'If you probe people’s stories, it’s harder to hate'

David Axelrod lives by the journalistic maxim that “if you probe people’s stories, it’s harder to hate,” he says in a New York Times interview.

 

The long-time reporter, Democratic political consultant and Obama administration official now is celebrating the 500th episode of his podcast, "The Axe Files,” interviews of “key figures in the political world,” according to its website.

 

"Sometimes you talk to people who you think you don’t admire, right?” he says. “And then, there are elements of them that you learn that you do.”

 

Often, he finds ways to connect across the political divide, as when he discovered that he and Karl Rove, a Republican political consultant and George W. Bush administration official, shared a common tragedy. They both had a parent who died by suicide.

 

"When people have struggles like that, I try to talk [with] them about it, in part because if people are listening who are having those struggles, or have lost someone, they understand that they’re not alone,” Axelrod says. "Karl has a very hard bark and a reputation for that. But I see him differently. Because of that, we actually have gone on and done things together on suicide prevention.”

 

Axelrod interviewed Kellyanne Conway, a Republican political consultant and Trump administration official, on “The Axe Files.”

 

“The father abandoned the family when she was three. Turns out he had another family, and he moved in with that other family and had a child just about the same age. So he leaves her and her mother and moves in with another woman and another kid who is a contemporary of hers and lives two towns down. She doesn’t see him again until she’s 12.

“She was resistant to delving too deeply into it. But finally, she said, ‘You know, I do remember coming home from school one day crying hysterically because I was one of only two kids in school who didn’t have a father.’ The other person’s father was lost in Vietnam.”