‘Double Down’ Dishes on Rahm, Daley, and More Chicagoans in the White House

[mystery-ak]

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/Felsenthal-Files/November-2013/Double-Down-Dishes-on-Rahm-Bill-Daley-and-Other-Chicagoans-in-the-White-House/

‘Double Down’ Dishes on Rahm, Daley, and More Chicagoans in the White House
Carol Felsenthal
How the mayor, the ex-mayor’s brother, the First Lady, and others got along (or didn’t) behind the scenes.





Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Double Down, published Tuesday, has already garnered volumes of advance publicity.

Relying on pre-publication leaks, I wrote last week about Bill Daley’s gambit in 2011 to poll and focus-group test a possible swap of Hillary Clinton for Joe Biden as Obama’s 2012 running mate. Today I’m checking on other Chicagoans—warning: Bill Daley makes a return appearance here—who weave in and out of the bestselling (#4 on Amazon) account of the 2012 Obama/Romney battle.

Here’s a sample of the juiciest Chicago-related tidbits that Halperin/Heilemann [hereafter referred to as H/H] collected from the 500 interviews they conducted for the fast-moving, anecdote-packed, behind-the-scenes look at a campaign I thought I had figured out but really hadn’t.
 

David Axelrod
Obama’s long-time message guru, who arrived at the White House with the new President in 2009, described by H/H as recognizable by his “slouch[y] stance” and his “sauce-splattered tie.” Businessmen who felt dismissed by Obama’s team saw Axelrod, H/H write, as “a combination of Trotsky and Rasputin, spouting class warfare on TV.” The President and the First Lady viewed him as alarmingly disorganized, and the President, concluding that Axelrod was “burned out,” ordered him home to Chicago months before Axelrod was ready to leave the White House. According to H/H, Obama, who arguably owed his presidency to Axelrod, “… betrayed little emotion as he ushered [him] out the door.”


continued at link

[happyg]

Michelle is so hands-on with Obama, not out of love and respect, but she knows how stupid he is. She has to protect his every move to prevent him from messing up. Even so, she is not much smarter, so they both screw up on their own. Jarrett is there at the behest of Soros to keep them both in line.

[Chieftain]

Big deal.  Buncha gossip that doesn't tell us a damned thing about anything that really counts.

How about a tell-all from someone who knows what really happened during the Benghazi raid??

[Rapunzel]

Marty Nesbitt

Chicago businessman and the President’s best friend. When the job got Obama down, as it often did, Obama required Nesbitt’s companionship. In 2012, after performing miserably at the first debate in Denver, Obama unhappily was prepping for the second. The session went so poorly that his aides dubbed it the “Mock from Hell.”  The President was “disengaged and pedantic” during the practice and angry after it. His aides emerged “ashen [faced].” With Marty Nesbitt in tow, Obama returned to his “sprawling quarters” at a hotel in Williamsburg, Virginia “to watch football and play cards.”

H/H write that Michelle had instructed senior adviser David Plouffe that, during these debates which her husband despised and resented having to do, “if the President wants our chef there, he should be there; if he wants Marty Nesbitt there, he should be there. Barack’s food, downtime, exercise, sleep, lodging—all of it affects his frame of mind. Plouffe saluted sharply….” 

(Sidelight: Michelle also warned Plouffe that Barack “had to speak from the gut, in language that regular folks could understand … Michelle’s advisers paraphrased her advice as ‘It’s not about David Brooks; it’s about my mother.’” Michelle told “a small group of female bundlers” that her husband had lost the first debate because “Romney is a really good liar.”)