David Axelrod was a hugely consequential figure in the rise of Barack Obama, and he has been caught in a big lie. A former Chicago Tribune reporter, political consultant Axelrod latched onto Barack Obama as an ideal vehicle for a stratospheric political rise to power, and as his campaign “brain” accomplished that goal better than he could have hoped. 

Axelrod had already known Obama a decade when he began working for him in 2002, as the backbencher in the Illinois State Senate mapped out his campaign for Senator in 2004. A seat in the United States Senate would position Obama for national power, but it was far from a given that Obama would win, until something rather miraculous happened.  The GOP had an attractive and wealthy candidate in Jack Ryan, a man able to self-finance his campaign. But in a highly coincidental move, Axelrod’s old colleagues at the Chicago Tribune somehow persuaded a California court to open the confidential divorce records of Ryan, which contained salacious accusations of his wife, made as part of the divorce proceedings. As the Tribune itself anticipated, the disclosure was devastating, and Ryan withdrew and was replaced by a weak candidate, Alan Keyes, who went down to a big defeat, elevating Obama to the national stage.

Axelrod’s management of Obama’s presidential campaign is widely acknowledged to have been very skillful, if not brilliant. The selection of the vague, wide-open slogan “change” is credited to him, for example.

So David Axelrod can be acknowledged as one of the major forces helping Obama attain his position as POTUS. Now, why would his family background matter? After all, the sins of the father should not be the responsibility of the son, should they?

The problem is that Axelrod has been lying about it. He was, in fact a “red diaper baby,” raised by a Communist to achieve the goals of the Party.  Charles C. Johnson, in an exclusive report, provides both the evidence of Axelrod Senior’s membership, and of Axelrod Junior’s lies:

Axelrod briefly mentions his father’s Communist views in his book but only in passing and in a section about how he got to visit the former Soviet Union.

But the problem is that documentary evidence, a CPUSA membership list for its 1936 election, lists Axelrod’s father.

Moreover, Axelrod was close to his father, as he reveals in his book.

So why would Axelrod misrepresent his father, claiming that Dad would have registered as a Republican if he were really a communist? I suppose he will claim that his Dad, to whom he was close, lied to him. But he had to have known. After all, all those cell meetings take up a lot of time.