President Obama, working up an appetite.

The Dog Days have come early to this year's presidential race with the revelation by the Daily Caller that our  president was fed dog meat by his stepfather as a boy living in Indonesia. President Obama disclosed this information in his little-known TIME Magazine top 100 non-fiction bestseller, Dreams from My Father, a 1995 memoir of his well-traveled youth.

If the Obama White House feels moved to complain about the hay their opponents are making (the Twitter hash tag #ObamaDogRecipes trended across party lines Tuesday night) out of this unfortunate nugget from his book they may have only themselves to blame. As ABC newsman Jake Tapper pointed out, Democrats have been relentless in promoting the tale of Mitt Romney's unfortunate dog Seamus, who reportedly rode on the roof of the Romney family vehicle from Boston to Canada in 1983:

Democrats have signaled they have every intention of making sure the American people — especially dog-lovers — know the tale. In January, senior Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod tweeted a photo of the president and Bo in a car, with the snide observation: "@davidaxelrod: How loving owners transport their dogs."

The real topper on the whole shaggy tale at this point would be if Mr. Romney chose to add former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as his running mate. While Mr. Huckabee's record towards furry friends appears to be on the up-and-up, one of his son's alleged acts against a stray dog was passing fodder for political opponents during Mr. Huckabee's 2007-2008 run for the Republican presidential nod.

If dogs really step up and form a lobby, perhaps even their own political action committee, everyone may be in trouble.

In front of a sign that featured Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. peering at the organization's logo was a wooden podium where, minutes earlier, Mr. Sharpton introduced the biggest guest he had ever welcomed. MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz were talking to Bertha Lewis, a housing advocate and founding member of the Working Families Party. A few feet away, former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford Jr. dug into his pockets for a business card to hand out to a man in a suit, before quickly making his way on to the next conversation. Several feet away, Earvin "Magic" Johnson was swarmed by a crowd of photograph seekers, which he patiently obliged. Mr. Simmons seemed to take no notice of the pandemonium, since he was engrossed in his own conversation with two gentlemen. Nearby, in a front-row table, NFL legend-turned-actor Jim Brown sat undisturbed.

For some politicos, the image of the "no-drama" president together with the reverend-whose career, at one point, seemed to have been foreshadowed in the pages of The Bonfire of the Vanities-was unexpected.

The one person who didn't find it unusual was Mr. Sharpton. "I never turn down a front page," he said in a recent interview, referring to the covers of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News, depicting him shaking hands with the president, "but I was like, why is this such a surprise to everybody?"

Throughout the four-day-long affair, Mr. Sharpton laid out an argument for reelecting Mr. Obama, often with top Obama aides looking on-including David Axelrod, one of Mr. Obama's top strategists. Before introducing Mr. Axelrod, Mr. Sharpton had a few words for his audience, with whom he was slightly disappointed. Referring to the "shellacking" Democrats took in the 2010 midterm elections, Mr. Sharpton said, "What happened was you was home. Now, everybody wants the president to come in like Superman to undo what we should have helped protect in the first place." He jokingly suggested they have a "national practice day" for voting, but quickly warned them about the dire need to show up at the polls. "Many black mayors went down because their percentage remained the same but the amount went down," he said. "We got to have turnout." Preemptively, Mr. Sharpton addressed the dissatisfaction among those considered to be Mr. Obama's base: voters who are African-American, living in cities and facing the brunt of the economic recession. To them, the message was clear: Stick with the president, and be patient. Change is coming, eventually.

"The boycott in Montgomery was in '55," Mr. Sharpton reminded the crowd. "They ain't got the Civil Rights Act until '64. Nine years later. Nothing ever happens the next day or the next year."

The introduction Mr. Sharpton gave the president was even more forceful. "He came into office when we had great challenges," said Mr. Sharpton. "And what many people have conveniently forgot is that this president took this nation from where it had never been in most of our lifetimes and put it back on a solid course, and now we forget where it was and where he has brought us. And some of us who are the most pained are being asked to make the most sacrifices and then are being demagogued into blaming him for standing up for all of us, and we are not going to be used like that." The crowd cheered.

