Axelrod Fails In Israel And UK Politics, But At Least He Has Nigeria?

05.08.2015 | Surge Wire |

Thursday’s overwhelming victory for Britain’s Conservative Party proved the second major international disappointment of 2015 for former President Barack Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod.

Axelrod served as a special adviser to the Labour Party’s failed campaign, whose embarrassing rout led to party leader Ed Miliband’s resignation Friday morning. Obama’s 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina was also involved in the election — on the side of Labour’s Conservative rivals. (RELATED: Conservative Britain Crushed The Competition In The UK Election)

According to Politico, Axelrod admitted he had only been to the U.K. “half a dozen times” since being hired by Labour for a reported fee of £300,000 (over $450,000).

The Chicagoan found the grace on Twitter to congratulate his ex-colleague on facilitating a “resounding Conservative victory,” and to say he’d “never seen as stark a failure of polling” as the forecasts which predicted a much tougher climb for Cameron.

But this was not Axelrod’s first foray into international electoral politics this year — or into making snap judgements on Twitter. While he was not directly involved, Israeli supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party have accused Axelrod and other Obama alumni of interfering in the March 2015 election that won Netanyahu another turn as Prime Minister. Jeremy Bird, Obama’s national field director in 2012, did contribute the resources of his firm 270 Strategies to a grassroots campaign aiming to unseat Netanyahu. (RELATED: Netanyahu Forms Ruling Coalition Less Than 2 HOURS Before Deadline)

Regardless of whether or not he had a direct hand in the campaign, Axelrod took to Twitter just after Netanyahu’s reelection in order to criticize the prime minister’s “shameful 11th hour demagoguery,” referring to a speech halfway through election day in which Netanyahu claimed turnout among Arab-Israeli voters was unusually high. In an interview, Axelrod also said Netanyahu “mortgaged the future” by pledging to block the two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution that he had worked for years to create.

Since Obama’s second presidential campaign, Axelrod has served as a consultant in several other foreign elections. His firm, AKPD, helped consult for Muhammadu Buhari’s All Progressives Congress in March’s tightly contested Nigerian election, in which the APC ultimately won the presidency.

Follow Ivan Plis on Twitter

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.