David Axelrod on Sarah Palin: "For someone who makes the point that she is not from Washington, she looks like she would fit in very well there."

Politico reports:

“She is deft at going on the attack. For someone who makes the point that she is not from Washington, she looks like she would fit in very well there,” Axelrod told reporters on the campaign plane in Pittsburgh, Pa. “These attacks all felt very familiar to Americans who are used to this kind of thing from Washington.”

Axelrod said her speech was riddled with distortions.

“Right down the line,” he said. “She tried to attack Obama by saying he had no significant legislative accomplishments – maybe that’s what she was told – but she should talk to Sen. Lugar, talk to Sen. Coburn, talk to people across the aisle in Illinois where he passed dozens of major laws to expand health care reform welfare, reduce taxes on working families. So I think she had an assignment and she went out and she discharged it.”

She's an automaton, programmed to carry out a mission. Possibly raised hydroponically by Karl Rove in a basement in the White House.

By the way, I keep hearing that Obama has executive experience qualifying him to run for the presidency in that he has run a campaign for the presidency. Does that mean Axelrod -- and Rove -- could run for President? I mean, isn't Axelrod really the brain behind it all?

He founded a political consultancy and soon made his mark running the re-election campaign of Chicago's first African-American mayor, Harold Washington. He has since done work for clients ranging from the current mayor, Richard M Daley, to presidential hopefuls John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. But the Washington campaign proved a template for helping other African-American mayoral candidates, leading one commentator early in the Obama campaign to remark that Axelrod had 'developed something of a novel niche for a political consultant - helping black politicians convince white supporters to support them'.

Yet in Obama, almost from the moment they met, Axelrod seemed to sense something on a far grander scale: a potential for what he described to friends as a 'historic' agent for change in American politics on the scale of the hero he had seen as a five-year-old. He helped to run Obama's campaign for the US Senate in 2004 and was also credited with helping to craft the powerful Democratic convention speech in July 2004 that put him squarely on the national political stage.