Samuels, Axelrod, and the Composite Character

A sequel to our previous note about "Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment"

As Steve noted, David Samuels’ “Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment” is generating a lot of buzz, with “a powerful ‘field theory’ of the subtle grand strategy of the Obama years to divide America and advance the fortunes of the cultural left.” There’s more to it that people should know.

Samuels traces the rapid-onset enlightenment to David Axelrod, whose father was a psychologist and mother a top executive at the Young & Rubicam ad agency. “Permission structures,” which derive from advertising, were Axelrod’s “secret sauce, the organizing concept by which he strategized campaigns for his clients.” Foremost among them is POTUS 44 and “The Obama Factor,” Samuels August 2, 2023 interview with David Garrow also generated plenty of buzz.

In Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Garrow revealed that Obama’s Dreams from My Father was a novel, not an autobiography or memoir, and the author a “composite character.” Obama “wants people to believe his story,” Garrow explained, “for me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction – oh God, did that infuriate him.” For Samuels, “there was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now,” and the fictitious character was still running the country through “turtles all the way down” in the Biden White House.

Axelrod came up only once in the interview, and nothing from either man about “permission structures.” That invites a look at what Axelrod had to say about the composite character in his 2015 Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.

His father Joseph Axelrod listed his political party as “Communist” and his mother Myril wrote for the leftist PM, home to Stalinist scribes such as I.F. Stone, a Soviet agent who claimed South Korea invaded North Korea. Myril left journalism for advertising and son David credits “much of my professional success to the drive and skills I drew from her.”

“Axe,” as he is known to clients, left journalism for advertising and “on the whole, I was surprised at how easy it had been to trade in those tools for a new career.” The new ad man became communications director for Sen. Paul Simon, but as Axe explains, “I frankly doubted America was ready for a jug-eared bow-tied liberal as president.” The ad-man looked to the far reaches of the left, and that would take some work.

For a presidential candidate, Axelrod contends, authenticity is an “indispensable requirement” and “biography is foundational.” The former journalist “felt more comfortable, and proficient at, telling stories than I did creating the ads that were state-of-the-art in Washington.” In due course, Axelrod teamed with the dream far-left candidate, as David Garrow discovered in his research for Rising Star.

“They’re terrified of people poking around Obama’s life,” a reporter told Garrow. “The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it’s not entirely true. So they have to be protective of the crown jewels.” And as Garrow told Samuels, the composite character “wants people to believe his story.”

Dreams introduces Barry Soetoro, stepson of the Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro his mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. Readers also meet Barry’s beloved “Frank,” the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, disguised as a happy-drunk poet. As Garrow explained in Rising Star, “Davis’ Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive.” In the style of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), the composite character could have simply adopted an Africanized name. Instead he claimed to be the actual son of the Kenyan Barack H. Obama, once a student at the University of Hawaii.

By the end of Dreams, the Kenyan is a nameless “Old Man.” He passed away in 1982 and in all his writings from 1958-1964, now housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, the Kenyan makes not a single mention of an American wife and son. So no surprise that the composite character president never read them.

“Permission structures” aside Axelrod and his client crafted a fake story voters were simply to believe. Axe bundled the evangel with a powerful incantation: racism.

“Personal attacks against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African American,” Axelrod explains. Criticism of Obamacare, “was rooted in race: a deep-seated resentment of the idea of the black man with the Muslim name in the White House. The facts notwithstanding, to them, health reform was just another giveaway to poor black people at their expense.” And so on, enforced by sycophantic media, with McCain, Romney and millions of others falling in line.

That enabled the composite character to transform America into, as David Samuels said, the disaster that we are living through now. The election of Donald Trump may change that reality but with the Dictatorship of the Subjunctive Mood (DSM) still prevailing on the left, storyteller David Axelrod probably isn’t done. See this writer’s Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation and Yes I Con: United Fakes of America.