The disillusionment of Obama’s guru.

Among the many distinctions David Axelrod has achieved in his career, there is one that requires special elaboration: He is, it turns out, one of the few customers to have ever run a tab at Manny’s, the Chicago cafeteria and deli. This is not because the odd knish ($4.25) or side of potato chips ($0.75) threatened to leave him cash-poor. It is, rather, because Axelrod has long styled himself someone who accumulates wisdom at places regular people frequent, not the lacquered haunts of downtown Washington. What the Oval Room is to Beltway consultant-dom, Manny’s is to Axelrod.

This detail helps explain why the chief strategist always insisted he wouldn’t follow his boss, Barack Obama, to the White House. Axelrod considered himself an enemy of Washington groupthink, and not just on matters of culinary preference. There was, for example, that annoying Washington habit of carving voters into niches and plying them full of micro-spiels—more like a marketing exec surveying the cable dial than a leader bestriding history. Axe, as he is known, spent eight years at the Chicago Tribune before entering politics. And although it had been decades since he’d left the ranks of scribblers, he still thought in broad narratives and stirring set pieces—“macro-trends,” he’d joke. Among the deviations from the standard playbook that the Obama campaign made famous: an eight-day trip to Europe and the Middle East, a 30-minute infomercial costing millions of dollars, a nomination speech set under the Rocky Mountain sky (with no backup venue for rain!).

If the Obama landslide dragged Axelrod to Washington against his better judgment (his wife said he’d never forgive himself for staying put), the one judgment he never set aside was the inanity of D.C. custom. Even before Obama arrived at the White House, Axelrod had grand plans for scrambling protocol. Recent presidents had materialized at the Capitol like patriotic bunting. Axelrod imagined Obama traveling by train from Springfield, Illinois, gathering up ordinary folks along the way. “We wouldn’t just bring their concerns to Washington, we’d bring them to Washington,” says one inauguration official. Compared to the feats Team Obama had pulled off during the campaign, this one hardly rated as revolutionary. But you had to appreciate the symbolism. Lincoln took a similar journey to his first swearing-in. Besides, why give the Oval Room set its run of the inauguration? They could share it with the country.

At which point things got complicated. Logistics aides pointed out that there was no direct route from Springfield to Washington—the train would have to make long detours through Chicago and Pittsburgh. The Secret Service worried it might not be up to the task of securing nearly 1,000 miles of track, to say nothing of the frequent stops. When Axelrod and his colleagues realized the trip could take a week, even they became discouraged. “We couldn’t hold the media’s attention that long,” says the inauguration official. “CNN on the fourth day of the whistle-stop would be like, seriously?” Reluctantly, they abandoned the idea, settling on a day trip from Philadelphia instead.

(Slideshow: Profiling the candidates to replace Rahm as chief of staff.)