Press secretary Robert Gibbs, revisiting a newspaper interview in which he blasted “the professional left” for criticizing President Barack Obama, brushed off calls for his resignation during Wednesday’s daily briefing and said his remarks were the result of frustration with pundits who haven’t given the administration its due.

“I don’t plan on leaving, and there’s no truth to the rumor that I’ve added an inflatable exit to my office,” he quipped to reporters, a reference to the frustrated Jet Blue flight attendant who left his job by swearing at passengers and jumping down the jetliner’s emergency slide. Gibbs said he “could’ve said things slightly differently” during the interview, but he did not apologize for his remarks, which triggered an angry outburst among Obama’s allies in print, on cable news channels and in the blogosphere.

“I watch a lot of cable TV, and you don’t have to watch long to get frustrated by some of what’s said, and I think that’s what that answer was born out of,” he said.

In an interview with The Hill’s Sam Youngman published Tuesday, Gibbs said liberals who have relentlessly criticized Obama for what they see as compromises and unkept promises — such as the lack of a single-payer system in the sweeping health care overhaul and the addition of 30,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan — would rather complain than give the president his due for a long list of favorable accomplishments. Those critics, Gibbs said, “will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Gibbs said liberals haven’t acknowledged that Obama prevented a national economic collapse, tightened Wall Street rules and changed the health care system despite lockstep Republican opposition.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug-tested,” Gibbs told The Hill. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

Gibbs later walked back his statements in a statement delivered to The Huffington Post, among others, saying he spoke “inartfully” and that Democrats and their progressive critics must unify. “So we should all, me included, stop fighting each other and arguing about our differences on certain policies” and work together, he said, “because we’ve come too far to turn back now.”

At Wednesday’s briefing, Gibbs said he didn’t speak with Obama about the matter and did not make any apology calls to anyone who might have been offended. Asked if he’d slipped up in his interview with The Hill, Gibbs playfully opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue. He restated that his comments were “born out of frustration” and declined to say specifically whom he had in mind when he derided the “professional left.”

“I left my membership list at home,” he said.

(Source: Politico)