Washington’s think tanks often serve as incubators for administrations-in-waiting. Leave the White House when Democrats take over, spend four or eight years waiting at Heritage or American Enterprise Institute. Lose your Treasury job thanks to a Republican winning, sit tight at Brookings. Sure enough, Obama found a ton of appointees among the ranks of the Center for American Progress, and at least a few have left the Obama administration for CAP.

But it seems the Obama administration also swaps staff with Google.

Bloomberg reports that Obama 2012′s data team has moved to Google. But it’s not a buyout out of nowhere. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was part of the Obama campaign all along, according to this Bloomberg story:

During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama’s reelection team had an underappreciated asset: Google’s (GOOG)executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. He helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization. “On election night he was in our boiler room in Chicago,” says David Plouffe, then a senior White House adviser…

This may surprise you if you believed Obama’s campaign rhetoric about him fighting against big business and wealthy executives. But the Google-Obama alliance is long-lasting and intimate.

A couple of examples:

Remember Obama’s No. 2 tech staffer at the White House was Google’s former top lobbyist — who improperly worked with active Google lobbyists on pushing policy that Google supported.

Obama appointed non-registered Google lobbyist and max-Obama donor Vint Cerf to a science advisory board.

Schmidt reportedly once asked a deputy to make the search engine ignore Schmidt’s political giving (heavy to Dems and Obama).