He has been equivocal on the subject in the past, but on Monday night White House chief of staff and native Chicagoan Rahm Emanuel made no bones about it: He wants to be the mayor of Chicago.

“I hope Mayor [Richard] Daley seeks re-election. I will work and support him if he seeks re-election,” Emanuel told Charlie Rose on the host’s PBS talk show, in an interview broadcast Monday night. “But if Mayor Daley doesn’t, one day I would like to run for mayor of the city of Chicago. That’s always been an aspiration of mine, even when I was in the House of Representatives.”

In January, after The Washington Post reported that Emanuel, a one-time Daley aide and longtime supporter of the mayor, was mulling a mayoral run, Emanuel did not deny the report. He instead said in statement that he was “100 percent focused on the job at hand: serving President Obama as his chief of staff.”

At the time, Daley himself dismissed the report as gossip.

But on Monday night, Emanuel said he missed the regular contact he had with constituents as a representative of Illinois 5th District. “You learned a lot,” he told Rose, according to a transcript of the interview.

(Source: Chicago Tribune / YWN-4705)