President Obama's top political adviser said Sunday that Republican presidential candidates who want to "roll back Wall Street reforms" obviously don't understand the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"I don't think any American is impressed when they see Gov. Romney and all Republican candidates say the first thing they'll do is roll back Wall Street reforms and go back to where we were before the crisis and let Wall Street write its own rules," David Axelrod told ABC's Christiane Amanpour.

"Is [the movement] beneficial to the president or is it detrimental to the president?" Amanpour asked. "Some of them are saying, you know, the president himself has a lot of Wall Street in his cabinet."

"I don't know," Axelrod admitted. "I don't know how to judge that and I don't know that anybody does, and we tend in this business to try and treat everything as a kind of seminal event. You see some of that around the Wall Street protests."

"I do know this, the American people want a financial system that works on the level, they want to get a fair shake, and they want to know the dealings made are done transparently so if they are problems such as the ones we saw before the crisis, we'll be alerted to them and can stop the whole economy from being turned over."