At a time when members of the opposing party rarely appear together on television, most political interviews are fleeting and the elections may have doomed to failure last digital squareDavid Axelrod’s podcast was an oasis.
Now, after 605 extraordinary shows in more than nine years, Axelrod concludes his program with interviewing his fellow ChicagoanRahm Emanuel.
I’m sad to see “The Ax Files” go away, in part because it’s more essential now than ever.
Yes, it was respectful and generated more light than heat. There were no food fights. But I come to praise Axe, not bury him in a shroud of past nostalgia for civil discourse.
What made the show so compelling (and unique for this period) was that it held candid, deeply personal and extensive interviews with leading figures from both parties. Where else can you find that combination today?
political interviews are fleeting
I should reveal here that Axelrod also had a variety of media figures, along with other walks of life, and I attended a session in 2016. That’s the right word because the show was always a therapy session and a journalistic investigation in equal parts.
Axelrod has no psychiatric training (that I know of), but he was once an excellent political reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He has ink in his DNA and that manifested itself in each program, when he tried to give news or at least provoke reflection. I always realized that I hated shows where their guests appeared with talking points. (I’ve been there!)
But these were not interrogations. Axelrod usually began interviews by asking people about their origins (“tell me about your parents”) and where they grew up. The son of an immigrant, Axelrod would invariably find common ground with those just a generation or two from the flame of freedom, regardless of their politics.
Which explains why the program was so vital. It revealed people as fully formed, complex and, yes, contradictory human beings. If you were looking for a red or blue tribe cartoon to confirm your preferences, you had plenty of other options.
Axelrod is partisan and deeply alarmed by the restoration of President-elect Donald Trump. But I know he was proud of how many Republicans said yes, in some cases reluctantly, and sat down for a probing interview with a former Democratic strategist and architect of Barack Obama’s political rise.
If we’re honest, these Republicans agreed in part because Axelrod is an elite figure on the American political scene and the invitation conferred a level of status on the guest. He’s been in the proverbial smoke-filled room (and even in some places in Illinois that weren’t) and political practitioners of all stripes respected that background.
However, Republicans also said yes because Axelrod is, to borrow a word from his religious tradition, a mensch.
He would challenge his guests but would never sandbag them. The point was for people to tell their stories, reveal something about themselves and launch themselves into the difficult task of discussing what politics is today. It was fitting that two of Axelrod’s final interviews were with two of the most prominent Republican figures in this year’s campaign: Trump. campaign co-director Chris LaCivita and CNN commentator Scott Jennings, who has become something of a Axelrod’s protégé (in the personal sense, not political, if you’re listening to Kentucky Republican primary voters).
Who were these two figures that so many people read or heard about this year? Well, if you listen to their appearances on “Ax Files,” you’ll know a lot about what shaped them.
There was something else that made the show, like all the best podcasts, so captivating: Axelrod respected the intelligence of his audience. This wasn’t something level 101. If you can’t understand why have Abner Mikva, 90, the legendary Chicago legislator and juriston the podcast a few months before Mikva’s passing was so moving that maybe the show wasn’t for you.
To be unsubtle about it: The jump from much of the TV news nonsense that passes as political information to podcasts like Ax Files was similar to the transition of kids and teens from TV sitcoms with funny themes to premium shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. Who could come back? Who would want to do it?
Take Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who appears on television news. Well, you know what Sanders doesn’t talk about in a seven-minute interview? How there were three names that weren’t talked about in his childhood home in Brooklyn: Hitler, Stalin and Walter O’Malley, who moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles.
Oh, and he also wouldn’t have had the same voting record on guns had he represented his childhood home instead of rural Vermont.
Sanders revealed this in 2015 when He was Axelrod’s first guest. He also spoke about his student activism for civil rights at the University of Chicago, Axelrod’s alma mater and home of the Institute of Politics he founded.
“That capsule set the tone,” Axelrod told me this week.
He also got the late Senator John McCain speak revealingly about all the time McCain spent visiting, chatting and reading Arizona news clips with an ailing Mo Udall, the former Arizona lawmaker who spent his final days confined to a nursing home. Without saying it, because it doesn’t have to be, can you imagine a prominent Republican showing up every week to comfort a prominent Democrat suffering from an illness?
Axelrod knows politics isn’t a poof, and even though he’s out of the campaign business, he’s close enough to it to pay the price for some hard feelings. That’s why you won’t find the current president in the Ax File archives: President Joe Biden was the only major Democratic contender in 2020 to skip the program, a slight rooted in the (now revived!) hostilities between Bidenworld and the Obama’s orbit. .
But if Axelrod’s proximity to the upper echelons of politics had some side effects on his reserves, his prominence also ensured some of his best results.
My favorite, by far, was the notable conversation of 2016 that he had with a basketball legend, Bill Walton, who left too soon. Walton seemed to me to be a great American character: his devotion to the Grateful DeadThe West and John Wooden need no further details, and Axelrod met his match that day. Do yourself a favor and enjoy his talk. You’ll get through it and feel exhausted and satisfied, like you just played a three-on-three game against Big Red.
I listened to it, as I did to many of Axelrod’s capsules, during a long trip. The good guys passed the time. The big ones made me feel like I had pulled up a chair for them. your table at Manny’s Deli and I was eavesdropping on two people shooting shit about half a Reuben and a bowl of matzah ball soup.
Which isn’t to say that Axelrod showed up like Larry King talking to Kato Kaelin, unprepared and just asking whatever came to mind while he took a few calls from Walla Walla and beyond to fill the hour.
Axelrod read deeply about his guests and often surprised them with how much he knew about their background. It took him hours of work, so I understand why he wants to end up with over 600 under his belt. Especially when he has a separate podcast, talking about kibitzing, with Mike Murphy and John Heilemann. Barrel Tricks.
But I will miss the “Ax Files” and I know others will too.
Introducing Emanuel on his latest show, Axelrod said his goal had been to offer “a small antidote to the crude nature of today’s politics and social media culture that so often reduces people to negative caricatures and robs us of our common humanity.”
Mission accomplished, brother.