At a moment when members of the opposite party rarely appear together on television, most political interviews are fleeting and the election may have doomed the last digital town square, David Axelrod’s podcast was an oasis.

Now, after a remarkable 605 shows over more than nine years, Axelrod is concluding his program by interviewing his fellow Chicagoan, Rahm Emanuel.

I’m sad to see “The Axe Files” go, in part because it’s more essential now than ever.

Yes, it was respectful and it generated more light than heat. There were no food fights. But I come to praise Axe, not bury him in a shroud of bygone-day nostalgia for civil discourse.

What made the program so compelling — and unique in this period — was that he had candid, deeply personal and extended interviews with the leading figures in both parties. Where else can that combination be found today?
political interviews are fleeting
I should disclose here that Axelrod also had on a range of figures from the media, along with other walks of life, and I sat for a session in 2016. That’s the right word because the show was always equal parts therapy session and journalistic inquiry.

Axelrod doesn’t have psychiatric training — that I know of — but he was once a superb political reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He’s got ink in his DNA and that came through in every program, when he’d try to make news or at least prompt reflection. I could always tell he hated the shows where his guests showed up with talking points. (Been there!)

These were no interrogations, though. Axelrod usually began the interviews by asking people about their backgrounds — “tell me about your folks” — and where they grew up. The son of an immigrant, Axelrod would invariably find common ground with those only a generation or two removed from freedom’s flame, no matter their politics.

Which gets to why the show was so vital. He revealed people as fully-formed, complex and, yes, contradictory humans. If you were looking for a cartoon caricature of the red or blue tribe to confirm your preferences, well, you had plenty of other options.

Axelrod is a partisan and is deeply alarmed with President-elect Donald Trump’s restoration. But I know he was proud of how many Republicans said yes, in some cases reluctantly, and sat down for a probing interview with a former Democratic strategist and the architect of Barack Obama’s political rise.

If we’re being honest, these Republicans agreed in part because Axelrod is an elite figure on the American political scene and the invitation conferred a level of status on the invitee. He has been in the proverbial smoke-filled room — plus even some in Illinois that weren’t proverbial — and political practitioners of all stripes respected that background.

Yet Republicans also said yes because Axelrod is, to borrow a word from his faith tradition, a mensch.

He’d challenge his guests but never sandbag them. The point was for people to tell their stories, reveal something of themselves and get on to the difficult business of discussing what politics is today. It was fitting that two of Axelrod’s final interviews were with two of the most prominent GOP figures from this year’s campaign: Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and CNN commentator Scott Jennings, who has become something of an Axelrod protégé (in the personal, not political, sense, if you’re listening Kentucky Republican primary voters).

Who were these two figures so many people read about or heard about this year? Well, if you listen to their “Axe Files” appearances you’ll know a great deal about what shaped them.

There was something else that made the show, like all the best podcasts, so captivating: Axelrod respected his audience’s intelligence. This was not 101-level stuff. If you can’t understand why his having 90-year-old Abner Mikva, the legendary Chicago lawmaker and jurist, on the podcast just months before Mikva’s passing was so poignant, perhaps the show wasn’t for you.

To be unsubtle about it: The jump from so much of the TV news blather that passes as political insight to podcasts like the Axe Files was akin to the aughts and teens transition from laugh-track broadcast TV sitcoms to premium shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. Who could go back? Who would want to?

Take Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who’s a fixture of TV news. Well, you know what Sanders isn’t discussing in a seven-minute interview? How there were three names not discussed in his Brooklyn boyhood home: Hitler, Stalin and Walter O’Malley, who moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

Oh, and that he also wouldn’t have had the same voting record on guns had he represented his boyhood home rather than rural Vermont.

Sanders revealed as much in 2015 when he was Axelrod’s first guest. He also discussed his student civil rights activism at the University of Chicago, Axelrod’s alma mater and home to the Institute of Politics he founded.

“That pod set the tone,” Axelrod told me this week.

