Fox business correspondent Charlie Gasparino says he believes White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley is leaving the administration because he doesn’t want to be part of President Barack Obama’s “very class-warfare oriented” re-election campaign.
Gasparino’s remarks came during a brief appearance with host Neil Cavuto on Fox News.
Other factors also had contributed to Daley’s discomfort within the Obama administration, Gasparino said.
The White House chief of staff apparently ran afoul of close presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett. Daley reportedly objected to how much power she wielded within the Obama White House.
In September, Daley called Gasparino to upbraid him over his report that Daley wanted to be the next Treasury secretary, a post that Timothy Geithner occupies.
“I said, ‘OK, stop yelling at me let me ask you a question, ‘Do you want to be Treasury secretary?’” Gasparino said. “And he says, ‘I don’t lust for the job,’ which means he wanted the job.”
Daley was Commerce secretary under former President Bill Clinton and was brought on board Team Obama to replace Rahm Emanuel, who left to run for mayor of Chicago.
Daley, the youngest son of the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, was expected to mend fences with the business community and to reach out to pro-business Republicans.
Neither role appeared important, however, once the president’s strategists decided that class-oriented populism and attacks against a “do-nothing Congress” would be the president’s best chance to win re-election.
“My guess is here the president’s going to ramp up the anti-business stuff going into the campaign,” Gasparino told Cavuto on Monday. “This guy [Daley] is a moderate, he’s obviously someone with close ties to the business community.”
Cavuto remarked that Daley recently advised the president to tone down his broadsides against Wall Street and the rich.
Said Gasparino: “This is going to be a very class-warfare-oriented campaign, and [Daley] does not want to be part of it. And they [the president’s political advisers] don’t want to be part of him.”
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