Mr. Obama, whom Mr. Sharpton introduced as the "servant in chief," a Biblical reference, was wearing a nearly identical suit to Mr. Sharpton's (black jacket, black pants, white shirt, black-and-white tie) and borrowed some of the talking points that had just been delivered. "And as Reverend Al said, some folks have amnesia about this," said Mr. Obama, referring to the economic crisis handed to him by the outgoing Republican administration.

After Mr. Obama concluded his remarks, Mr. Sharpton waded into the audience. When asked if he'll start to play a larger role in advocating for Mr. Obama, Mr. Sharpton wrinkled his nose and shook his head. "No, not at all," he said. "I have no intention in taking on a wider role in his campaign at all."

But not everyone sees it that way. "There's no question about the fact that Reverend Sharpton will campaign loud and clear for Obama, in the community and all over the country," said attorney Sanford Rubenstein, a mainstay at Mr. Sharpton's rallies. "Sharpton says a lot of times that people have got to take their path. And there's a path for Sharpton to take in this campaign, and that's the path to energize the base." The next day, as Mr. Obama and Mr. Sharpton graced the cover of the city's major tabloids, those within Mr. Sharpton's organization were basking in their newfound glory.

The significance of the moment was reinforced in subsequent talks. "The National Action Network is operating at a new brand after our celebration last night with the president," said the chairman of the group's board, Dr. W. Franklin Richardson, speaking before a panel on organized labor. "Not only with the president. All day yesterday we had four of the cabinet members, including the attorney general, the secretary of education, the secretary of HUD, the political adviser to the president. Today we have two members of the cabinet, secretary of labor and secretary of health and human services."

The power in the room had Dr. Richardson feeling heady about Mr. Sharpton's new standing. "Our president, Al Sharpton, is the leading voice in America for African-Americans," he said. "Undisputed. That can not be disputed. That's not debated."

Norman Seabrook, the president of the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association, said the president's appearance at the organization sent a clear message about Mr. Sharpton's role on the national stage.

"[Mr. Obama] showed you the vehicle last night," said Mr. Seabrook. "Al Sharpton was your vehicle. So you give your grievance to Al and say, 'Al, go on to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and take our agenda forward.'" Mr. Seabrook implored the attendees to "use the vehicles that you have that make it work for you. You use the vehicles that you have."

But Mr. Sharpton was somewhat coy about being that vehicle. "There's some people who want a permanent place as the ones having access. It had nothing to do with the community," he said.

On Friday, Mr. Sharpton was accompanied by two men in dark suits, part of his security detail, who walked on either side of him during his stroll down the hallway. They hovered around him during our brief interview. He had just finished his daily radio show and was juggling the demands of the last few panel discussions, as well as those of being a celebrity, posing for photographs with well-wishers.

"In many ways, part of the reason why I could identify with [the president] even though we are so much unalike, or dissimilar," said Mr. Sharpton, "is the crowd that was attacking him for not being black enough was attacking me for being too black. Because it was about them, it was never about our people."

Those unnamed critics that stymied his own presidential ambitions in 2004 weren't the only ones Mr. Sharpton felt stood in his way.

"I think that they always, some in the media, always perceived me more as someone who would not engage in the process more than I ever was. And they forget that I ran for office. I ran for Senate in '92, I ran for mayor. So why wouldn't I be involved in the electoral process?" He added, "Why don't they just admit, maybe we didn't understand what he was saying in the first place?"

            apaybarah@observer.com

"I can't remember what he said that day. I was five years old," Axelrod said. "But through the wonders of Google, someone sent me the speech that he made that day."

Axelrod, who recently left the White House to work on Obama's re-election campaign, was the first of nearly half a dozen Obama aides to address the National Action Network audience, this morning alone. (HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, Attorney General Eric Holder, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and Lisa Jackson of the EPA were all slated to speak, in addition to Obama himself.) 

"And what [President Kennedy] said was, 'I'm not running on the platform that says if you elect me, things will be easy,'" said Axelrod, with NAN founder Al Sharpton sitting as his side. Kennedy told the group: "I don't come here to please you, I come here to serve you. Not to please you, but to serve you."

