Karl Rove, image via WikipediaEmail • Twitter • Facebook • LinkedIn • Youtubeby Frances Martel
April 16th, 2011
Reality TV and real estate personality Donald Trump may be as far as nine points ahead in the latest GOP 2012 polls, but that doesn’t mean the Republican establishment is ready to embrace him with open arms. On last night’s On the Record, Karl Rove did his best to distance the party from the Donald, telling Greta Van Susteren that his “weird conspiracy theories” about President Obama’s birth certificate made him a “joke candidate.”
After a lengthy discussion about the current budget battle in Congress in which Rove claimed Republicans had attained victory, if only because the federal government’s budget authority had been reduced by $60 billion, Van Susteren questioned Rove on Trump’s impact on the Republican Party. Rove refused to answer whether Trump “hurt” the Party, noting instead that his obsession with President Obama’s birth certificate “hurts Donald Trump.” “He was an interested candidate who had a business background and could have contributed to dialogue,” Rove lamented, adding that making the birth certificate a centerpiece of his campaign delegitimized him. “He’s off there in the nutty right, and is not an inconsequential candidate,” Rove concluded, adding that “the guy is smarter than this” and he was “sorry to see it happen.” He also denounced claims that President Obama didn’t go to school, citing a friend who was a classmate of the President’s, and the conspiracy theory about the newspaper reports in Hawaii.
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