* Click here for some background. WBEZ yesterday…

David Axelrod, former chief strategist and senior advisor to President Barack Obama in his winning 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, said if Pritzker harbors White House ambitions, he ought to think hard about leaving Springfield after two terms because of the political volatility that being governor can bring.

“Third terms are notoriously perilous, and things that can go wrong tend to go wrong in third terms,” Axelrod said. “If your attention is divided between running for president, which is a hellacious job in itself, and…dealing with crises at home, that is a very difficult balance to strike.

“I honestly think time may be better spent for him if he wants to run for president, traveling the country and interacting with people and not just speaking, but listening. It would enrich him as a candidate and give him a head start. So you have to balance the risks and rewards of each decision. And in my view, the risks of running again [for governor] are greater than the possible rewards,” said Axelrod, a CNN commentator and host of the political podcast, “The Axe Files.” […]

Democratic political strategist Pete Giangreco had roles in nine presidential campaigns dating back to 1984, including Obama’s two victories and the 1992 and 1996 wins by Democrat Bill Clinton. Like Axelrod, Giangreco sees more time in Illinois’ Executive Mansion as a move fraught with risk for Pritzker if the governor has any desire to seek the White House. […]

“Every time Gov. Pritzker goes to New Hampshire and starts swinging a bat at the president, the president’s going to retaliate,” Giangreco said. “If you have a guy at 1600 Pennsylvania who wakes up every morning trying to figure out how to screw Illinois because the governor said something, that’s like a new dynamic that no one’s ever seen before. It’s like you can do one or the other: You can govern or you can run for president.

“The stakes are too high to try to do both,” Giangreco said.

Rich suggested yesterday that Axelrod and Pete Giangreco might be saying this to boost former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for governor.

* Gov. JB Pritzker hopped on CNN yesterday and talked about Rich’s speculation…

* The transcript…

Reporter: Is Axelrod right?

Pritzker: David’s a friend of mine. Here’s what I can say, I think he has in mind the idea that his friend Rahm Emanuel would like to run for governor of Illinois. [He] probably wouldn’t run for governor if I were running for reelection. So that’s one thing that I think he’s considering.

The other thing I think he’s suggesting, he’s not wrong. When you talk to people who’ve considered running for a third term, they would tell you that sometimes third terms don’t work out for people. It hasn’t happened very often, but if you look at Jay Inslee in Washington State, he had a fabulous third term and really accomplished quite a lot, and was able to finish a lot of things that he started in his first two terms. So it can happen either way. Frankly, you can have a flub that occurs in your first term or in second, it could happen in your third term. Things happen.

My focus is on lifting up the people of the state of Illinois, advancing the cause of the economy for our state, and making sure that I’m bringing what I have been, I think, for the last six and a half years, which is fiscal stability to a state that really wasn’t stable for many years before

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