David Axelrod

David M. Axelrod (born February 22, 1955) is an American political consultant and analyst and former White House official. He is best known for being the chief strategist for Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. After Obama's election, Axelrod was appointed as Senior Advisor to the President. He left the position in early 2011 and became the Senior Strategist for Obama's successful re-election campaign in 2012. 

Axelrod wrote for the Chicago Tribune, and joined CNN as Senior Political Commentator in 2015. Currently, Axelrod serves as the director of the non-partisan University of Chicago Institute of Politics. His memoir is titled Believer: My Forty Years in Politics. Axelrod was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City, and grew up in its Stuyvesant Town area. He was raised in a liberal Jewish family and had his bar mitzvah ceremony at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Manhattan. 

His mother, Myril Bennett (née Davidson), was a journalist at PM, a liberal-leaning 1940s newspaper, and later an advertising executive at Young & Rubicam. His father, Joseph Axelrod, was a psychologist and avid baseball fan, who migrated from Eastern Europe to the United States at the age of eleven. He attended Public School 40 in Manhattan. Axelrod's parents separated when he was eight years old. In 2021, Axelrod disclosed in a CNN op-ed that his father suffered from severe clinical depression, unbeknownst at the time to the family, which led to his suicide when the younger Axelrod was 20.

Describing the appeal of politics, he told the Los Angeles Times, "I got into politics because I believe in idealism. Just to be a part of this effort that seems to be rekindling the kind of idealism that I knew when I was a kid, it's a great thing to do. So I find myself getting very emotional about it." At thirteen years old, he was selling campaign buttons for Robert F. Kennedy. 

After graduating from New York's Stuyvesant High School in 1972, Axelrod attended the University of Chicago, where he majored in political science. Axelrod described his childhood as "very turbulent", although he did not specify the exact details that elicited this characterization. As an undergraduate, Axelrod wrote for the Hyde Park Herald, covering politics, and earned an internship at the Chicago Tribune.