Despite the fact she’s the establishment candidate.

CHICAGO — She’s the prohibitive Democratic front-runner, David Axelrod says, but if Hillary Rodham Clinton is going to win the White House in 2016 she needs to campaign like an insurgent.

Axelrod has credentials to make the critique: He was the strategist for challenger Barack Obama when he wrested the Democratic nomination from her the last time she was the front-runner, in 2008. In his memoir, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, published Tuesday by Penguin Press, Axelrod recalls both how Clinton’s caution and missteps cost her the nomination — and how she then countered and threatened to win it back.

“What she can’t rely on, and I don’t think she will, is the Clinton name, although the Clinton name trades very high in American politics,” Axelrod told Capital Download in an interview at his office at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. “Americans are always about the future. Bill Clinton was famously the one who said that, and he was right. So she needs a very well-conceived message about where she wants to lead the country. If she doesn’t have that, then it does become a problem. ….

“I think she has to approach this campaign like a challenger, not like a front-runner — like an insurgent.”

That means not only delivering speeches but also connecting viscerally with voters, making herself vulnerable and approachable the way she did in New Hampshire after losing the Iowa caucuses, and not shying from primary debates even against a distant field. While she’s one of the most familiar faces in American politics, she has to project a fresh and forward-looking message that tells people where she wants to take the country.