Politics & Power Quote by David Axelrod

Axelrod is selling a political superstition on purpose: that competence is electable, that doing the work will magically resolve the polling problem. It reads like moral advice, but it functions as campaign armor. By insisting "if we do our job right" and then immediately banishing "polls", he’s trying to launder strategy into virtue - to make an electoral imperative sound like civic duty.

The sentence is a long, breathless braid of "if we" clauses, and that structure matters. It mimics governing as endurance: keep your head down, keep stacking priorities, don’t look up. The repetition of "keep worrying" reframes anxiety as responsibility, as if obsessive focus is the antidote to political volatility. He also narrows the policy universe to a curated checklist of middle-class stress points - health care, schooling, housing, college - not because those are the only issues that matter, but because they are the issues that can be narrated as kitchen-table realism. "Pillars" is the tell: a sturdy metaphor meant to imply consensus, permanence, and a shared definition of normal life.

The subtext is triage. Axelrod is a Democratic strategist from the Obama era, when governing was constantly measured against cable-news cycles and approval numbers. This kind of rhetoric tries to reassert legitimacy against that churn: focus on tangible benefits, and politics becomes downstream. "These things will take care of themselves" is the quiet sleight of hand - it pretends polarization, media incentives, and structural headwinds are secondary. It’s not naivete; it’s a message discipline tactic, designed to keep a coalition from panicking and a presidency from looking like it’s campaigning to survive.