IT DID not take long for David Axelrod, the rumpled campaign genius who steered Barack Obama’s rise from state senator to president, to detect that governing the country might prove less uplifting than getting his boss elected. In memoirs published on February 10th Mr Axelrod recalls fretting, soon after the inauguration in 2009, that White House insiders were already talking about breaking Mr Obama’s campaign commitments. This prompted Rahm Emanuel, the new president’s chief of staff to scream at Mr Axelrod: “I’m god-damned sick of hearing about the fucking campaign. The campaign is over. We’re trying to solve some problems here.” From this and other clues, Mr Axelrod deduced that there was a “tension” between a campaign that had promised to bring hope and change to America and the task of actually governing.

Mr Axelrod’s autobiography, “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics”, is in part a story about a broken heart. The Chicago-based strategist was already a veteran when he met Mr Obama. By then he had run (and won) enough campaigns to develop his “remedy not replica” theory of politics. This holds that voters almost always choose change over the status quo, even when a popular incumbent is stepping down, and moreover look for a candidate who seems to correct the perceived weaknesses of a departing leader. He watched Mr Obama deliver a soaring hymn to a post-racial, post-partisan America at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and helped him win election to the Senate in Washington, boosted by opposition to what he called a “dumb” war in Iraq. Soon, Mr Axelrod concluded that the young lawyer might just be the cure for a country sick of George W. Bush.

Mr Axelrod helped his improbable candidate win the 2008 presidential primaries, taking his youth and inexperience and turning them into strengths at a time of deep alienation with politics as usual. He coined the slogan “Yes We Can”, and helped craft television ads and speeches in which Mr Obama vowed to tame Washington and restore frayed global alliances.

If “Believer” were merely an account of Mr Axelrod’s bruising return to reality, as the 2008 agenda became bogged down by recession, partisanship and gridlock, it would be little more than a historical footnote—even if, as one of the innermost circle, Mr Axelrod has uncommon insights to offer. Notably, the book adds to the growing body of evidence that Mr Obama is quite an odd man. Though Mr Axelrod is at pains to relate how his former boss is more human and anguished by tales of woe and suffering than many suppose, he does concede that Mr Obama is astonishingly self-assured, and self-aware. “I don’t need to be president. It turns out that being Barack Obama is a pretty good gig in and of itself,” he is quoted telling Mr Axelrod, shortly before announcing his candidacy. After a terrible first debate performance during the 2012 election, Mr Obama confides that he agrees with a pundit who suggests he lacks the “neediness” that drives most politicians to perform in pursuit of “validation”. And though Mr Axelrod blames Republicans for wrecking Mr Obama’s plans to seek bipartisan deals, the strategist does say that the president has aggravated political opponents by lecturing them on why it is in their own political interests to agree with him.

“Believer” is more than a work of history because of the name of the woman Mr Obama beat to the nomination in 2008. With the most successful Democratic strategist of his generation as the author, “Believer” raises pointed, still-valid questions about Hillary Clinton’s presumed ambition to represent her party in 2016. As a loyal Democrat, Mr Axelrod has suggested in interviews around the book’s launch that—in the light of Mr Obama’s “great, unfulfilled promise” to change Washington—Mrs Clinton’s years of Washington experience will be much more of an asset in this campaign than in 2008, allowing her to run as a candidate of change. Yet many of Mr Axelrod’s observations about voter disillusion, and the importance of mobilising great armies of enthusiastic volunteers, will still apply in 2016.

Meet Hillary, the candidate of change

Mr Axelrod comes close to conceding that Mrs Clinton was correct in her pessimism about Washington. In the book he recalls Team Obama’s shock when the president found it was facing “monolithic” Republican opposition to his agenda, rather than the bipartisan support they had “naively” expected as the economy stood on the brink of a depression. “Maybe this was what Hillary was talking about when she chided us during the campaign for raising ‘false hopes’,” he writes.

Even if no candidate can run on “Hope and Change” this time, that does not make “I Told You So” a winning slogan. At the core of the 2008 Obama insurgency was a belief that being a “very capable” Democrat was not enough to win the presidency. Mrs Clinton, with whom Mr Axelrod had worked in the past, was skilled at serving up Republican-bashing red meat, boasting in one primary debate: “If you want a winner who knows how to take them on, I’m your girl.” But many voters had decided that it was not just Republicans, but politics that was broken. Mr Axelrod writes: “The change she was offering was not away from Washington’s habit of parsing words and passing on tough issues (She habitually sought safe harbour).” Nor was she willing to break with a system full of lobbyists and deep-pocketed political action committees, he adds. “The only real change she was offering was in political parties, and that simply wasn’t enough.”

This time Mrs Clinton faces no serious rivals for the Democratic crown, even before she announces her intentions. But pondering Mrs Clinton’s vulnerabilities in a 2006 memo, Mr Axelrod wrote: “For all her advantages, she is not a healing figure...After two decades of the Bush-Clinton saga, making herself the candidate of the future will be a challenge.” Even if the country is more resigned to partisanship than in 2008, that is still true.