President’s Political Protector Is Ever Close at Hand

By JEFF ZELENY
NYT

WASHINGTON — The pepperoni and cheese pizzas had been delivered, and a meeting about how to sell President Obama’s economic plan was set to begin — not at the White House, but a few blocks away in the seventh-floor apartment of David Axelrod.

Mr. Axelrod took a seat in his living room, with the Washington Monument visible in the distance, and asked how the president’s proposals were being received in the country. He went around the room, calling on a cluster of strategists who were on hand to discuss the latest batch of polls and focus groups conducted for the White House.

It is known as the Wednesday Night Meeting, an invitation-only session for a handful of advisers, nearly all of whom played a key role in paving Mr. Obama’s path to the Oval Office. The location varies, but on a recent evening Mr. Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, was feeling under the weather, so a group that he says is “like family to me” met at his place.

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