David Axelrod wants us to believe that he thinks we're terrible for only looking for juicy bits in his supposedly finely wrought meditation on politics called "Believer."

And if you can believe that, he's got a first-term Senator for President he can sell you. Or, well, we did believe him back then, he believes, so why won't we believe that this book of his is something more than what "modern media" is making of it?

“More than anything, this is what’s terrible about modern media and how these books roll out,” Axelrod says. “I was determined to write a book that wasn’t going to be characterized by some titillating nugget that had about a three-day half-life, but rather an entire story of my life and the conclusions that life has led me to. I wanted to write a book that people might want to read years from now and not just today’s publication because they wanted to find out who had been knifing who.”

But why would we believe that you have written a thoughtful tome of this sort? What in the entire story of your life could move us to believe that you'd produce a work of timeless literature or even solid personal memoir that tells the truth about what happened and reveals the actual "conclusions that life has led [you] to"?

Even now as you try to bullshit us into believing "Believer" is worth believing, you say things like:

The book treats Hillary Clinton, a client before she was an opponent—and today Axelrod’s preferred 2016 presidential candidate—with admiration and respect, even when her operatives are dissed, and even when Axelrod reports that she considered a post-2008 primary conversation with him, aboard the Obama campaign plane, about as welcome as a root canal.

“I think she’s going to be the [Democratic] nominee, and I will strongly support her,” says Axelrod, who claims that 2012 was his final campaign and that he has retired once and for all from political consulting; these days he presides over the Institute of Politics, which he founded in 2013 at his alma mater, the University of Chicago. “She’s in a very strong position—not to say that she’s guaranteed anything,” Axelrod says of Clinton. “The question—and only she can answer it when she becomes a candidate—is what kind of candidate she’ll be.”

So, obviously, he had no intention to tell the truth about Hillary. He's rooting for the Democratic Party candidate in '16, and it's probably going to have to be her, so he's pulling his punches. Who wants to read the inside story of Obama's '08 campaign if you know the writer is committed to being kind to Hillary? What I'd have to believe to want to read "Believer" is that the writer has put the interests of us, the readers, first. Otherwise, it's PR, propaganda... a book-shaped object. We smell that —easily — and we turn up our noses... after picking out the few nuggets that looked tasty.

And here's something Axelrod said in the interview:

Axelrod is skeptical of the presidential buzz surrounding Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. “So he goes to Iowa and gives a good speech to a few hundred activists…and he’s the flavor of the month,” he says. “Presidential politics is like pole vaulting. Everyone can clear the early bar. But then the bar gets raised. And the reality is, how do you handle it when it gets really, really rough, when you’re under constant scrutiny, when everything you say becomes an issue?”

What a hack! 1. He instinctively runs down the Republican, of course. 2. He uses a banal metaphor (raising the bar) and drags it out as if that will make it seem to contain wisdom. 3. He's acting like the first time he noticed Walker was the first thing Walker ever did. That speech in Iowa. But that speech in Iowa was what it was because Walker had gone though four really, really rough years in Wisconsin when he was under constant scrutiny, when everything he said became an issue.