President’s closest aide feels sting of public’s disaffection

“Typical Washington junk we have to deal with,’’ Axelrod said in an interview. The president is deft at blocking out such noise, he added, suddenly brightening. “I love the guy.’’ he said; in the space of five minutes, he repeated the sentiment twice.

Critics, noting the administration’s stalled legislative agenda, falling poll numbers, and muddled messaging, suggest that kind of devotion is part of the problem at the White House. Recent news reports have cast the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, as the administration’s chief pragmatist, and Axelrod, by implication, as something of a swooning loyalist. Or as the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, joked, “the guy who walks in front of the president with rose petals.’’

Still, it is a charge that infuriates Axelrod, the president’s longest-serving adviser and political alter ego. “I guess I have been castigated for believing too deeply in the president,’’ he said, lapsing into the sarcasm he tends to deploy when playing defense.

No one has taken the perceived failings of the administration more personally than Axelrod, who as White House senior adviser oversees every aspect of how Obama is presented. As such, Axelrod has felt the brunt of criticism over what many view as the administration’s failure to clearly define and disseminate Obama’s agenda.

“The Obama White House has lost the narrative in the way that the Obama campaign never did,’’ said James Morone, a political scientist at Brown University. “They essentially took the president’s great strength as a messenger and failed to use it smartly.’’

Axelrod would not discuss what counsel he offered to Obama, though he any charge that he is too infatuated with the president to recognize the political risks of his ambitious agenda.

“Believe me, if we were charting this administration as a political exercise, the first thing we would have done would not have been a massive recovery act, stabilizing the banks, and helping to keep the auto companies from collapsing,’’ he said.

But Axelrod argued that the president, confronted with “breathtaking challenges,’’ did not have the luxury of moving more slowly or methodically.

The criticism of the administration’s communication strategy - leveled by impatient Democrats, gleeful Republicans, bloggers, and cable chatterers - clearly stings Axelrod, as well as the circle of family, friends and fans he has acquired over decades in politics.

“Every time I hear that the White House is getting the message wrong, it breaks my heart,’’ said Axelrod’s sister, Joan, an educational therapist in Boston. “I know he agonizes.’’

Joan Axelrod said that while her brother is devoted to Obama, he is not a sycophant. She paused when asked whether he admired the president too much. “He is very, very loyal, sometimes to a fault,’’ she said.

Axelrod’s friends worry about the toll of his job - citing his diet (cold-cut-enriched), his weight (20 pounds heavier than at the start of the presidential campaign), sleep deprivation (five fitful hours a night), separation from family (most back home in Chicago), and the fact that at 55, he is considerably older than many of the wunderkind workaholics of the West Wing. He wakes at 6 a.m. in his rented condo just blocks from the White House and typically returns at about 11 p.m.

Unlike other presidential alter egos, Axelrod is not viewed as a surrogate “brain’’ (like Karl Rove), a suspicious outsider (like Dick Morris in the Clinton White House) or a co-president (James Baker in the first Bush White House).

Sometimes portrayed as a bare-knuckled Chicago operative, he is also a bantering walrus of a man in mustard-stained sleeves who describes himself as a “kibbitzer,’’ not a “policy guy.’’

White House officials describe Axelrod’s focus as big themes rather than day-to-day sound bites. There has been no shortage of Democrats willing to second-guess his messaging approach.

“They made a big mistake right out of the box with the Inaugural Address,’’ said former Senator Bob Kerrey, adding that a president pledging bipartisanship should not have disparaged the previous administration in his speech, as many listeners believed Obama did.

Chris Lehane, a former top aide to Vice President Al Gore, says the administration should tell a clearer story. “They have been enormously capable in dealing with the day-to-day challenges of the government,’’ Lehane said. “But they don’t seem to get the credit they deserve for that because they’ve communicated no overarching big idea or philosophical framework of where they want to take the country.’’