NYT : Rove Steps Up His Attacks on Clinton’s Candidacy

Rove Steps Up His Attacks on Clinton’s Candidacy

By PATRICK HEALY | August 16, 2007

Karl Rove intensified his attack on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday, saying she lacked the vision to be president while saying she was “so weak” on national security and support for the armed forces.

Mr. Rove, President Bush’s political adviser, has been criticizing Mrs. Clinton since Monday, when he announced his intention to resign from the White House and coupled it with candid analysis, notably, calling Mrs. Clinton a “fatally flawed” presidential candidate.

Mrs. Clinton, of New York, and her advisers have denounced the attacks while privately welcoming them, hopeful that Mr. Rove, a bête noire to Democrats, will spur liberal skeptics of Mrs. Clinton to rally to her.

Advisers to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a Clinton rival, conjecture that Mr. Rove is trying to help Mrs. Clinton win the Democratic presidential nomination because, this thinking goes, she would be easier to beat than Mr. Obama.

Mr. Rove gave two high-profile interviews yesterday, on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program and to Reuters, essentially delivering the same message: that Mrs. Clinton had opposed Republican efforts to overhaul health care and expand medical benefits to more Americans and that she had opposed the USA Patriot Act, domestic surveillance programs and other antiterrorism measures.

“Look, she is who she is,” Mr. Rove said on Mr. Limbaugh’s syndicated program. “There is no front-runner who has entered the primary season with negatives as high as she has in the history of modern polling.

“She’s going into the general election with, depending on what poll you look at, in the high 40s on the negative side and just below that on the positive side. And there’s nobody who has ever won the presidency who started out in that kind of position.”

Mrs. Clinton, campaigning yesterday in Iowa, inserted a retort into her prepared remarks for the Iowa Federation of Labor, A.F.L.-C.I.O. Convention Presidential Forum. “I feel so lucky that I am now giving them such heartburn,” she said.

She went on to criticize Mr. Rove and other Republicans for describing her support for universal health care as equivalent to, in her words, supporting “socialized medicine.”

“That’s just an absolute falsehood,” Mrs. Clinton said. “What we want is to get the costs down, the quality up, and cover everybody. And I think we can do that.”

Her advisers squeezed advantage from the Republican attacks, going so far as to link Mr. Rove with Mr. Obama.

“It sounds like Mr. Rove and Senator Obama are reading off the same set of talking points,” said Phil Singer, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Obama’s advisers scoffed and said Mr. Rove was aiding and abetting a Clinton nomination because Republicans believed that she was too divisive to be elected.