Somewhere out there in the great political beyond, Millard Fillmore is grinning from ear to ear.

America’s 13th president and later a failed Know-Nothing Party candidate for the same office in 1856 must be all smiles as he watches David Axelrod put a new twist on the old Nativist Party members’ response to questions about their activities: “I know nothing.” Axelrod, who has been President Obama’s chief political strategist since the 2008 presidential campaign, was charged with finding a strategy to change the focus of the 2010 election to something, anything, other than the chief executive’s failed record on taxes, spending and the economy.