"Believe me, I've been thinking a lot about that a lot over the last couple of years," Axelrod told the audience. "We did a lot more serving than pleasing because of the challenges that we face."

Rescuing the economy from a "free fall" was chief among them, he said.

"If you were planning your presidency, the first three things you would do, would not be a nearly trillion-dollar recovery act, bailing out the auto industry, bailing out the financial sector. That was not in our campaign plan. That was not in our campaign plan."

"Each of these decisions were as necessary as they were unpopular," said Axelrod. But making it more challenging was the fact that "we had to do it virtually all alone."

Citing an interview Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did with The New York Times, Axelrod said Republicans vowed to give the president "votes on no big things." Echoing McConnell, Axelrod said, "We didn't want to give him votes on big things. We wanted him to have to do it alone because then we can say he was acting on a partisan basis."

"And, you know," he added, "it was a diabolical strategy, but an effective one to be honest with you."

He said independents who defected from the Democrats in 2008 to the Republicans in 2010 now have "buyer's remorse."

In a scrum with reporters later, Axelrod said the president was coming to Sharpton's event because the reverend had been "a strong supporter" and "the president came for that reason."

I asked Axelrod about a judicial race in Wisconsin that he mentioned during his speech, where an ally of Republican Governor Walker was in a deadheat with a little-known progressive candidate.

"It told me the atmosphere in Wisconsin's changed dramatically. I would venture to say if the governor there were running today, if you re-ran the same race you ran in November he would lose, and not by a few votes," said Axelrod.

"I think independent voters have seen enough to know that they're uncomfortable. I think Democratic voters are mobilized and I think that's a microcosm of what is happening in many places around the country," he said.

Axelrod, speaking at the National Action Network in midtown this morning, said the president replied, "Don't kid yourself; If things were good, we never would have gotten the job."

The audience laughed and Axelrod wrapped up his speech a few minutes later.

Axelrod is one of the main message men and strategists for President Obama's recently-announced re-election campaign and the narrative he's weaving is a harrowing one. As Axelrod puts it, Obama was forced to make a series of choices that were "as necessary as they were unpopular."

Axelrod said the Republican strategy in Congress was to deny President Obama any bi-partisan support, which he called "diabolical," but "effective."

But Axelrod maintained that the tides are turning in Obama's favor. An obscure judicial race in Wisconsin pitting an ally of union-bashing Gov. Walker versus a little-known progressive was "a deadheat," and is now "in a recount."

"We have more work to do and everyone in this room knows it," he said.

• As the pension-kickbacks investigation grinds on, Steven Rattner's friends see Andrew Cuomo at parties and have to ask the attorney general/governor-elect why he is being so mean and prosecuting their friend so hard? And then Cuomo basically says, "Just the facts, ma'am." [NYT]
• David Axelrod says that President Obama had absolutely no choice in the matter of extending the Bush-era tax cuts. [AP]
• Businesspeople are cheering Obama's tax maneuvering like the dickens -- surely because it's what's good for the country and not just what's good for them. [Bloomberg]
• Commodities, commodities! Everybody wants to own commodities! [WSJ]
• Bank of America has agreed to pay $137 million to settle a Justice Department inquiry into alleged malfeasance in municipal-bond auctions. [Reuters]

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

mtaylor@observer.com

Twitter: @mbrookstaylor

"You know, we've been here almost two years, done five hundred speeches probably, never happened before, right?" Mr. Axelrod told Mr. Letterman. "And I can only think of one thing: Witchcraft."

Updates here, video below:

Earlier: Video: President Obama's Podium Breaks at Fortune Summit

Rahm Emanuel Week, which happens to advance the notion that Mr. Emanuel isn't the combative figure he appears to be, just happens to coincide with what appears to be Timothy Geithner Month, which attempts to soften up the controversial Treasury Secratary with articles in Vogue, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic Monthly.

And, while the White House seems to be courting the chatter about its inner workings, senior adviser David Axelrod has made himself available too. He's tamping down all the speculation by talking to The Times and Politico, giving them lines like: "There aren't 10 people outside of Washington who give a rat's ass about any of this."

