Axelrod: Romney '12 concession call 'irritated' Obama

President Barack Obama was not amused by Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential election concession call, according to a new memoir.

In “Believer: My 40 Years in Politics,” former senior Obama adviser David Axelrod writes that the GOP candidate implied on the call that Obama had won because of his popularity in black communities, according to the New York Daily News, which acquired an advance copy of the book.


Obama was “unsmiling during the call, and slightly irritated when it was over,” according to Axelrod.

“‘You really did a great job of getting out the vote in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee,’ in other words, black people. That’s what he thinks this was all about,” Obama said after he hung up with Romney.

The memoir, set to come out on Feb. 10, goes behind the scenes of other high-profile political relationships.

One part of the book describes the awkward relationship between former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, a longtime friend of the Obama family; Emanuel felt as though he had to “manage the president’s best friend.” Emanuel helped campaign for Jarrett to inherit Obama’s vacant Illinois Senate seat to avoid the discomfort, but Obama kept Jarrett in the White House.

Another section of the book speaks about Vice President Joe Biden, saying he “is a decent guy, but man, that guy can just talk and talk.”

Axelrod also reveals that Obama for a short time considered appointing Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court.

Later, when the president was mustering support for the Affordable Care Act, he joked that to get Sen. Olympia Snowe’s vote, “We’ll call it the Snowe plan. Hell, she can live here in the White House! Michelle and I will get an apartment.”