrod: Well, again, I think that we both can expect very vigorous opposition research attacks. But the Republicans have focused before, and they will again, on a whole range of aspects of the questions that came up in the '90's, and we as a party don't need to go back to those controversies. They've made it clear that they want to run against her, and I'm sure they can tell you why.

Q: There was a memo that I gather was inadvertently released from your campaign -- Bloomberg News wrote about this -- which laid out a scenario in which there could be a tie for delegates between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and then this would all have to be decided by those 800 political insiders and politicians who are part of the superdelegates. Should that kind of power to decide who the nominee is be put into the hands of those people?

Axelrod: Well, first of all let me say, that wasn't for release and doesn't necessarily represent what we think the final scenario will be. There may well be a verdict before the convention. In terms of the superdelegates, I think all those superdelegates should be watching closely what is happening in this election, and who has the ability to bring more people to the Democratic ranks, who has the ability to get those crossover voters, to bring independents, to galvanize young people and expand our base so we're not in another situation as we've had in past elections, where we're in this sort of 50/50 situation and we have to try and eke out a win; we haven't done it the last couple of times. We have an opportunity here with Obama to build a coalition, a majority coalition that not only can win an election but can bring about change.

And by the way, Linda, I think the fact that Obama has done so well in so many of these so-called red states where Democrats have not done well, I think is a good auguring for the future, and that's why so many red state officials -- Governor Napolitano, and Sebelius, Governor Kaine in Virginia, and Senator Conrad in North Dakota and so many others -- have stepped forward to say, this is the kind of Democrat who can win and who also can help us in our states. That's the kind of judgment that the superdelegates should make.

Q: You know, there is going to be a dispute -- no question about it -- over what happens with Michigan and Florida, two states which voted but because they broke party rules, the votes really didn't count. Do you think Michigan and Florida should hold party caucuses in the next couple of months, to try to really select delegates in an additional electoral process, one other than the one that they had?

Axelrod: Well, that's a discussion they have to have with the DNC. But one thing is very clear, you can't have rules and then have those rules broken. None of us participated in the Michigan and Florida primaries and in fact, in Michigan Senator Obama wasn't even on the ballot, out of respect for the agreement that was made. And to assign delegates on the basis of those votes would be wholly inconsistent with the rules and with fairness, so some solution of the sort you are talking about certainly has appeal, but in any case I don't think you're going to have a resolution based on those nonbinding primaries in which most of the candidates didn't participate.

Q: And of course those are both contests that Hillary Clinton won.

Axelrod: Yeah, and I think there is a reason for that: because she -- as has been true everywhere -- she is sort of the incumbent in the race, the default candidate, the best-known candidate, and if there's no campaign she is likely to profit from that.

Q: Well, many hairpin turns ahead in this process, so try to get some sleep out there.

Axelrod: I've got that penciled in for mid-November.

Q: Thank you so much for joining us, David Axelrod.

Axelrod: Good to be with you.