Cory Booker on Maddow: Obama Campaign ‘Didn’t Force Me’ To Walk Back Bain Comments
The Great Cory Booker Walkback continued last night, with the Newark mayor taking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show to explain his recent comments in favor of, and then against, the private equity industry.
Booker, you’ll recall, confided on Sunday’s Meet the Press that he was “uncomfortable” with – and even “nauseated” by – an Obama campaign ad that attacked Romney’s record at the private equity firm Bain Capital. He later – presumably after a mind-concentrating call from Team Obama – shot a web video intended to “clarify” his position – that postion being that the Obama campagin was absolutely within its rights to ding Romney over his career as a buyout artist.
The Republican National Committee, he told Maddow, crossed the line with its “I Stand With Cory” campaign, suggesting he’d been pressured by the Obama campaign to swallow his words, which he denies. “My outrage, and really my frustration was about the cynical, negative campaigning, the manipulating of the truth,” he says in the clip below. “And so here they are plucking soundbites out of that interview to manipulate them in a cynical manner, to use for their own purposes.”
Fully embracing the good-soldier role, Booker said that when Mitt Romney “says ‘I was a job creator,’ I think that’s a characterization of his record that deserves inquiry, and I think the way the President himself is talking about that is something I will defend, in fact something I will echo.”
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