David Axelrod Told Obama to Toughen Up -- Politics Daily »

In 2006, David Axelrod wrote an unblinking assessment of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate:

"You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don't relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched."

Axelrod's get-tough man talk is just one of dozens of revelations in "The Battle for America 2008," a new book by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson about the most compelling campaigns of 2008.

In writing about the Obama campaign, Balz and Johnson share excerpts of a private strategy memo from Axelrod to Obama on the subject of Obama's potential run for the presidency. The memo shows Axelrod, who was the campaign's senior strategist and is now senior advisor to the president, encouraged Obama to run sooner, rather than later. The memo notes that history is full of failed candidates who ran past their primes, but has few examples of those who tried too soon.

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