Karl Rove Praises Hillary's 3 A.M. Ad As "Gutsy"
Everyone's been talking today about Karl Rove's big interview with GQ magazine, but I wanted to highlight this bit, in which Hillary's red phone ad earns praise from the master of fearmongering himself.
Asked about the ad, Rove says...
It was a gutsy, dangerous move. She figured out that she had to do something to raise the issue of: Is he fit to be president? And this was a way to do it. I happened to be in Texas a week before the ad popped, and all of her surrogates were hitting him pretty hard on the thinness of his experience. They were pretty brutal. And this ad sort of fed into that.
We don't imagine that Hillary ad guru Mandy Grunwald will be putting this one on her resume anytime soon. On second thought, maybe she will -- it's a high honor, after all.
Separately, Jonathan Martin ferrets out this key passage in the interview, in which Rove previews the coming GOP attack on Obama's patriotism:
There are Democrats, particularly blue-collar Democrats, who defect to McCain because they see McCain as a patriotic figure and they see Obama as an elitist who's looking down his nose at 'em. Which he is. That comment where he said, you know, "After 9/11, I didn't wear a flag lapel pin because true patriotism consists of speaking out on the issues, not wearing a flag lapel pin"? Well, to a lot of ordinary people, putting that flag lapel pin on is true patriotism. It's a statement of their patriotic love of the country. And for him to sit there and dismiss it as he did...
As we've noted here before, should Obama be the nominee, we're going to see a GOP assault very similar to what hit Gore and Kerry -- Obama thinks he's better than you ordinary Joes, and he thinks patriotism is for rubes. Get ready.
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