Politics & Power Quote by David Axelrod

Politics runs on the fiction that outcomes were always obvious, and Axelrod is puncturing that myth with a strategist's wink. By anchoring the claim to a concrete timeline - "two years before" - he’s not just bragging about Obama’s improbable rise; he’s reminding the audience how quickly the electorate’s sense of inevitability can be rewritten. The line is a subtle act of power: if prediction is the currency of pundit culture, Axelrod is saying most of the market was broke.

The specific intent is defensive and legitimizing at once. Defensive, because Obama’s victory was often recast as either a fluke of 2008’s chaos or the byproduct of charisma alone. Axelrod reframes it as something that overcame real skepticism, which implies disciplined organizing, message control, and coalition-building. Legitimizing, because improbability becomes proof of merit: the system didn’t hand it to him; the campaign took it.

The subtext is also a quiet indictment of political gatekeeping. “You nor anyone else” isn’t just rhetorical emphasis; it’s a finger pointed at insiders who treated an outsider-ish candidate - a relatively new senator with a different biography - as non-viable. Axelrod turns that dismissal into a narrative asset: the very fact that elites couldn’t imagine it becomes evidence that the campaign expanded the realm of the possible.

Context matters: post-election storytelling is always a battle over authorship. Axelrod’s sentence claims the win for strategy and movement, not hindsight and mythmaking, while keeping Obama’s improbability at the center - a brand, a lesson, and a shield.