A pol emerges
Karl Rove assesses Senator Obama in GQ:
I got to know [Obama] because we have a mutual friend, Ken Mehlman, who was his law-school classmate at Harvard. And so as a result, whenever in the last three years he’s been around at the White House, I’ve gotten to see him, and we sort of would hang around and chitchat about things. I’m actually in his book. He wrote that “people like Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove say we are a Christian nation.” And I did not say that. I confronted him about it. At the White House…
first he denied that I was in the book! And then he denied that it said that I said that it was a Christian nation. And then when I pulled out the thing [he had a copy of the offensive page with him] and showed it to him, he sort of blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And I thought, That’s who he is. I mean, look, he may claim that he’s for a different kind of politics, but that was a cheap shot. And I’m not certain if any of the four said it either. But it was like, you know, Let’s just strap it in there and see if it goes someplace.
Another example: Him saying, “We honor John McCain for his fifty years of service” was a cheap shot. He was going out of his way to say John McCain’s old.
One of the more interesting things in the Rove interview is that he turns the TV sound off to watch body language (he must have been cringing during the first Bush-Kerry debate in 2004, with Kerry looking quite presidential and Bush looking just the opposite with his “annoyed smirk“).
Here Rove observes how Obama took the bait when Senator Clinton raised the idea of Obama’s being Hillary’s number two: “Take a look at the footage. Turn the sound off and look at it. You can tell that he is arrogant, and you can tell that he’s a little bit angry, and you can tell he’s very dismissive.” Question: will Hillary Clinton’s current judgment about Senator Obama ultimately be vindicated?