Robert Gibbs has issued a statement trying to walk back his critique of the “professional left” in an interview with The Hill. Here’s Gibbs statement (via The Plum Line)

I watch too much cable, I admit. Day after day it gets frustrating. Yesterday I watched as someone called legislation to prevent teacher layoffs a bailout — but I know that’s not a view held by many, nor were the views I was frustrated about.

So what I may have said inartfully, let me say this way — since coming to office in January 2009, this White House and Congress have worked tirelessly to put our country back on the right path. Most importantly, to dig our way out of a huge recession and build an economy that makes America more competitive and our middle class more secure. Some are frustrated that the change we want hasn’t come fast enough for many Americans. That we all understand.

But in 17 months, we have seen Wall Street reform, historic health care reform, fair pay for women, a recovery act that pulled us back from a depression and got our economy moving again, record investments in clean energy that are creating jobs, student loan reforms so families can afford college, a weapons system canceled that the Pentagon didn’t want, reset our relationship with the world and negotiated a nuclear weapons treaty that gets us closer to a world without fear of these weapons, just to name a few. And at the end of this month, 90,000 troops will have left Iraq and our combat mission will come to an end.

Even so, we will continue to work each day on the promises and commitments that the President made traveling all over this country for two years and produce the change we know is possible.

In November, America will get to choose between going back to the failed policies that got us into this mess, or moving forward with the policies that are leading us out.

So we should all, me included, stop fighting each other and arguing about our differences on certain policies, and instead work together to make sure everyone knows what is at stake because we’ve come too far to turn back now.

“Inartfully”? Talk about the under-statement of the year. Gibbs went out and just fired Republican style insults at the left at a time the President is hitting the campaign trail trying to fire up support for the mid-terms. Robert Gibbs has just lost every bit of respect in my book. His statement earlier was unprofessional and hurt Democrats as a whole. It’s time for him to go, and even Nate Silver is echoing that now:

I don’t know whether Gibbs was going “off-message” out of frustration, or whether the White House has become so jaded that they actually think this was a good strategy. Either way, it speaks to the need for some fresh blood and some fresh ideas in the White House. The famously unflappable Obama is losing his cool.

The first two years of the Obama presidency has been blowing off the base. Now that his agenda is in serious peril with the risk of a Republican controlled Congress, Obama is realizing that he needs the base, and idiot’s like Gibbs running at the mouth isn’t going to help convince said base one bit to work harder for him. If anything it will push people more into staying at home.

If President Obama is serious about listening to the base, then he needs to show it by taking control of his administration and getting rid of people like Gibbs and Rahm. They have become the Republicans best ally in the mid-terms.