He also got the late Sen. John McCain to talk revealingly about all the time McCain spent visiting, chatting and reading Arizona news clips with an ailing Mo Udall, the former Arizona lawmaker who spent his final days confined in a nursing home. Unstated, because it doesn’t have to be, can you imagine a prominent Republican showing up every week to comfort a prominent Democrat gripped by disease?

Axelrod knows politics ain’t beanbag, and even though he’s out of the campaign business he’s close enough to it that he still pays a price for some grudges. Which is why you won’t find the current president in the Axe File archives: President Joe Biden was the only major Democratic contender in 2020 to skip the show, a snub rooted in the (now-revived!) hostilities between Bidenworld and Obama’s orbit.

But if Axelrod’s proximity to the top echelons of politics had some side effects on his bookings, his prominence also ensured some of his best gets.

My favorite, by far, was the remarkable 2016 conversation he had with a basketball legend, the gone-too-soon Bill Walton. I found Walton to be a great American character — his devotion to the Grateful Dead, the West and John Wooden needs no elaboration — and Axelrod met his match that day. Do yourself a favor and take in their chat. You’ll get through it and feel exhausted and satisfied — like you just played in a game of three-on-three against Big Red.

I listened to it, like I did many of Axelrod’s pods, on a long drive. The good ones passed the time. The great ones left me feeling like I had pulled up a chair at his table at Manny’s Deli and was eavesdropping over two people shooting the shit over half a Reuben and bowl of matzo ball soup.

Which is not to say Axelrod showed up like Larry King talking to Kato Kaelin, unprepared and just asking whatever came to mind while taking a few calls from Walla Walla and beyond to fill the hour.

Axelrod read deeply about his guests and often surprised them with how much he knew about their backgrounds. It took hours of work, so I get why he wants to wrap it up with over 600 under his belt. Especially when he has a separate podcast — speaking of kibitzing — with Mike Murphy and John Heilemann, Hacks on Tap.

But I’ll miss the “Axe Files” and I know others will, too.

As he introduced Emanuel on his final show, Axelrod said his goal had been to offer “one small antidote to the coarse nature of today’s politics and social media culture that so often reduces people to negative caricatures and robs us of our common humanity.”

Mission accomplished, brother.

© Josh Reynolds/AP

PHILADELPHIA — Vice President Kamala Harris’ debut appearance with her running mate and his runner-up here Tuesday night neatly illustrated the reasoning behind her choice.

Contrary to the wish-casting of the left and the sinister claims of the right, Harris didn’t select Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota because she is beholden to her party’s base or, more absurdly, uneasy with a Jewish vice president. She picked Walz because she had chemistry with him as a generational peer and saw him as somebody who could be an effective advocate without threatening to overshadow her.

When Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, the bridesmaid in his own city, delivered a fiery stem-winder near the start of the evening, and then Walz concluded it with a folksy introduction of himself and a Minnesota not-so-nice takedown of the GOP ticket, Harris’ assessment seemed vindicated.

Whether her comfort-food pick will prove not merely a better fit for her personally, but a winning one, remains to be seen.

However, the most significant moment yet in Harris’ overnight candidacy included signs that she knows she must broaden her appeal to prevail in November.

After spending her career in liberal California, running in the 2020 Democratic primaries and appearing before mostly liberal constituencies as vice president, Harris is suddenly being made to devise a general election message for an audience she has not much considered outside the three months she was on the Covid-cloistered 2020 ticket.

How will she run? Will she practice the sort of defensive politics Bill Clinton and Barack Obama mastered, in their own way and in different decades, to reassure middle America they were no radicals? Or will she adopt a new, fit-for-Trumpian-times model of simply rousing core supporters and betting contempt for opposition will carry the day?

She did both on Tuesday and, before a partisan audience, it was not surprising that the red meat drew the loudest applause. Yet for a candidate knocked for being captive to prepared remarks — and she’s still yet to speak extemporaneously for any length since President Joe Biden withdrew from the race — her most effective moment may have been when she deviated slightly from script.

It was when she hailed “the promise of America,” recounting how “two middle-class kids” from very different places, Oakland, California, and the heartland, could perhaps get to the White House together.

