Opinion: David Axelrod, Rick Davis and others do an election postmortem

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The brains behind the presidential campaign came together last night at Harvard’s Institute of Politics to give the inside scoop on the year’s biggest story.

Bill McInturff (John McCain’s chief pollster) and Rick Davis (McCain’s campaign manager) met with David Plouffe (Barack Obama’s campaign manager) and David Axelrod (Obama’s chief strategist) for the election postmortem, which the Institute has held every election cycle since 1972.

It was moderated by PBS’ Gwen Ifill, who played her own role in the campaign.

The politicos named the highlights of the campaign as well as their regrets.

Davis, for one, said he wished McCain had never said that the U.S. economy was fundamentally strong (a statement he made in September, when Wall Street was collapsing).

‘That would be one he’d want to do a redo on,’ Davis said.

Obama’s team said that the controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. was a low point of their campaign.

‘It was a moment of great peril,’ Plouffe said.

Axelrod shared a few details about that controversy, which culminated in Obama giving his well-regarded speech on race in Philadelphia in March. He said Obama was still working on the speech until late the night before he gave it.

‘I woke up at 2 a.m., and there was the speech on my BlackBerry,’ Axelrod said. ‘I e-mailed him back and said, ‘This is why you should be president.’’

-- Kate Linthicum