By Dave Andrusko

It's an almost irresistible temptation to draw cosmic conclusions as political aides leave a presidential administration. The pull is even stronger when the latest Obama aides to leave include his chief of staff--Rahm Emanuel--and Senior Adviser/message meister, David Axelrod. And political reporters can be forgiven since this is all happening on the eve of what is shaping up to be very, VERY difficult off-year elections. ("Shellacking " is now a common descriptor.)

After 18 months the portraits of each remain intact. Emanuel is still the go-for-the-throat political operative, while Axelrod retains (in reporters' eyes) the aura of "idealism" which they associated with the Obama campaign. At the same time there is a hard-to-miss dismissive/you're-not-such-a-big-guy tone in some of the stories wrapping up Axelrod's stay.

The Obama machine clearly saw its campaign as a model for how to deal with the Institutional Media (read dinosaur media): contemptuously ignore it. They could for two reasons. First, because most had acted as lap dogs during 2007-08, which earned them the scorn they desired. And, second, Obama had gone around them--by use of social media, his own "army" of volunteers, etc.--so who needs them now?

By this week, as Dana Milbank of the Washington Post observed today, "The very fact that Axelrod was appearing at an event sponsored by Politico (along with Google) was evidence that he had capitulated to the political culture he and his colleagues vowed to change."

If you watch the 44-minute long event, you can't help but smile. Axelrod bemoans the "the who's up and who's down and doing everything through the prism of the latest poll and election."

He added (according to Milbank), "[T]his is a very critical time in the history of this country," and "we shouldn't just tunnel everything down into kind of the board-game of politics." But having said that, Axelrod conceded he'd spent a lot of time on

ephemeral stuff that comes and goes--stuff that "nobody can remember, and that takes up more energy than I'd like."

The irony for us is that Obama continues to escape most of the blame for abortion-ridden, pro-abortion ObamaCare. How? Because Axelrod (and by extension Obama) insisted they were going to run the government the way they ran the campaign--running against "Washington."

So instead of taking the hit for the ObamaCare abomination, Obama/Axelrod get a pass. They were "forced" to play the inside the beltway game of "Washington dealmaking." Poor babies.

The truth is, of course, that we don't know how much behind the scenes role the Administration played, but no doubt it was much less passive than many accounts would have us believe. More to the point, Obama pressed hard at key junctures. And most important of all, when those final votes were needed, Obama conjured up a bogus face-saving Executive Order which was supposed to keep abortion out of the final package.

It didn't, of course, and pro-lifers refused to accept the excuses of those Democrats who had previously voted pro-life and who accepted that phony assurance. They made passage possible.

The irony, as Michael Gerson observed in an op-ed in this morning's Post, is that "Much of the White House senior staff seems to long for a purer, simpler, more wholesome kind of politics . . . in Chicago."

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