The White House’s game on health care reform has been obvious since at least the middle of the summer, when President Obama unnerved much of his base by announcing that “the public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of health care reform.”

That was news to much of the left, for whom the public option represents the only redeeming feature of the current reform effort. Without it, liberals suspect, reform will mostly amount to a massive, taxpayer-funded giveaway to private insurers, who—thanks to a new individual mandate—will be handed millions of new customers (many of them young and healthy) while facing no competitive pressure to cut costs or curb many of their unsavory, profit-minded practices.

In his public statements since then, including his September address to Congress, the president has made it clear he shares the left’s basic belief in the concept of a public health insurance option. But he has made it equally clear that his bottom line is different from theirs and that if a bill without a public option lands on his desk, he’ll still sign it.

Even now, with the left hoping that the White House will lean on Senate leaders—who are now trying to hash out a compromise plan from a Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee bill that includes a public option and a Finance Committee bill that doesn’t—to write a public option into the final bill, that bottom line isn’t budging, one of Obama’s top advisers made clear on Sunday.

In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” David Axelrod reeled off the usual platitudes about the public option and its potential to stir badly needed competition in the healthcare system. “But that doesn’t mean we halt the process,” Axelrod quickly cautioned. “There are people in the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, who have objected to [the public option], and we have to work through these issues, and we’re going to do that.”

He added: “There will be compromise, there will legislation, and it will achieve our goals—helping people who have insurance get more security, get more accountability from the insurance industry, helping people who don’t have insurance get insurance they can afford, and lowering the overall cost of the system.”

And when host George Stephanopoulos followed that up by asking if it was accurate to say that the White House wouldn’t demand a public option in the final bill, Axelrod replied, “I think the final bill will achieve those goals and a public option would help.” Which was a very long way of saying yes.

At one level, the White House’s posture makes sense.

They are guided—haunted, some would say—by Bill Clinton’s experiences when he threw himself into health care reform in his first term. Clinton and his wife commissioned their own task force, drew up their own plan, and attempted to impose it on Congress. They were met with resistance that should have been predictable and that should have triggered them to seek compromise. Instead, they dug their heels in, rejected deal-making from moderates, and watched the entire enterprise blow up in their faces.

Obama and his team have strived to avoid Clinton’s mistakes. That has meant showing extraordinary deference to Congress—setting a few broad, overarching goals for reform, then leaving it to House and Senate leaders to create a package that can actually pass both chambers and reach the president’s desk. Staying out of the public option debate, a very sensitive subject in the Senate, is part of this strategy.

There’s also a more basic imperative for the president: He badly needs to be seen as having scored a political victory on health care, an issue that has flummoxed and undermined presidents for decades. The promise of his presidency was and remains transformational change, but his critics—with increasing support from mainstream outlets—are starting to score points with the claim that he really hasn’t done much. A health care signing ceremony would serve as a powerful refutation of this contention.

Understandably, then, the White House view seems to be that some kind of reform bill, even if it ends up watered down and laughably limited in scope, is better than no reform bill—so why let a sticky subject like the public option be the deal-breaker?

Reinforcing this sense is the fact that the public option, even in the context of the most generous and expansive legislation now under consideration, would only affect a sliver of Americans—mainly small business employees and individuals not covered by employer plans. The vast majority of Americans would be ineligible to buy in even if they wanted to. The White House seems to have concluded that there’s no good reason to go to war over something that affects so few.

This sort of thinking isn’t wrong, politically. Any kind of health care reform bill this year probably will help the Democrats in 2010. But there is a longer-term consideration: If the bill is too weak and too worthless this year, it will be a lot tougher to go back and reform it and to make it more effective in future years.

This is the strongest argument for insisting on a public option, no matter how weak, right now: as long as a basic, skeletal outline of a public plan is in the final package, there will be something to work with in the future. There will be a chance, in other words, to create—eventually—a public option that will actually be open to all Americans and that will change the competitive landscape in the way proponents imagine.

That kind of reform will benefit Democrats far more in the long term –five, ten, 20 years down the line, much the way Medicare remains a political winner for them today.

If there’s no public option in this year’s bill, that future is hard to imagine.

