Axelrod to Leave White House Soon?

Fox News:

President Obama’s senior advisor David Axelrod is planning to move up his departure to sooner than originally planned, a senior White House official told Fox News on Monday, heading out in late January or early February.

The purpose is “to leave enough time to spend time with family before the next project begins,” the official said.

As recently as Nov. 14, Axelrod told “Fox News Sunday” that he’d probably stay about six more months before leaving to work on the president’s re-election bid.

Really? You mean this has nothing to do with the “shellacking” Obama received in the midterms?

CNN’s Ed Henry reports that:

President Obama is planning to bring former campaign manager David Plouffe onto the White House staff at the beginning of January to work alongside senior adviser David Axelrod for a brief time before Axelrod moves on to help run the re-election campaign, according to a senior administration official and a senior Democratic strategist familiar with the plan.

The sources added that Axelrod is now planning to leave his White House post as soon as immediately after the State of the Union address, which is an earlier departure date than originally expected and could be part of a new round of departures at the White House.

While there have been reports suggesting Plouffe will directly replace Axelrod, the working plan right now is actually for the two veterans of the 2008 campaign to work together for at least a short period as sort of a handoff, as the White House continues to reshape itself to deal with a Republican-controlled House and a shrunken Democratic majority in the Senate.

Well, there’s no time to lose with the President’s approval rating at 39% in the latest Zogby poll and only 28% strongly supporting him in the Rasmussen daily tracking poll today.

Yikes! Look at those disapproval numbers.

Meanwhile, at Huffpo, Sam Stein continues his reporting on disgruntled Democratic donors:

In the wake of an electoral drubbing and fearing another one in two years, some deep-pocketed Democratic donors have decided to essentially go rogue with respect to the Obama White House.

In meetings this past week, some of the top financiers in the party advanced discussions about building a third-party apparatus to counter that on the Republican side of the aisle.

I’m not sure how “rogue” these donors are really willing to go, since they are mainly talking about David Brock’s new project. James Carville sounds skeptical too:

“There probably is some kind of need [for a third-party outlet]. The one thing about us though is when we lose we have a lot of meetings. We are not even getting started on the retreats or retrospectives,” said James Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, during an unrelated breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “There is probably going to be one now, it is just the nature of what it is. Undoubtedly the Democrats will have symposiums and retreats.”

Big whoop.

Still, at least the Dems are recognizing that things don’t look so rosy for Obama. It appears that David Axelrod is worried too.