When Operatives Don't Operate You Get the Big Bain Backfire

It didn't take long, did it? The Romney campaign latched on quickly to Booker's precipitous remarks, much in the same way a hungry baby would latch firmly onto his mother's breast.

Well, you knew they would because the Democrats would have done the same if presented with as much political fodder for their campaign fire by a Romney operative.

Of course, the video features other Democrats - mainly those who cleave close to the Morning Joe discussion table, such as DINO and Wall Street mouthpiece, Harold Ford Jr, and former Obama financial advisor, Steve Rattner; but the undisputed centrepiece and star of the show is Cory Booker. Because his remarks ring freshest in the ear and the memory.

Harken, just harken, unto the last words of the advert:-

With no record to run on, it is no surprise that the Obama campaign has resorted to misleading attacks that have been disavowed by its own supporters.

This is the pejorative import of Booker's words - words, which could be brought back to haunt him in future years as and when his political career develops.

The fact that both the President and the Vice-President were pursuing a line of campaigning against Romney, which had proven successful since used by Ted Kennedy in 1994 and even by Romney's opponents in the Republican primaries - that Romney was a proponent of vulture capitalism that profited more from job cremation rather than job creation; that this was a particularly successful ploy and was being used successfully by both the President, the Vice-President and other Democratic operatives, until Cory Booker, the mayor of a major American city and a self-proclaimed Obama operative brought that line of attack to its political knees with his pronouncement on Sunday.

I know that at least one high-profiled blogger is cautioning against throwing Booker under the bus because of this, alluding to the various and nefarious tweets referring to him as no less than a "traitor." Look, I like Cory Booker, and maybe he was naive enough or narcissistic enough to get caught in a gotcha moment by the Republican-leaning David Gregory on Sunday; but the basic fact is what he said and when he said it reflected what I'd define as vainglorious stupidity; and for that, he deserves to be castigated.

He carelessly threw down a passel of words that easily became a stick with which to beat the President and almost totally negated a political point against an opponent, which - until that time - the President was actually winning.

A very good Facebook friend, an independent, has been castigating Obama supporters, amongst them, myself, for being intolerant about the fact that Cory Booker has merely disagreed with the President - something, which, in her opinion, he is entitled to do.

This is true. Anyone of us, as Democrats, are free to disagree with some of the President's policies or campaign issues. That is our right. But make no mistake: Cory Booker is not Joe Manchin. And Joe Manchin is not acting as an Obama operative, either in his home state of West Virginia, or anyplace else. So someone like Manchin can and does say that maybe he won't support the President because the President isn't entrusting him with actually getting his message out to the voting public.

My point is that Cory Booker was entrusted with doing just that, and - rather unwisely - he unwittingly went off-message in a very public arena, and now both he, and the President's campaign, are smarting from Booker's political ego.

If the President wins a second term, at the end of that term, he'll retire as a private citizen, with his political life, effectively, over; and he will have earned that. Booker has much of his career aspirations ahead of him, the first and foremost being a stab at taking over from retiring Senator Frank Lautenberg in 2014.

Let's hope the public's collective amnesia falls into play for Cory Booker and that his false equivalencies don't come back to haunt and stalk him.