The man who did more than anyone to put Barack Obama in the Oval Office (other than Obama himself) has written a highly revealing campaign memoir, appropriately titled "Believer."
The president's prime political strategist, fellow Chicagoan David Axelrod, lets readers in on many of the secret decisions that put Mr. Obama where he is today. Along with it he offers a confession of his personal esteem, although that does not bar him from revealing Obama's occasional churlishness and impatience, belying the president's image as Mr. Cool.
Mr. Axelrod, a onetime political reporter for the Chicago Tribune, retains his journalist's eye for the significant as well as for the defining elements of the story. He paints Mr. Obama's historic route to the White House as one of daring, pluck and luck.
Above all, he reveals their mutual understanding of the presidential quest as a grinding marathon requiring not only endurance but also astute pacing and the ability to shift gears as opportunity offers and political error demands.
Mr. Axelrod casts his colleagues in the Obama campaign as a band of believers who took the ride out of personal conviction that their candidate actually could change the way Washington worked, while they were perhaps too optimistic about the willingness of the opposition party to come to the dance.
Beyond Obama's achievements in office so far -- including, notably, the Affordable Care Act, despite all the bumps in the road to implementation -- Mr. Axelrod acknowledges a central factor along the way. That is the manner in which former President George W. Bush and his disastrous economic and foreign policies held the Obama administration hostage.
From the very start of his presidency, Mr. Obama was obliged to divert major energies and resources to recovery from the Great Recession and resolving Mr. Bush's reckless war of choice in Iraq.
The nation publicly celebrated the milestone of a first African-American president. But the opposition party in Congress dug in single-mindedly, denying him any semblance of bipartisan support, deepening the task of climbing out of the twin ditches of a stalled economy and foreign wars.
For all that, Mr. Axelrod manages to convey the joy of the journey in the eyes of those who shared the belief in the man they sought to make president, and in the resilience of the country. The president's second term, with much of the romance of the undertaking worn off, seems in the telling harder on all hands, including Obama.
The chapter on the president's 2012 struggles to come back from his lackluster first debate against Mitt Romney is particularly revealing. Mr. Axelrod paints the president as almost having to will himself to regain the spark that had carried him to victory in 2008. In the end it worked; what finally motivated Mr. Obama was dread of letting down his team of believers by not delivering the winning riff as of old.
Mr. Romney played into Mr. Obama's hands in the next debate by confirming his own public image as the impossibly rich guy who simply couldn't get why the 47 percent of Americans was turned off by him.
"Believer" is a rare presidential campaign chronicle in that it affords fly-on-the-wall access to political strategy and tactics at the highest level, presented with the clarity of the reporter Mr. Axelrod used to be. His acknowledged partisanship did not prevent the author from offering a few warts that helped capture his subject in whole.
The opposition is unlikely to share Mr. Axelrod's conclusions about Mr. Obama's presidency. But political pros on the other side will recognize the world recreated in his lively and instructive chronicle. "Believer" is an ode, after all, to the notion, severely tarnished by the junior Bush presidency, that politics can be an honorable profession.
Jules Witcover is a syndicated columnist and former long-time writer for The Baltimore Sun. His latest book is "The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power" (Smithsonian Books). His email is juleswitcover@comcast.net.