Warren's spokesman, A. Larry Ross: Obama had contacted Warren to invite him, not the other way around.

Lies, lies and more lies...Making matters worse, the Obama team evidently decided not to alert anyone who was likely to be upset about the pick ahead of time. News of Warren's involvement in the inauguration came out of the congressional committee working on the inauguration instead of from Obama's own inaugural committee, a wholly separate entity. At least initially, aides for Obama's inaugural committee said the decision had come from Congress, not Obama. In fact, that wasn't the case at all.

Gil Duran, a spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein wrote:
That was solely the choice of the president-elect. Obama's staff sent explicit orders for whom to include in the inaugural ceremony up to Capitol Hill, since Congress is, technically, in charge of that part of the day. Sen. Feinstein obviously disagrees with the views of Rev. Warren on issues that affect the gay and lesbian community. However, Sen. Feinstein respects the president-elect's prerogative to select a cleric to deliver the invocation.(That one doesn't need any translation -- Feinstein's office was politely, respectfully, throwing Obama under the bus.)

In a statement, Warren wrote:
I commend President-elect Obama for his courage to willingly take enormous heat from his base by inviting someone like me, with whom he doesn’t agree on every issue, to offer the invocation at his historic inaugural ceremony.

But so far, say both Obama aides and his critics, there hasn't been much of a similar attempt to reach out to key allies who are upset about the pick and patch things up.