Obama qualifies: 'You can't change Washington just from the inside

President Obama has slightly tweaked a line he said last week that caught some criticism from the Romney campaign and conservatives in the media.

"The idea was you can't change Washington just from the inside," he said in a taped interview with The View today. "You've got to mobilize the American people. When ordinary people are engaged and paying attention, that's when Congress responds. We can't play just an inside game."

The Romney campaign last week pounced when Obama said in a separate interview that "you can't change Washington from the inside." The original line by Obama didn't contain the word "just."

"The President today threw in the white flag of surrender again," Mitt Romney said at a rally in Florida at the time. "He said he can’t change Washington from inside. He can only change it from outside. Well, we’re going to give him that chance in November."

[Quotes from today's recording of The View were made available by the White House pool report, written by the Washington Times' David Boyer.]