David Axelrod is warning that it’s time to take Donald Trump more seriously.
In a New York Times op-ed published Monday, the former senior adviser to President Obama likened the rise of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate to the rise of Trump, and said Trump fits the profile of someone who could be the next president.
“Here’s the gist. Open-seat presidential elections are shaped by perceptions of the style and personality of the outgoing incumbent. Voters rarely seek the replica of what they have,” Axelrod wrote. “They almost always seek the remedy, the candidate who has the personal qualities the public finds lacking in the departing executive.”
Axelrod added that if he had “only reread my own words, written nine years ago to another aspiring candidate, I would have taken the Trump candidacy more seriously from the start.”
Axelrod argued that just as a “young” and “energetic” John F. Kennedy succeeded a “grandfatherly” and “somnolent” Dwight D. Eisenhower, so did “puritanical” Jimmy Carter in defeating “the unelected incumbent Gerald R. Ford, who bore the burden of the morally bankrupt Nixon era.”
“So who among the Republicans is more the antithesis of Mr. Obama than the trash-talking, authoritarian, give-no-quarter Mr. Trump?” he asked. “Relentlessly edgy, confrontational and contemptuous of the niceties of governance and policy making, Mr. Trump is the perfect counterpoint to a president whose preternatural cool and deliberate nature drive his critics mad.”
However, Trump would have a tougher fight in the general election than Obama did, Axelrod added.
“It’s far too early to picture the iconic Trump logo affixed to the White House portico,” he argued. “But as the most ardent and conspicuous counterpoint to the man in the White House today, the irrepressible Mr. Trump already has defied all expectations.”
With a few days until the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, Trump leads the GOP field with 34.6 percentage points in a RealClearPolitics average of polls.
