Obama U

We’ve been posting regular updates on the unprecedented run of Obama Administration veterans who have decamped for academe but the University of Chicago just landed a very big one. “After serving with distinction as an adviser to the last two Democratic presidents and many other holders of high political office, David Axelrod now hopes to inspire a new generation of recruits to public service,” Peter Monaghan writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Until early last year, Mr. Axelrod was a senior adviser to a friend of 20 years, Barack Obama.”

“He then became a top strategist for the president’s re-election campaign, just as he had been a key player in then-Senator Obama’s 2008 presidential run. But Mr. Axelrod, who is 57, will shift gears on January 1, when he becomes the inaugural director of the University of Chicago’s new, nonpartisan Institute of Politics. There, he says by phone, ‘the most important thing I can impart is how essentially important the public arena is.’”

Oh, he could probably come up with a more interesting lecture series than that. “Meanwhile, as extensively detailed in my book Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America, the only reason Obama became a U.S. senator — allowing him to run for president — is that David Axelrod pulled sealed divorce records out of a hat, first, against Obama’s Democratic primary opponent, and then against Obama’s Republican opponent,” Ann Coulter wrote in a column which appeared in 2011. “One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was way down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader.”

“But then The Chicago Tribune — where Axelrod used to work — began publishing claims that Hull’s second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.”

“From then until Election Day, Hull was embroiled in fighting the allegation that he was a ‘wife beater.’ He and his ex-wife eventually agreed to release their sealed divorce records. His first ex-wife, daughters and nanny defended him at a press conference, swearing he was never violent. During a Democratic debate, Hull was forced to explain that his wife kicked him and he had merely kicked her back.”

“Hull’s substantial lead just a month before the primary collapsed with the nonstop media attention to his divorce records. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.”

“Luckily for Axelrod, Obama’s opponent in the general election had also been divorced.”

 

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.