Rove Outlines Strategy for GOP Campaign against Clinton, Obama

WASHINGTON — Republican strategist Karl Rove laid out a line of attack Wednesday that he said could defeat either of the two Democratic front-runners for president.

Speaking at the Republican National Committee's winter meeting here, Rove said Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton could be taken to task for proposing a "big government" health care system and $800 million in new spending despite claims to "fiscal responsibility."

RICK MCKAY/STF (enlarge photo) Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove addresses the executive director's meeting at the RNC winter meeting in Washington, D.C. Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008.

The former White House adviser — dubbed the "architect" of past Republican success by President Bush — said that Clinton also "has a problem giving straight answers" and cited her inconclusive response when asked in a debate last month if she favored driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.

Rove cited the results of Tuesday's primary in Michigan, where Clinton was the only major Democratic candidate on the ballot and received 55 percent of the votes, with 40 percent voting "uncommitted."

"She's running against nobody, and nobody gets 40 percent of the vote," Rove quipped. "The other 5 percent of the vote went to three other people — 27,924 votes went to the guy who believes in UFOs, the guy who dropped out and the guy who last held public office somewhere around 1855."

Rove suggested doubts about the New York senator have been "augmented" by the refusal of the Clinton Presidential Library to release documents about her role as first lady.

Taking aim at the other Democratic front-runner, Rove said Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is vulnerable to "questions about his accomplishments" as a first term senator and "whether he as the experience that would equip him to be commander-in-chief in a time of war."

The Republican strategist added that Obama's voting pattern is "more liberal" than Sen. Clinton's.

Rove said he sees a "big issue coming" that could trip up the Democrats as the Senate considers a bill reauthorizing the surveillance program that allows the government to listen in on telephone calls from terrorist suspects abroad without a warrant, even if one party is in the United States.

Obama and Clinton have criticized the program. Rove said Republicans should portray it as a protection from "people who want to hurt America."

He said Democratic candidates are "naysayers" in denying that a reduction of violence in Iraq shows that Bush's troop "surge" strategy has worked.

Rove offered no predictions for who might be ahead in the heated GOP race for the presidential nomination. But he asserted that despite the "squabble," the Republican winner will favor lower taxes and a smaller bureaucracy and will strongly back the U.S. war effort in Iraq.

In an apparent acknowledgment of the uphill challenge facing the Republicans this year, Rove said the party's nominee has "big tasks to undertake." He said the path to victory would include stressing "kitchen table issues" such as health care, the economy and trade.

He advised the GOP candidate to "campaign aggressively in places Republicans don't normally campaign."

"We're going for everybody," he said, including the African-American, Latino, Asian, blue collar and union voters.

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, Luis Miranda, countered that "Karl Rove must be getting tone deaf" to his own party's mood.

"Just look at yesterday's exit polls in Michigan," the spokesman said. "Nearly half of the Republicans there said they were either dissatisfied or angry with the Bush administration."

The message that the Republicans have been campaigning on is that they all promise "a third Bush term" by backing the war in Iraq, opposing the expansion of federal health care for children and "backing the president's tax cuts that have wreaked havoc on the nation's economy."

"If that's the message that Karl Rove is happy with, I don't know what he's looking at," Miranda said.