President Barack Obama’s Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett was kept away from the president following his first debate flop in Denver with Republican candidate Mitt Romney, according to Politico’s Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin’s e-book.
Jarrett has a "tendency to stir him up" and was sent on the campaign trail so that she would not further damage the president’s confidence.
According to the report:
[The president] was deeply shaken by his own failure in Denver — far more than anyone on the outside could have known at the time. Intuitively, Obama and his top advisers quietly waged a campaign-within-a-campaign to buck up their bummed-out candidate and, even more quietly, to purge distractions and negativity from his midst.
Gone, for a time, was Obama’s beloved iPad, which delivered a stream of sour commentary. Gone too, gently shuttled off to campaign events outside the Air Force One bubble, was his close friend Valerie Jarrett, who had a tendency to "stir him up," said more than one Obama insider.
Obama campaign officials publicly denied there was any organized effort to get Jarrett out of Obama’s space. But privately, a top Democratic official said they needed to "make sure she wasn’t around all the time … that she was gainfully employed somewhere else."
Their friendship has presumably been restored. Jarrett accompanied Obama during trips to Michigan and Connecticut on Dec. 16. She is also leading outreach on fiscal cliff conversations with top financial leaders.