I’m actually kind of relieved to hear this denial (assuming he’s telling the truth). The idea that a political staffer was part of national security meetings was repugnant to me, just as it was when Karl Rove was part of every decision in the Bush White House:

Senior Obama political aide David Axelrod said little today about a past fight with Attorney General Eric Holder, but flatly denied reports that he attended high-level national security meetings.

“I know there were weekly meetings dealing with terrorist threats and planning around it, but I did not attend those meetings,” Axelrod said on CBS’ Face the Nation.

As for a new book’s report of a 2009 confrontation with Holder over the attorney general’s concerns about political interference in legal matters, Axelrod said:

“First of all, let me say, Eric Holder is a great friend of mine. We actually went to the same high school. So we may have gone chest to chest back in the day. But we have a strong relationship. And I’m not going to get into the details of that, other than to say I respect him.”

Axelrod, a former administration aide who now works with Obama’s re-election campaign, also told CBS: “I obviously never tried to interfere in anything that he (Holder) did, never talked to him about a governmental matter or a Justice Department matter in all of the years I was in the White House.”

If only he wasn’t so corporatist, I wouldn’t feel so bad about this election:

In 2008, more than 550,000 gave more than $200 to Barack Obama, entering their names in the longest list of individual donors ever seen in American politics.

That list was a snapshot of the hope Obama inspired in a cross sections of liberals, young professionals, African-Americans, and Democrats who saw in him a generational and historic moment. But now, as Obama struggles to keep pace with his 2008 fundraising clip, that list offers a cross-section of Democratic disappointment and alienation. According to a BuzzFeed analysis of campaign finance data, 88% of the people who gave $200 or more in 2008 — 537,806 people — have not yet given that sum this year. And this drop-off isn’t simply an artifact of timing. A full 87% of the people who gave $200 — the sum that triggers an itemized report to the Federal Elections Commission — through April of 2008, 182,078 people, had not contributed by the end of last month.

Interviews with dozens of those drop-off donors reveal the stories of Democrats who still plan to pull the lever for the president, but whose support has gone from fervent to lukewarm, or whose economic circumstances have left them without money to spare. The interviews and the data are the substance of an “enthusiasm gap” spurred by the distance between the promise of the campaign and the reality of governing, one that has begun to deepen Democratic gloom about this November’s election.

“Where’s the change I can believe in?” asked Lisa Pike, a 55-year-old from Williamsburg, Va. with a small medical transcription business who gave $658 in 2008. She said she is not planning on contributing this time around. “I wish he was the socialist they accused him of being. I wish we had the tons of change that would justify the right freaking out. I wish him well — I don’t dislike him personally — but I’m disappointed that he’s not the change-agent I had hoped for.”

What David Atkins said. I was doing a radio show last week and I said I had no respect for “independent” voters in general. I said they were usually hopelessly underinformed and if they weren’t too lazy to read, they might see that there is no “middle” anymore.