“Only in America,” she said, repeating herself. Then, as if in the pulpit, she said it three more times: “Only in America.” The crowd, perhaps inspired by the Olympics, got the cue and began chanting “U-S-A!”

It was the stuff of Republican nightmares.

Harris followed with what may be rhetorical boilerplate for many candidates but which seemed more notable for one still defining herself and her message. She vowed to pursue voters of every stripe in Obama-like fashion — “from red states to blue states” — but then broadened her appeal rather than narrowing it to specific affinity groups.

“We are running a campaign on behalf of all Americans, and when elected, we will govern on behalf of all Americans,” Harris said.

It was not exactly a rebuke of her party’s identity fixation, but it was a beckoning to something broader.

As was, in a smaller way, her repeatedly calling her running mate “Coach.” After all, there are few unifying American institutions left beside football.

Walz, too, sent unsubtle signals of reassurance.

He may not have been wearing his sergeant’s chevrons or bearing a coach’s whistle over his neck, but his remarks made clear he intends to run on his biography and regular-bloke style and not his progressive legacy in St. Paul. He held up his GI Bill and public school credentials, salted his comments with a bit of “damn” and “hell” and portrayed the opposition as the country club and the sell-out.

Walz’s couch line, referring to a false internet rumor about JD Vance, will get the attention — I think it was beneath him — but the sharper cut was when he assailed his GOP rival as an Ivy Leaguer floated by rich guys who then “wrote a best-seller trashing” his own rural roots. “Come on,” Walz demanded in the fashion of somebody raised in Butte, Nebraska.

Recounting his own career, Walz emphasized his bipartisan work on issues like veterans and agriculture, same as he did in the introductory video the campaign unveiled earlier in the day.

The two were clearly taken, perhaps overwhelmed, by the rapturous response. Walz surely didn’t mean to knock Biden when, upon taking the microphone, the Minnesotan praised Harris for “bringing back the joy,” but he didn’t have to expound either.

It wasn’t surprising to see them together. At a meeting of the Democratic Governors Association last December, I told Walz that if Harris was the Democratic nominee in 2028, he or Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky would be her most logical running mates. (He didn’t disagree and, in fact, mentioned some of his credentials that could complement such a ticket.)

What’s surprising, of course, is that they forged a partnership now.

It nearly didn’t happen. They overlapped two years in Congress but didn’t know each other. And Walz was struck by, and slightly irritated about, how little effort the vice president’s office made to cultivate the governors at the outset of Biden’s administration. That changed, though, when Harris made a handful of trips to Minnesota and she and Walz finally got to know each other.

Few in the Democratic Party were happier to see the ticket talking about love of country, military service and veterans’ care than Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, who since his 2022 campaign has been urging his party to reclaim the flag.

“He's a person who won’t be lectured on patriotism,” Moore told me after watching a command sergeant major, the essential cohesive force in any military unit, take the stage.

Moore, though, wants more. He thinks Harris should drape her nominating convention later this month, literally and metaphorically, with the stars and stripes.

“This needs to be framed as a celebration of America,” Moore said of the Chicago conclave, urging Harris and Walz “to be unapologetic in speaking about their love of country.”

That means “flaws and all,” he added, because “loving your country doesn’t mean lying about it.”

It means conveying to voters, as Harris did Tuesday, that what makes America great is the possibility it affords so many, no matter their circumstances. But she must also demonstrate what the country means to her — and that she shares the values that transcend America’s differences.

Obama is the obvious model for Harris, and Trump’s attacks make her inoculation even more essential.

The former president’s call for unity in his keynote speech at the Democratic convention 20 years ago this summer that marked his national debut is well-remembered. What’s less so is the first ad he aired at the outset of the 2008 general election, when Obama was eager to define himself before the Republicans could do it to him.

Invoking his values, the then-candidate looked at the camera and concluded the commercial with this assurance: “If I have the honor of taking the oath of office as president, it will be with a deep and abiding faith in the country I love."

© Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO