David Axelrod (A.B.,'76) has been appointed Senior Advisor to President-elect Barack Obama. Axelrod was Obama's Chief Strategist during the presidential campaign and led Obama's 2004 Senate campaign.
Axelrod was born in New York and developed a taste for politics at an early age. After attending public high school in New York, he studied as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, majoring in political science. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1976.
While enrolled at the University of Chicago, Axelrod wrote for the Maroon and landed a job as a political columnist for the Hyde Park Herald. After graduation, he worked for the Chicago Tribune and became City Hall Bureau Chief and a political columnist. He was the youngest political writer and columnist in the paper's history.
In 1984, after eight years with the Tribune, Axelrod joined the campaign of Paul Simon, who was running for the U.S. Senate from Illinois. After Simon defeated the incumbent senator one year later in an upset, Axelrod founded Axelrod & Associates, a political consulting firm that is now known as AKP&D Message and Media.
While in college, Axelrod met his future wife, Susan Landau. In 1982, Landau received a Master's Degree in Business Administration/Health Service Administration from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business (then known as the Graduate School of Business). Susan was a founding member of Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization dedicated to finding a cure for epilepsy. She is now President of CURE.
Axelrod has helped a veritable who's who of leading Democrats run for office. With Obama's victory, Axelrod has cemented his position as one of the most successful political consultants of his time. His firm has worked on the campaigns of governors Eliot Spitzer (New York) and Deval Patrick (Massachusetts); senators Hillary Clinton (New York) and John Edwards (North Carolina); and Chicago mayors Harold Washington and Richard M. Daley, as well as scores of well-known Democrats.
—Prof. Chuan He
