It did not take long for David Axelrod, the rumpled campaign genius who steered Barack Obama's rise from state senator to president, to detect that governing the country might prove less uplifting than getting his boss elected. In memoirs published on February 10th Mr Axelrod recalls fretting, soon after the inauguration in 2009, that White House insiders were already talking about breaking Mr Obama's campaign commitments. This prompted Rahm Emanuel, the new president's chief of staff to scream at Mr Axelrod: "I'm god-damned sick of hearing about the fucking campaign. The campaign is over. We're trying to solve some problems here." From this and other clues, Mr Axelrod deduced that there was a "tension" between a campaign that had promised to bring hope and change to America and the task of actually governing.
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