Gene Sperling, a top economics adviser to President Obama, said Sunday that he hopes he and Bob Woodward can move past the an email exchange over a Washington Post op-ed in which Woodward claimed that President Obama had once conceded that sequestration should be offset only by spending cuts.
Sperling wrote in an email to Woodward that “as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.” Though consensus is that email was friendly in nature, Woodward contends the sentence was code for “you better watch out.”
“Bob Woodward is a legend. I hope that him and I (sic) can put this behind us,” Sperling said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“I haven’t talked to him yet, but I hope to,” he said. “I hope we can put it behind us because I think we both care about the policy issues we were debating and I think we both think that that’s where the focus of our national debate should be, not on — not on our email exchange.”
Sperling said the emails were polite and substantive. “I was arguing a case as to why I believed the president asking for balance is consistent with where things have been for the last several years,” he said.
