The strategist who took Barack Obama to the White House is now advising the Labour leader in his bid to become Britain’s prime minister. How does he think the two compare?

David Axelrod finds himself in a strange place these days. For the first time in almost a decade, America’s most celebrated political magician, the strategist who in 2008 came up with “Yes we can!” and sent Barack Obama hurtling into the White House, now has no role to play in national politics in his native country. As the drumbeat begins in the 2016 presidential race to succeed Obama, the master image-maker and election guru will spend this cycle on the outside looking in.

It can’t be easy, this unfamiliar distance from the heart of things – like playing for England in the 1966 World Cup final then four years later watching the Germany rematch from the bleachers. How’s he feeling about it, I ask, when we meet in a hotel in midtown Manhattan to discuss his new autobiography, Believer.

“My wife asks me that all the time,” he says, grimacing. “It’s going to be a challenge.”

From his first election at Obama’s side, the bid for a US Senate seat in 2004, until their final race together, the president’s re-election campaign in 2012, Axelrod was at the heart of the exhilarating narrative of the nation’s first African American president. He describes his position in those heady years as “keeper of the message”.

“I’ve had the ultimate experience in American politics. Two winning presidential races, serving in the White House with someone who’s not just my client, but my friend. With someone with whom I had a deep bond of trust.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Axelrod in New York. Photograph: Mike McGregor/Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Guardian

Now Axelrod, on the eve of his 60th birthday, has a consolation prize to compensate for his marginalisation on the wings of American politics: his role as senior strategic adviser to Ed Miliband in the upcoming UK general election. Announced last spring, the appointment was made presumably in the expectation that Axelrod could wave his magic wand over the Labour leader in what promises to be a scrappy and ugly campaign.

So can Axelrod do it? Can he contribute his skills to Labour’s top team and help sprinkle stardust over a politician who has suffered the worst popularity ratings of any party leader since Michael Foot in 1982, and lamented even by natural allies such as the New Statesman as an out-of-touch Hampstead socialist? Can he transform Ed Miliband into an occupant of Downing Street? Can he help create an Ed Miliband of Yes We Can?

In one of the opening pages of Believer, Axelrod’s account of 40 years in politics as a campaign strategist and former reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune, he recalls his feelings of loss at the end of the 2012 election knowing that he would never lead another Obama campaign. For him, he wrote, Obama was an impossible act to follow. “I had been spoiled. The thought of starting over with someone new – and almost certainly somebody who would fall short of Obama – was unappealing.”

That presents me with a thoroughly unfair but utterly irresistible opening question to Axelrod when we turn to the challenge facing him as Miliband’s senior adviser. Would he put the Labour leader into that same category – someone who falls short of Obama?

He looks at me as if slightly gobsmacked but is game enough to answer: “I think Obama’s a once-in-a-lifetime candidate. I can’t think of another person who I would put in his category in my experience of consulting. So I wouldn’t put that burden on Ed or anyone.”

Not exactly a resounding endorsement from a consultant employed, reportedly on a six-figure sum, to help sell Miliband to the British people. But then Axelrod rallies to the cause.

“I think Ed is a smart, earnest guy who very much cares about the issues I care about, especially when it comes to the economy. Ed understands that a healthy economy is not one where a few people do fantastically well and the rest are falling behind. That’s fundamentally what differentiates him from Tory policies because there is a grand indifference among the Tories.”

Axelrod says he doesn’t recognise the awkward individual that the conservative press loves to depict. “My experience with Ed is that he’s someone very comfortable in his own skin. I think he knows why he’s in politics and has a clear idea of public service.”

He goes on to say that in the land of Axelrod, people are divided into two distinct types: those who want to be something, and those who want to do something. “I think Ed genuinely wants to do something. He sees public service as a calling. He sees challenges he wants to address.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ed Miliband with David Axelrod. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA Archive/Press Association Ima

But where’s the personal narrative, I ask. Axelrod has made a career out of turning candidates’ life stories into 30-second TV ads, none more successfully than Obama’s. In his book, he proclaims that “biography is foundational”. So how can he put Miliband’s journey – son of a Marxist academic, Oxford alumnus, career politician – to similar electoral advantage?

“Barack Obama had a made-for-TV story. Who has a story like that? But what Ed has is a comparable commitment to public service for the right reasons, and I think people sense that,” he says.

It’s not just Miliband who has been the butt of grub street ribaldry. Axelrod himself has been a target since he accepted the senior adviser job last April. A month after the announcement he was poked by the press for tweeting a misspelling of Miliband’s name. Others have asked why he has been largely absent in the UK since taking the position, missing last September’s Labour party conference, where Miliband memorably forgot to mention the deficit in his speech delivered without autocue. Others have pointed out with glee that in Axelrod’s new book Miliband doesn’t get a single mention.

I invite him to set the record straight: exactly how much has he been doing on behalf of the Labour election campaign and how frequently has he visited the UK since last April? “I’ve been there for visits in the last couple of months, I’ll be going back. I’m a little tied up now,” he says pointing to the book, “but this was an understanding I had with Ed. I’ve had emails today on several issues, my colleagues had calls with them this morning. This was the arrangement. I think it’s less about me being there as a showpiece than about what strategic insights I can offer.”

