What David Axelrod Told Bill Clinton in 1996

Dav­id Axel­rod, the Demo­crat­ic uber-strategist who en­gin­eered Barack Obama’s up­set de­feat of Hil­lary Clin­ton in 2008, ad­vised Bill Clin­ton 12 years earli­er on at least two ma­jor speeches, ac­cord­ing to doc­u­ments re­leased Fri­day by the Clin­ton Lib­rary.

In Au­gust 1996, Axel­rod sent a memo to Clin­ton aides with his thoughts on the pres­id­ent’s up­com­ing ac­cept­ance speech at the Demo­crat­ic Na­tion­al Con­ven­tion. Rahm Emanuel, then a seni­or ad­viser to the Clin­ton White House, for­war­ded Axel­rod’s memo to oth­er seni­or aides, in­clud­ing Le­on Pan­etta, George Stephan­o­poulos, Har­old Ickes, and speech­writer Mi­chael Wald­man, telling his col­leagues it was “worth your time.”

“Even though I’m sure you have more cooks hov­er­ing around the broth than you need, I wanted to briefly share a few thoughts and sug­ges­tions,” Axel­rod wrote the night after Bob Dole ac­cep­ted his nom­in­a­tion at the Re­pub­lic­an Na­tion­al Con­ven­tion, of­fer­ing up chunks of text to be used in the speech.

Axel­rod’s firm did not im­me­di­ately re­spond to a re­quest for more de­tails about the nature of his work for Clin­ton, or wheth­er he was paid.

First, he ad­vised Clin­ton to take the high road in the speech, ur­ging the pres­id­ent to praise Dole’s years of ser­vice to the coun­try. Second, he sug­ges­ted the pres­id­ent re­but Dole’s de­sire to con­nect with the Amer­ic­an past by stat­ing that he wants to “build a bridge to the fu­ture.”

The speech Clin­ton de­livered a few days later hit both of these notes. “I be­lieve that Bob Dole and Jack Kemp and Ross Perot love our coun­try,” Clin­ton said when ac­cept­ing the nom­in­a­tion. “I will not at­tack them per­son­ally, or per­mit oth­ers to do it in this party if I can pre­vent it.”

That led right in­to Clin­ton’s head­line-mak­ing mes­sage of the night: “With all re­spect, we do not need to build a bridge to the past. We need to build a bridge to the fu­ture. And that is what I com­mit to you to do. So to­night, let us re­solve to build that bridge to the 21st cen­tury.”

Axel­rod also ad­vised Clin­ton to use Dole’s per­son­al story as a way to re­spond to the GOP nom­in­ee’s at­tacks on Hil­lary Clin­ton’s book It Takes a Vil­lage. That doesn’t seem to have made it in­to the speech.

In a second set of memos, sent to Wald­man in Janu­ary 1997, days be­fore Clin­ton would de­liv­er his second in­aug­ur­al, Axel­rod offered some thoughts on drafts of the speech he had ap­par­ently been sent. It doesn’t ap­pear that any of the lan­guage he offered made it in­to the speech dir­ectly.

“I hope it is, at least, a little use­ful,” the strategist wrote.

The doc­u­ments were among thou­sands of pages made pub­lic Fri­day, part of a series of pre­vi­ously re­dac­ted files.