Clinton: The Rove Candidate of 2008?

[GaryC 7]

As he packs his desk just 15 steps from the Oval Office, Karl Rove says he will not join any 2008 presidential campaign. That's just as well, since none of the Republican candidates presumably could afford the association even if they wanted his strategic smarts. And besides, none of them is really running his style of campaign. The candidate who seems to be adopting his style and methods the most so far? Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At least that's what Nicolle Wallace thinks. "Hillary is running the most Rove-like campaign out of all of them," Wallace, a former Bush White House communications director who worked closely with Rove, said in an interview. "She has almost operationalized the whole idea of turning your weakness into strength, message discipline that is almost pathological -- she does not get off message for any reason -- and never skipping an opportunity to exploit her opponent's weaknesses."

Even Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, seems to agree, effectively vowing to run her operation much as Rove did his two successful national campaigns. "She expresses admiration for the way George W. Bush's campaign team controlled its message, and, given her druthers, would run this race no differently," Michelle Cottle writes in New York magazine. "'We are a very disciplined group, and I am very proud of it,' she says with a defiant edge."

Rove and the Clintons have circled each other warily these last eight years, exhibiting a mix of grudging respect and deep bitterness as the central if competing political strategists of their era. Rove singled out Hillary Clinton's campaign in his parting interviews in the last few days, predicting she will win the Democratic nomination and be a tough opponent in the fall of 2008. "Any rational observer would have to say that Hillary Clinton is a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination," he told reporters aboard Air Force One as he and President Bush headed to vacation in Texas yesterday. In his weekend interview with the Wall Street Journal's Paul A. Gigot published yesterday, Rove called Clinton "a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate."

The Clintons recognize the skill Rove has brought to politics and admire his craft, if not his ideology. Just days after the November 2004 election, Bill Clinton pulled Rove aside at the dedication of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Arkansas. "Hey, you did a marvelous job, it was just marvelous what you did," Clinton told Rove, according to the book, ""The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008," by our former colleague, John F. Harris and his co-author, Mark Halperin. "I want to get you down to the library. I want to talk politics with you. You just did an incredible job and I'd like to really get together with you and I think we could have a great conversation."

That's not to say Rove hasn't aggravated the Clintons. Hillary Clinton uses him regularly as a foil in fundraising appeals and on the trail. And by last year, Bill Clinton was expressing exasperation rather than admiration. "I am sick of Karl Rove's [manure]," the former president exclaimed to the New Yorker's David Remnick. Even then, Remnick wrote that "there was a trace of admiration in the remark, a veteran pol's regard for the way his rival had packaged a radical brand of American conservatism as 'compassionate conservatism' and kept on pushing it long after its sell-by date had passed."

And why not? Harris and Halperin wrote last year that Rove and the Clintons shared some of the same understandings of how politics work and the two authors even crafted a list that they titled "What Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove Know About the Way to Win the White House in 2008." Clinton, they wrote, has "borrowed some strategies" from Rove for dealing with the media, enemies and anticipated attacks. "Like Karl Rove," they wrote, "Hillary Clinton knows that playing offense is better than playing defense. ... Hillary Clinton obviously dislikes Bush's policy goals, but she appreciates some of the methods he has used to achieve them."

So if Hillary Clinton were to win next year, would it be a repudiation of Karl Rove politics or the perpetuation of them?

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2...ndidate_of.html

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I’ve never seen Hillary as a ‘breath of fresh air’ candidate. Still as it stands – I’m not sure what the point really is in bringing Rovian campaign tactics. It’s par for the course in the current system (AKA everyone is doing it), and given the disgraceful defamation and smear tactics in 2004, surely one of the things that we should want to be getting away from.