David Axelrod is a top advisor to Barack Obama. Axelrod is a longtime strategist for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and styles himself a "specialist in urban politics." Axelrod also served in 2006 as the chief political adviser for Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair U.S. Representative Rahm Emanuel for the U.S. House of Representatives elections, in which the Democrats gained 31 seats. Axelrod and Barack Obama's ties reach back more than a decade. Axelrod met Obama in 1992 when Obama so impressed Betty Lu Saltzmann, a woman from Chicago's "lakefront liberal crowd," during a black voter registration drive he ran that she then introduced the two. In late April and early May, Barack Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright criticized Axelrod's influence on Obama. The New York Times reported that Wright said of Axelrod "while he was expert at promoting black candidates with white voters, he did not know much about relating to the black community...They're spiriting him away from people in the African-American community. David doesn't know the African-American church scene." In 2007, the University of Chicago Hospital hired ASK to assist in marketing a plan for steering patients who don't have health insurance to other health care facilities, a plan with which now-First Lady Michelle Obama was associated, working for the hospital. Critics argue that the plan dumps costly patients simply to increase the hospital's bottom line.
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