Robert Shrum: It's not that Rove has a score to settle with Rick Perry. He just knows this Texas governor would make a disastrous GOP nominee
Rick Perry entered the Republican primaries with Texas-size swagger and prairie-shaking thunder from the right. After just a few days of pyrotechnics, Karl Rove, minister of the dark arts for the last Texas president, reproved Perry as "un-presidential."
Perry's spin doctors, and a brace of commentators, promptly put the criticism down to personal animus. Clearly Rove has reasons to dislike the governor who succeeded George W. Bush, and who by 2007 was assailing Bush's record in Austin, and then in 2011 his signature domestic achievement in the White House, "No Child Left Behind."
But Rove has a reason that goes beyond bad blood.
Perry has fast become a phenomenon, a magnet for media coverage — and according to a Rasmussen poll, he's the instant front-runner, leading Mitt Romney nationally 29 percent to 18 percent. And the 13 percent for Michele Bachmann surely see Perry, not Romney, as the second choice. (Rasmussen, whose numbers tend to have a partisan tilt, does have a Fox-like feel for Republican voters.) So for Rove, Perry is "un-presidential" precisely because he looks like a probable nominee — and it is highly improbable he could win the presidency. Rove has plenty of company in this assessment; the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal pointedly doubts that Perry "will sell in the suburbs of Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where the election is likely to be decided."
To be fair, Rove himself seeded the ground for the rancid tea harvest that fuels Perry's appeal. In 2004, Rove aided and abetted the smearing of John Kerry, a genuine war hero in Vietnam, to prop up Bush, who wasn't exactly diligent about his stateside National Guard duty. There is a straight line between the Swiftboat lies and Perry's smarmy statements that he can't say whether Barack Obama loves America but does see the president as "the greatest threat" to this country. Huh? How about terrorism?
Again and again, Rove has also advanced Republican economics, really low politics in disguise, which blames spending for economic stagnation, and flacks policies that would ruin the recovery in order to retake the White House. But Perry ventured a final step off the cliff of reason into the valley of paranoia when he arraigned Federal Reserve Chairmen Ben Bernanke, a Bush appointee, as "treasonous" for leveraging monetary policy to encourage growth and jobs. That leveraging is not a liberal idea; it is the entirely sensible prescription of the conservative icon and Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman. Perry's comment was incendiary, literally McCarthy-esque, and it's this specific offense that drew Rove's fire.
Read the entire article here.
1 comments:
This writer defends Rove (somewhat) but these statements are unforgivable....
Rove himself seeded the ground for the rancid tea harvest that fuels Perry's appeal. In 2004, Rove aided and abetted the smearing of John Kerry, a genuine war hero in Vietnam, to prop up Bush, who wasn't exactly diligent about his stateside National Guard duty. There is a straight line between the Swiftboat lies and Perry's smarmy statements that he can't say whether Barack Obama loves America but does see the president as "the greatest threat" to this country. Huh? How about terrorism?
It's typical that this liberal twit would smear the Tea Party.
He believes that Kerry was a genuine war hero when the weight of evidence proves the contrary.
Of course he points at Bush's alleged absence from his National Guard duty. That's proven to be a pile of B.S. That's why Dan Rather is out of a job.
Actually Perry isn't wrong about Obama being the greatest threat to the country. What would America become if it is broke? I sure Obama would love it more if it was socialist.
It's so funny to see a liberal concerned with terrorism. When it comes to defending Obama...anything goes.
Dave
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