I start teaching again next week. It’ll be my fourteenth year teaching strategic political communication at GWU. Consider this post a bit of a semester warm-up for the stratcomm course. (It’s important that old men like me remember to stretch and drink lots of water.)
When I started teaching at GWU, David Axelrod was a Pretty Big Deal. He was the Obama campaign’s Chief Strategist, and a senior advisor to the President. Axelrod is fundamentally a comms guy, so you would expect him — at least back then — not to sound like a complete and utter novice about communication strategy.
Apparently either the times have changed or Axelrod has changed, because oh brother he does not know what he’s talking about anymore. See below:
Axelrod, on X-the-everything-app, embarrassing himself in public
This is… really quite a take. Points for originality, I guess? Maybe Axelrod is auditioning for a columnist gig at the Washington Post or something. It takes real effort to be this wrong in so few words.
For those who have been taking a break from the mid-August news, he’s referring to a speech that Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff gave over the weekend. Here’s the passage:
“While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings, he golfs, and trades stocks… He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
The “Natalie” in question is Natalie Harp, a Trump aide who apparently never leaves his side. She is 35 years old. She looks a bit like his daughter Ivanka. Other Trumpworld figures are leaking all kinds of stories about her.
The line could have passed unnoticed, if Trump’s comms team had any discipline or basic sense. But instead, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung responded on X by calling Ossoff “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” and other Trump attachés lined up to lob middle-school taunts at Ossoff. And so now we are on day four of this story. If you type “Natalie” into Google, “Natalie Harp” is the first autocomplete option.” [Note to Cheung: you are world-historically bad at your job, and I love that for you. Never, ever change.]
Anyway, back to Axelrod, who insists that the with Natalie bit was “gratuitous and unnecessary.” He says the line “juiced the virality” and “thrilled some in the base” but “distracted and detracted from the power of the message.”
…
Axelrod, my man, what the fuck are you doing?
Sheriff Beshir, Widow’s Bay, episode 4. (Y’all need to watch this show, btw.)
Let’s review: would Ossoff’s line have been better or worse without those two words?
Well, the message (“Trump doesn’t want to do the job”) would’ve stayed the same. But only the people attending his Georgia rally would have heard the message. Including “with Natalie” massively increased the agenda-setting power of his statement. Those two words have left the national pundit-class spending four days talking about Trump spending time with Natalie.
It’s pretty well-established by now that attention is the primary, scarce currency of political media. Axelrod can decry that if he likes. I might even agree with him. But it’s a mistake to dismiss something as just “juicing the virality.” Virality is substantively pretty damn important, and ignoring it is a great way to render yourself completely irrelevant.
Axelrod seems to think that Ossoff was undignified, and “playing to the base” with his remarks. That’s… plain silly. One of the most basic lessons in political communication (from Chicago’s own Saul Alinsky, no less!) is that “The Action is in the Reaction.” The point of referencing Natalie isn’t to get lowest-common-denominator jeers from the base. The point is to prompt a total meltdown from your undisciplined opponent, further strengthening your message and extending the clock.
That’s good for the broader message. It’s good for Ossoff’s national profile. And it’s bad for Trump. Full marks all around.
I could maybe understand Axelrod’s perspective if this remark had been part of a nationally-televised Presidential Debate. If the spotlight was already on Ossoff-vs-Trump, and the rest of the line was already so strong, then I could see why he might think “we don’t need that bit. Cut it.” (Even then, I don’t know that I’d agree with him. I would at least get where he was coming from, though.)
But Axelrod seems to have forgotten that most political communication happens in the absence of the national spotlight. And he seems completely unaware that the agenda-setting power of the mainstream media, circa 2026, is much degraded from his heyday (2008-2012). The best, most cutting critique of the Trump administration really isn’t worth much if no one hears or responds to it.
This is all pretty basic stuff. Axelrod surely knows better. I don’t know what he’s doing here. …Maybe this is bit of stentorian-centrist signaling is meant to impress the higher-ups at CNN or something. But it’s embarrassing for him, and instructive for the rest of us.
Don’t beclown yourself in public. People will notice. And then they’ll think less of you for it.