Axelrod Cashes In

From Kenneth P. Vogel at Politico:
As he prepared to take a job in the White House at the end of last year, David Axelrod sold the political consulting firm that helped elect President Barack Obama for $2 million to a group of consultants who helped steer Obama’s campaign. According to a disclosure form released Friday evening by the White House, the firm, AKP&D Message & Media, paid him $897,000 last year, when it had basically turned itself into an arm of the Obama campaign, which paid the company $2.5 million.

The disclosure indicates that Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe — the "P" in AKP&D and still an influential political consultant for Obama and the Democratic National Committee — was not among the buyers, though he’ll remain a senior adviser to the firm. Instead, Axelrod reported the new owner is a "newly formed S corporation” owned by Obama campaign vets John Kupper, John Del Cecato and Larry Grisolano. Kupper and Del Cecato — the "K" and "D," respectively — handled research and for the campaign and also wrote many of its ads. Grisolano is a Los Angeles-based strategist who handled direct mail for Obama’s campaign.

Axelrod’s disclosure offers a peek inside the business model he used to create a Chicago-based consulting powerhouse, which included both AKP&D and ASK Public Strategies. ASK, which specialized in corporate public relations, paid him partnership income of $152,000 last year, according to the disclosure, even though he had taken a leave of absence to work on the campaign. Axelrod sold his share of ASK to Kupper and Eric Sedler for $1 million at the end of last year. The firm became the source of some controversy during the presidential campaign, when The Washington Post reported that in 2006, Michelle Obama urged the University of Chicago’s hospital, where she served as an executive, to hire ASK to drum up community support for a controversial urban health initiative.

The Obama team disputed the Post’s account, asserting that someone else at the hospital initiated ASK’s hiring. A March BusinessWeek story highlighted how ASK established front groups for corporate giants, including Madison Square Garden and ComEd, to help sway public opinion on controversial initiatives in New York and Illinois, respectively. Entitled “The Secret Side of David Axelrod,” the story asserted that the firm was a master of “Astroturf organizing" — a practice the good government groups with which Obama worked closely in the Illinois Legislature and U.S. Senate have lambasted as a way to skirt lobbying laws. Additionally, New York State lobbying records obtained by POLITICO show that Madison Square Garden paid ASK $1.16 million to lobby in 2004 — the biggest lobbying contract of the year in the state.

Sedler in a November interview with POLITICO disputed that ASK engages in Astroturf lobbying and also asserted that, though ASK had to register as a lobby shop in New York, it actually didn’t lobby public officials, only produced advertisements on matters of public policy debate.

Note that this Axelrod megabucks disclosure was released on a Friday night while the entire Obama team was in Europe. This was calculated so as night to gain much attention.

Don't be fooled: While lambasting corporate titans and setting up strawmen, Obama's team and all the other powerful Dems running the country are now raking it in.

Meanwhile, the rest of us get to muddle through.

Passive Aggressive

Does Barack Obama believe that Geraldine Ferraro should have been fired (or forced to step down) as Hillary's "Honorary New York Leadership Council Chair" because she said "if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position"?
Obama won't say. He will imply, of course. But he won't say.
"I'll leave that to the Clinton campaign," Obama says. But then he adds that when people associated with his campaign have made objectionable comments, they were fired.
Ferraro says the whole thing was cooked up by Obama's guru David Axelrod and she's probably right. She notes that hers was an offhand comment first offered in an interview with an obscure publication. "They have people who troll the internet overnight for stuff like this and then they feed what they found to the broader media if they thing it will advance their cause," Ferraro says.
But surely Obama wouldn't know about any of that.
He's far too busy trying to Bring Us Together. And when stuff like this happens it's totally on the perpetrators. Get it?
There seems to be something disturbingly passive-aggressive about Barack Obama. I suspect it's a learned behavior; something that goes back a long way. And it's tiresome, and ultimately cowardly. There, I've said it.
As for Ferraro, she refuses to apologize because she feels she has nothing to apologize for. She compares Obama to herself in 1984 and freely acknowledges she would never have been nominated to run for the Vice Presidency had she been a man.
In fact, Ferraro likes Obama and suggested she was trying to pay him a compliment. But, as things turn out, that may be a very risky business these days.
Read ferraro's complete letter of resignation here.