Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) on Sunday chided Vice President Joe Biden for his remark that Republican repeal of Wall Street reform would put voters "back in chains."
"I think it was an indelicate play on the Republican words of shackling the economy with regulations and shackling small businesses," O'Malley said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "It was certainly an indelicate choice of words."
O'Malley, the current chair of the Democratic Governors Association, was one of several guests on the Sunday show circuit to discuss Biden's comments.
Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," called the "faux outrage" against Biden "hypocritical."
"Let's look at what the vice president actually said," she said. "Speaker Boehner, even Paul Ryan have been traveling this country talking about the need to unshackle the private sector, unshackle the financial industry and the vice president was just taking that metaphor a step further and talking about wanting to put other people in shackles, and the word he used -- chains -- is a distraction from the larger argument … that we shouldn't deregulate Wall Street ... that's the point the vice president was making."
Biden made the comments at a campaign stop in Danville, Va., on Tuesday while stating that Republicans want to deregulate financial institutions.
President Barack Obama has already come to his defense, arguing consumers would be in a far worse situation if the GOP succeeded in doing away with financial reforms.
"The truth is that during the course of these campaigns, folks like to get obsessed with how something was phrased even if everybody personally understands that's not how it was meant," Obama said in an interview with People magazine on Wednesday. "That's sort of the nature of modern campaigns and modern coverage of campaigns. But I tell you, when I'm traveling around Iowa, that's not what's on people's minds."
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