David Axelrod, the great strategist who masterminded President Barack Obama’s historic election campaigns, sits down with Emmy Award-winning NPR host Michel Martin to discuss his years as a young journalist, political consultant, and ultimately senior adviser to the president. From a young journalist in 1970s and 80s Chicago—where he reported on the dissolution of the last of the big city political machines—to his twenty-year friendship with Obama, to serving during two wars and an economic disaster, Axelrod offers a rich account of the man and the mind behind some of the greatest political changes of the last decade.

This event took place at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.