WASHINGTON – First it was President Obama’s zig-zagging leadership on Syria coming in for bad reviews – but now a new campaign tell-all book is portraying constant infighting and resentment within Obama’s vaunted reelection campaign.
The book, by former Newsweek correspondent Richard Wolffe, describes longtime campaign guru David Axelrod and spokesman Robert Gibbs as being “pushed out” of the White House in the first term, despite the official statements at the time that they were resting up before the 2012 campaign.
“He needs the guys to play cards and golf, and tell him where he’s going next and why,” vented a former aide. ‘But beyond that, it’s what function you have. And if you can’t fulfill that function anymore, or someone can do it better, you’re gone.'”
“The president broke Axe and Robert’s hearts,” said one member of Obama’s inner circle, according to the book. Obama “doesn’t need anyone. [Axelrod] Axe and Gibbs were effectively fired. He owes everything to Axe. Everything. He’d never have gotten anywhere without him.”
Axelrod, who now runs a political center at the University of Chicago, reportedly irked top campaign officials by hiring a lawyer to negotiate a lucrative deal to get a cut of campaign TV ad buys.
Obama’s reelection campaign manager, Jim Messina “told friends that he was acting under the president’s direction, which he characterized like this: ‘I want everybody treated fairly, but I don’t want anybody to get rich on this. They’re gonna get rich on the books they write afterwards.'”
The overlapping roles led to conflict, according to the book, called “The Message: the Reselling of President Obama,” which was excerpted in the Daily Beast.
According to the book, “Axelrod repeatedly tried to convince other senior aides to bypass Messina, and they believed he was trying to oust Messina altogether. Axelrod had never wanted him to get the job in the first place.”
Longtime adviser Robert Gibbs got paid $15,000 a month but was far from the center of the action.
“We paid him to do absolutely nothing,” a senior Obama aide told Wolffe. “What he wanted was to hang out with Barack Obama, and there was no way he was going to be allowed on the plane.”
According to another excerpt, on MSNBC, Obama wasn’t always thrilled with his operation, such as when Axelrod got heckled on TV during a speech in Boston on opponent Romney’s home turf.
“The president felt like things needed to be tighter,” said a senior Obama aide.
According to the book, advisers David Plouffe and White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer thought deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter – a frequent face of the campaign on TV — “micromanaged too much, had delusions of power” and “strayed out of her lane.” The statement, like many assertions in the book, doesn’t have any attribution.
When Cutter said Romney may have committed a felony by not fully disclosing his role at Bain Capital, the remark drew blowback in the press. Chief of Staff Jack Lew “believed the felony accusation was unbecoming, unpresidential, and strategically unwise,” according to the book.
Cutter clashed with Axelrod, and some people wanted her out of the campaign – though the first lady wouldn’t stand for it.
“Given Michelle Obama, she’s not going anywhere,” said a source described as one of the “plotters.”