Axelrod: ‘Take charge of your own future’

David Axelrod is focused on November and the four years that could potentially follow. He hopes young people, however, have their sights set further into the future.

Axelrod, the chief campaign strategist for President Obama’s re-election bid, spoke to a full house at the Krasa Student Center at Benedictine University as part of the Center for Civic Leadership’s “Presidential Election Series 2012” program.

And while telling the audience how he grew from a young boy in New York City stumping for a charismatic mayoral candidate into what some have called the nation’s most astute political strategist, he had one message for the students in the room.

“All I can do is remind young people how much is at stake. After all, the future that we’re debating is largely the future that young people are going to live in,” Axelrod said

while rattling off issues like college affordability and high-end job creation. “Whatever your concerns are, this is a very pivotal election so my challenge to young people is ‘Take charge of your own future. It really does make a difference.’ I deliver that message wherever I go. I think it’s very, very important.”

Axelrod himself, can tell you the very day in which he got hooked on public service. He was 5 years old on Oct. 27, 1960, when his caretaker took him to New York City and stood him up on a mailbox so he could hear and see John F. Kennedy.

“I was 5, and I didn’t understand a lot of what he was saying, but it seemed really important and excited and from that moment on I was hooked,” he said. “By the time I was 9, I was handing out leaflets in our community for Robert Kennedy, who was running for the U.S. Senate in New York.”

After college, he spent eight years at a Chicago newspaper to save his “passion for politics.” But in 1984, his career took another turn when the late U.S. Sen. Paul Simon sought his help to win his first U.S. Senate seat.

“It was then that I determined I could make a living doing strategy and media for campaigns,” he said.

Axelrod gained a national reputation for helping elect African-American politicians, including the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, who became the city’s first black mayor in 1983. He also served as a top adviser to former President Bill Clinton.

In 2004 he reconnected with Obama, whom he had befriended in 1992. Obama was considered a long shot for the U.S. Senate in 2004, but Axelrod said that was a challenge he needed to “recharge” his idealism.

“I genuinely believed in Barack. I saw in him some of the same qualities I saw in Paul Simon, the Kennedys and leaders who entered public life not just to be something but to do something and to make a difference,” Axelrod said. “I though if I could somehow, in some way, help him get elected to the United States Senate, that I would be making a positive difference so I signed up.”

Four years later, Obama was elected president and was quickly faced with one of the country’s worst economic collapses and a country in the midst of two wars. Axelrod is now focused on getting Obama re-elected. He accepted the challenge again because Obama, he said, is a living example of a young person who took control of his future.

“I don’t think there’s a higher calling. I believe deeply in public service and we so desperately need our young people to be committed to public service because they need to help shape the future in which they’re going to live,” he said.

Benedictine plans to invite a representative of the Republican Party to speak at the university in the fall, once the nominee is selected.