***UPDATED: VIDEO IS MUCH LONGER BUT OBAMA CAMPAIGN ONLY USED BAIN PART***
After yesterday’s Meet The Press appearance, Cory Booker created a YouTube video nearly walking back everything he said about Bain Capital. He said that he now encourages the president to go after Bain because Romney has made it part of his record and thus it deserves scrutiny.
As soon as Morning Joe saw this, he said it looks like a ‘hostage video’:
(via Mediaite)
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UPDATE: Apparently the ‘hostage video’ was much longer than what was showed in the segment above, and Politico writes that the Obama campaign disingenuously chopped it up and tweeted out last night the portion where Booker agreed with attacking Bain:
In an almost four-minute follow up video for his social media followers, Booker explained that Romney’s business record was fair game, and that he was simply frustrated by negative campaigning.
That video:
The Obama campaign, however, sent out a different video on Sunday night. On Twitter, Obama campaign press secretary Ben La Bolt tweeted out a 35-second version of the video, which was very likely cut by the Obama campaign (because, when I clicked on La Bolt’s link, it had just 8 views).
Here is that video:
What gets lost in the edit is the nuance of Booker’s argument. Watching the 35-second video, you would believe that Booker was flip-flopping from his comments on Meet The Press and going on an all-out assault on Romney. In the four-minute video, Booker stands by his comments — including “nauseating” — and explains that while he does think Romney’s record is fair game, he remains “furstrated” by the Obama campaign’s negative attacks.
In other words, the 35-second video is a reverse from the original argument. The four-minute video is an extenstion of the original argument.