Axelrod on Mass. election: "the Republican had run "a very clever campaign.""As a practitioner in politics, my hat's off to him,"

Some pre-spin from David Axelrod, who puts on the record the full range of arguments — that Coakley ran a bad campaign; Brown ran a brilliant one; and local Dems didn't ask for help — that Washington Democrats have given over the last week.

Paul West writes up his interview with regional reporters:

The Obama strategist volunteered praise for the Massachusetts Senate campaign run by the Republican, Scott Brown, and seemed to find nothing good to point to in the Democratic effort. He said he didn't want to "delve deeply into post-mortems on the day people are voting."

Axelrod appeared to reject the criticism that he and his team had been taken by surprise and should have done more to head off a Democratic collapse. He said it was "not exactly a revelation to us" that voters are angry and anxious after a year in which millions of Americans have lost their jobs and millions more see no evidence in their lives that the economy is recovering.

Axelrod also said that there were "local issues at play" in Massachusetts and that the Republican had run "a very clever campaign."

"As a practitioner in politics, my hat's off to him," Axelrod said.

He was asked whether Obama should have done more than make an eleventh-hour effort to head off a defeat that would be calamatous for his agenda.

"The White House did everything we were asked to do," he said. "I think if we had been asked earlier, we would have responded earlier." (SOURCE POLITICO)