Axelrod’s relative absence from the UK has been compared unfavourably with the high visibility of his former colleague , Jim Messina, who worked alongside him as campaign manager for Obama’s re-election in 2012 and is now strategic adviser to David Cameron. It is one of the intriguing elements of this year’s UK election that two such close political operatives, who both made their names serving left-of-centre Democratic candidates in the US, should find themselves in opposing camps across the Atlantic.

I assumed that Messina’s decision to cross the aisle and put his talents to the use of the Tories would be precisely the kind of morally flexible politics that Axelrod detests. Politics for him is a mission, not a choice. He recalls in Believer how he fell in love with politics in 1960 when he heard John F Kennedy address a crowd in his New York neighbourhood of Stuyvesant Town. He was only five, but he absorbed the message: that we are the masters of our future, and politics is the means by which we shape it. “This wasn’t about electing someone or victory for a party but about changing the world, changing the course of the country,” he says.

Since then he has devoted himself to that burning sense of purpose. He has struggled not only to win but to help lift candidates into positions of power where they can actually make a difference. That’s what drew him to Obama in the first place, that shared idealism, and it’s what he’s just told me he sees in Miliband.

I read back to him a line in his book where he describes Messina as a “hard-core political operative, an occasional mercenary”. Is Messina acting as a mercenary on this occasion, taking the Cameron dollar?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Axelrod and Jim Messina, former colleagues going head-to-head in the UK general election. Photograph: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call,Inc.

“I don’t think he’s being mercenary. I’m sure he’s being well paid,” he says with a wry smile.

Then he goes on, sounding a little peeved at me: “Listen, Jim’s a friend of mine. I respect him as a professional. We went through two campaigns together and served in the White House together. We wept together when the Supreme Court upheld the health care bill. A lot of people want to make this about him and me, it’s not. I articulated for you why I’m working for Ed Miliband, that it’s consonant with the philosophy that has animated my political life. You’d have to ask Jim what animates him.”

Last November, Messina addressed Tory MPs at their away day in the Cotswolds. He told them that the average voter thinks about politics for all of four minutes a week, and then he boiled down for them what he thought the Conservatives’ message should be on 7 May: “Cameron is fixing Britain, creating jobs”.

Six words. I ask Axelrod, who is even more lauded than Messina as a master craftsman of political slogans, whether he can do the same for Labour. Can he boil down the Labour offering to voters on 7 May to six words?

This is his reply, transcribed verbatim: “The promise of fixing Britain and creating jobs is that it says nothing about raising wages or economic security. That’s what’s fundamentally missing. If you are willing to proliferate zero-hour contracts and encourage policies that undercut wages you may claim that you’re creating jobs but you are also creating jobs that don’t support families. The question is do you have economic policies that are going to promote living wages, put people who are working hard in a position to support their families? Are you making education and training accessible to young people or are you going to make it so costly they are burdened with debt when they leave? The Tories just don’t look at the British economy through the lens of everyday people. They don’t have a kitchen table philosophy of economics and that’s why the recovery hasn’t reached kitchen tables around Britain.”

That’s 145 words. Is it unreasonable to think that Axelrod and his team still have some fine-tuning to do?

Axelrod is such an important figure in the modern age in that not only has he been at the centre of an era in American politics, he’s also been there at the birth of a new type of permanent campaigning that is rapidly gaining ground in the UK. In the age of cable news and social media, the battle of owning the message, or shaping the style and substance of politics, is now never-ending. It’s a constant round-the-clock whirl. A “beast of transiency” he calls it, the sense that “we tend to get buffered from day to day, controversy to controversy – every day is election day in Washington.”

He takes his fair share of the blame in creating this Frankenstein’s monster; one that has seen the cost of the presidential election in the US rise to an unconscionable $7bn in 2012. He was party to Obama’s decision to opt out of the public finance system which in turn helped unleash an avalanche of private money into the election process. “With that money comes a lot of ads, a lot of transient politics, a lot that takes us away from what is really important,” Axelrod says.

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The UK is different in this regard: its bar on political TV advertising forces candidates to rely on “earned media” – the press and broadcasters – to carry their message to voters and tell their story. “That’s a very dirty filter through which to communicate. It takes longer, it’s more challenging,” Axelrod says.

That will all change when the starting gun of the election proper fires, he predicts. From having been the victim of the UK’s famously vindictive press, Ed Miliband will finally be out in front of the media and beamed directly to the British people.

“The advent of the short campaign will give him the exposure he needs. He’s going to get that opportunity in the final push, in the short campaign, and it’s going to be a very close and competitive election.”

The keeper of the message sounds like he really believes that. Which is odd, given his track-record. He barely slept for two years in his relentless drive to get Obama into the White House. Now he’s declaring his confidence that it will all come right for Ed Miliband, though we might have to wait until the last minute.

Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (Penguin Press US) by David Axelrod is out now

• This article was amended on 16 February to correctly identify the book’s publisher.