A former top Obama political adviser is headed across the pond.
David Axelrod, who served as a senior White House adviser and strategist on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, has been tapped to advise the Labour Party in the UK, where party leader Ed Miliband is gunning to be prime minister.
But the release announcing the appointment began with a blunder: Axelrod’s name was misspelled.
“David Alexrod joins the team,” read the release, according to a screen capture posted by NBC News.
The typo reinforced an already established stereotype in Britain that Miliband is a “bumbling and feckless Mr. Bean-like character,” according to NBC News’ F. Brinley Bruton.
Axelrod is scheduled to attend meetings next month in London with Miliband and other officials. Staffers from the Obama for America campaign will also advise the Labour Party, according to a release.
Axelrod, who serves as a political analyst for msnbc, said he was impressed with Miliband’s attention to economic inequality in Britain, an issue that is shaping up to be a Democratic plank in the 2014 midterm elections in the U.S.
“He understands that a growing economy demands that you have to have broad prosperity. We can’t just have prosperity hoarded by a few where people at the top are getting wealthier and wealthier but people in the middle are getting squeezed,” Axelrod said in a statement.
Axelrod also pointed to his experience — and success — working on Obama’s campaigns.
“Barack Obama articulated a vision which had, at its core, the experience of everyday people. And everyday people responded, they organised and they overcame the odds. I see the same thing happening in Britain,” he said. Axelrod and his aides follow a long line of American political operatives who have consulted for foreign officials, including longtime Democratic consultant James Carville. Carville, who worked on former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, advised Israel’s Ehud Barak in his campaign for prime minster in 1999. Democratic strategist and pollster Stan Greenberg has worked as a campaign adviser for Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. On the other side of the aisle, GOP strategist Arthur Finkelstein has advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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