Recording 200 episodes of an hour-long podcast in a little over two years (they’ve been downloaded almost 20 million times) is a task not for the faint of heart. When each of those 200 episodes features a politician or other newsmaker and is a largely unedited, hour-long conversation, well, that’s almost as much work as getting a freshman U.S. Senator elected to the presidency.
Conveniently, David Axelrod is familiar with both, as President Barack Obama’s former chief strategist for his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and as the voice of his podcast The Axe Files, a production from CNN and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. (Disclosure: As an alumna of the University of Chicago I was involved with the IOP, though I did not interact with Axelrod frequently.) He worked as a local reporter in Chicago before jumping to politics, developing campaign ads, and eventually leading messaging for Obama’s early years in the White House.
In 2015, Axelrod…