Appearing on several Sunday morning talk shows, Susan Rice, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, and David Axelrod, one of the president’s top advisers, stressed the same basic theme: that this month’s election shouldn’t dissuade the U.S. from trying to resolve the nuclear issue with Iran since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and not the president, is the real decision-maker in Tehran.

“That was the case before the election; it is the case now,” Rice said on CBS’s Face the Nation.

How and when the political situation in Iran will be resolved is anyone’s guess. The momentum for the street protest seemed to be wilting in the last few days, the result of the government’s merciless crackdown, but it seemed to pick up again on Sunday. At the same time, it’s also at least possible that, even if the protest movement fails, the Khamenei regime’s opponents could pull off a backdoor coup by enlisting clerical leaders in a bid to oust the Supreme Leader.

Still, the most likely outcome seems to be the simplest: the crackdown succeeds, the protests fizzle, the clerics slowly fall back into line, and the election stands. That is certainly the scenario the White House had in mind when it sent Rice and Axelrod onto the Sunday morning circuit. And if it is the scenario that unfolds, there will be domestic political risks for Obama in pushing ahead with diplomacy.

Here, a rough parallel can be drawn to George H. W. Bush and his response to the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989. The Chinese government’s vicious crackdown, much of it carried live on television, enraged an American public that had previously paid little attention to life in China. Confronted with such naked injustice, surely the president would use every means at his disposal to punish the Chinese government—right?

But that’s not what Bush, who had served as the U.S. ambassador to China in the mid-1970s, had in mind. He feared that imposing penalties, such as revoking China’s Most Favored Nation trade designation, would prompt the Chinese government to reverse the gradual (but significant) steps toward freedom and openness that it had taken in the decade leading up to Tiananmen. So he limited his comments to condemning the nature of the crackdown and otherwise took a largely hands-off approach.

This exposed Bush to domestic political attacks from Democrats almost identical to the ones that Republicans have launched against Obama over Iran. On Meet the Press a few days after Tiananmen, Tom Foley, then the speaker of the House, addressed Bush’s handling thusly: “There are people who feel we ought to speak out more loudly and more clearly. I think the president probably needs to do that. We are outraged as a country about the death sentences, about the suppression, and about the enormous big lie that the Chinese government is attempting to tell about this story.”

It would be wrong to say that Tiananmen is the reason Bush went on to lose his reelection bid in 1992. With no further uprisings after the June massacre, the media lost interest and so did most Americans, and just over 18 months later—after the 1991 Gulf War—Bush’s approval rating stood at 90 percent. So as unpopular as his handling of Tiananmen was, he certainly could have won reelection anyway.

But by taking the approach he did, Bush handed his political opponents a weapon, and they rarely missed an opportunity to beat him with it. In his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton repeatedly savaged Bush for “molly-coddling of those brutal old men in China who turned the tanks on their own students at Tiananmen Square” and promised to end China’s Most Favored Nation status as president. And at their New York convention that summer, Democrats showcased veterans of the Tiananmen uprising on stage.

Voters in ’92 had long since stopped thinking about China on a regular basis, but they still had their memories of those awful, disturbing images from June ’89. With the economy dragging Bush’s poll numbers down and endangering his reelection prospects, reviving those memories provided Clinton and the Democrats with yet another indictment of his leadership. To most voters, Tiananmen had always been a simple moral issue: The Chinese government had behaved horrifically and Bush had never been as outraged as he should have been.

Obviously, the situation with Iran is not exactly the same. For one thing, the nuclear issue will keep Iran in the news for the foreseeable future, even if the crackdown succeeds and there are no more protests. And Obama (as Axelrod and Rice did Sunday) can try to frame any diplomatic overtures in terms that may be understandable to Americans who know of Iran only what they’ve seen and read in the last few weeks. If we don’t try to strike a deal, Obama can essentially say, this same government will end up with a nuclear weapon. This may buy him slack that Bush never enjoyed.

Still, to much of the public, the memories of the past two weeks will live on much like the memories of Tiananmen did 20 years ago. The reality is that Obama has taken a responsible course by refusing to inject himself into the Iranian drama. But when his opponents rekindle memories of this moment three years from now, will Americans see it that way?