In a move seen as an appeal to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton is reportedly going to tap Gary Gensler, former regulator and advocate of the Dodd-Frank legislation, to be her presidential campaign’s chief financial officer, according to a Bloomberg exclusive Thursday. The information was obtained from an unnamed Democratic source.
While Gensler was a former partner at Goldman Sachs, he served for President Barack Obama as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was a key player pushing for tighter rules for Wall Street. Gensler also served in President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department.
“For Clinton, who has been fighting her left flank’s concern that she is too cozy with Wall Street, Gensler is a notable hire,” Bloomberg wrote. “He became known as someone with sharp elbows — even during his negotiations within the Obama administration — in his push for tighter regulation.”
The news service says the move is to also ease tensions among progressive groups because they favor Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has said she will not run against Clinton. Warren was the brainchild behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“While Gensler’s hire is unlikely to assuage those concerns entirely, it would put a trusted financial reform player into a senior role in the Clinton campaign,” Bloomberg wrote.
For now, Clinton is striving for a populist tone on her “listening tour,” such as when she chatted with a roundtable at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, after road-tripping from New York to the Midwest state in a van.
“There’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay less in taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80,” Clinton reportedly told the group. “I think it’s fair to say that if you look across the country, the deck is stacked in favor of those already at the top.”