Cory Booker spoke at the convention on Tuesday night. Booker: Jerusalem omission 'unfortunate'

Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, N.J., and co-chairman of the Democratic platform committee, on Thursday called the removal of a plank supporting Jerusalem as the capital of Israel an “unfortunate omission” but could not explain how it happened.

“It was an unfortunate omission, and it in no way detracts from the point that we have a president of the United States who believes both in God, we all know that, but also believes in that plank [supporting Jerusalem],” Booker said on CNN’s “Starting Point.”


But when pressed repeatedly by members of the show’s panel about how it happened, Booker didn’t offer any insight or explanation as to why the Jerusalem language was stripped when it had appeared in the 2008 platform.

“I have to say that sometimes, as bad as it might seem, there’s imperfections, there are mistakes made,” Booker said, later adding: “I was co-chair of the platform committee. I was in the mix. This was not somebody who changed the platform. It was an omission.”

Booker repeatedly asserted that support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was bipartisan, and tried to turn the focus to GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s differences with his party platform.

“Here you have a Romney campaign that says, ‘I don’t believe what my plank is, abortion under no circumstances, rape, incest,’” Booker said. “He says, ‘I differ from the plank.’ Here’s a president who says, ‘That plank is what I stand for.’ So the president of the United States is going to reach down and say, ‘Guys, you need to change this, you need to fix it. It may be ugly, sloppy, but we’re going to get to the right end.”

Sources told POLITICO President Barack Obama personally intervened to force changes to the platform. Democrats eventually restored the word “God” and the Jerusalem language to the platform in a chaotic voice vote Wednesday.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who was flabbergasted on Wednesday when he was told of the missing Jerusalem language, said Obama quickly made the change and minimized the controversy as “a tempest in a teapot.”

“I didn’t know it wasn’t in there,” Schumer said on “Starting Point.” “I don’t read, to be honest with you, the whole huge document, but I know what our party stands for.”

Two of Obama’s closest advisers — Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod — said the president was unaware of the missing language until Wednesday morning.

“He just thought it was important to put back in what has been in the platform, Jerusalem being the capital, and so he put it back in,” Jarrett said on CBS’ “This Morning.”

“He was counting on others, he has some other duties and responsibilities,” Axelrod added. “And so when he learned that, what had been in the platform had been taken out, he said put it back in.”

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the language’s removal was unintentional.

“It was a technical omission and nothing more than that,” the Florida Democrat said on “Starting Point.” “Through the drafting process and the platform committee process, there was never any discussion or debate over adding or subtracting it.”

While apologetic about the Jerusalem plank, Booker dismissed the absence of the word “God” as a trumped-up controversy.

“God was in there, faith was in there,” Booker said. “There are so many issues that evoked it that some of my atheist friends, it made them, ‘Oh, why are you always talking about faith and religion.’ All those issues were in there. The word ‘God’ isn’t in there once, so people are pulling it out and making a big deal out of it. That didn’t bother me as much.”

The 32-page Democratic platform contained a 200-word section on faith and made several references to religious freedom elsewhere in the document.