Obama Aide on Cory Booker: 'He's Dead to Us'

Newark Mayor Cory Booker may have backpedaled from that "nauseating" comment and sung the praises of President Obama, but it won't be enough to restore the luster to the once-rising star of the Democratic Party. "He's dead to us,” one White House official tells the New York Post. Booker had reportedly been aiming for the housing secretary position in the Obama Cabinet before he spoke out strongly against the campaign's Bain attacks.

It didn't help that Booker's online video "clarifying" his position on Bain came out many hours after the original remarks (the White House apparently wanted an immediate statement) and was not cleared by Obama aides. Additional comments by Booker the next night on Rachel Maddow's program only made things worse, as Booker sounded like he had been forced to retract his original statement. "It's not just that he messed up, it was that he compounded it and didn’t have their back when they gave him a national stage to talk," said a Democratic source. (More Cory Booker stories.)