WH trying to tamper criticism after president's 'begrudge' remark

The White House is aggressively downplaying criticisms of the president's remark on Wednesday that he does not "begrudge" bank CEOs' for their million-dollar bonuses.

President Barack Obama made the comment during an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek earlier in the day. The remark touched off a series of media reports that suggested the administration was no longer concerned with executive compensation -- an implication the White House promptly dismissed as untrue.

In e-mails with The Huffington Post on Wednesday afternoon, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki charged reporters had taken the line severely out of context.

"The president has said countless times, as he did in the interview, that he doesn't 'begrudge' the success of Americans, but he also expressed 'shock' at the size of bonuses and made clear that there are a number of steps that need to be taken to change the culture of Wall Street," she said. "[That is] a sentiment he has consistently expressed since long before he took office."

Psaki pointed to the transcript of the interview -- which the White House e-mailed to reporters -- as evidence Obama also criticized those bankers for taking home sizable paychecks despite their lacking performances.

According to the transcript, Obama's full quotation did have more nuance:

THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, first of all, I know both those guys. They’re very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system. I do think that the compensation packages that we’ve seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance. I think that shareholders oftentimes have not had any significant say in the pay structures for CEOs.

QUESTION: Seventeen million dollars is a lot for Main Street to stomach.

THE PRESIDENT: Listen, $17 million is an extraordinary amount of money. Of course, there are some baseball players who are making more than that who don’t get to the World Series either. So I’m shocked by that as well. I guess the main principle we want to promote is a simple principle of “say on pay,” that shareholders have a chance to actually scrutinize what CEOs are getting paid.

Obama then segued into a discussion about ways to address executive compensation -- remarks that White House officials said had been left out of most media accounts of the interview.

Still, a number of critics have since capitalized on the president's line, which nonetheless marked a significant departure from the populist rhetoric he previously used to describe bank bonuses. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), for example, e-mailed a copy of the Bloomberg article to reporters, stressing the president had backtracked and now supported Wall Street over Main Street.

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