Jack Lew, the new White House chief of staff, was previously a managing director at Citi Alternative Investments. Nancy-Ann DeParle, a deputy chief of staff who helped lead the president's health care reform effort, was a managing director at CCMP Capital.

Jeffrey Goldstein, the recently-departed undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance, was a managing director at Hellman & Friedman before he joined the administration. He's returning to the private equity firm now that he has resigned. Former auto czar Steve Rattner came out of the world of private equity before briefly working with the administration, and defended Bain Capital from attacks in a Politico op-ed this week.

A number of Obama advisory board members and lower-profile appointees have also had private equity on their resumes. Mark Gallogly of Centerbridge Partners, and formerly of the Blackstone Group, was on the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Richard Parsons, the former Time Warner executive on the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, is also linked to Providence Equity Partners Inc. Walter Jones, the U.S. executive director of the African Development Bank, was a senior private equity executive with Gravitas Capital Advisors.

There are other private equity connections on the President's Management Advisory Board, the Board for International Food and Agriculture Development, the National Infrastructure Advisory Council and the Advisory Committee of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

And if he plans on doing that, will he have to purge the ranks of his own administration?