David Axelrod offers Hillary Clinton some 2016 advice

David Axelrod, President Obama's former senior adviser, is offering Hillary Clinton some strategic advice for her potential 2016 presidential bid.

Clinton shouldn't try to "run away" from the president, Axelrod said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning."

As "we saw in the midterms, that's not a good strategy," he said. He also said that Clinton needs to "define herself and where she wants to take the country in the future."

The former secretary of state's relationship with Mr. Obama has had its "peaks and valleys," Axelrod said. But, he concluded, their evolving relationship ultimately became one of the great stories of the Obama administration.

When asked about the president's demeanor since the Democrats' major midterm losses, Axelrod said that while the Obama administration may have been presumed politically dead, the president has "had the best run he's had in years since." He suggested that the president has shifted his attitude, realizing he's got two years left in office. He noted that Mr. Obama has "a bounce in his step that I haven't seen in a very long time."

Axelrod also admitted to what he calls "a mistake that I take some responsibility for." As the administration scrambled to contain the financial crisis during their first months in office, Axelrod says he regrets using the president as too much of "an announcer for the government instead of the narrator of a larger theme."

Axelrod also acknowledged the president's own weaknesses, telling Charlie Rose, "He didn't always relate to the politicians as well as he could."

Since leaving Mr. Obama's reelection campaign, Axelrod has been advising British Politician Ed Miliband and working on his own memoir, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, published Tuesday by Penguin Press.

Axelrod admitted that he experienced "withdrawal" when he left the White House, and was "depressed" about not hearing from the president on a regular basis. In regards to his current relationship with the president, who he now calls a friend, Axelrod said the two talk "from time to time" and "email frequently."

As for Axelrod's future in American politics, the political strategist says he's staying on the bench. But when pressed about weighing in on politics across the pond, Axelrod shot back, "That's not a domestic campaign!"