Friday Hugh Hewitt interview former adviser Karl Rove about his old boss President George W. Bush’s unwillingness to comment on his successor President Barack Obama’s job performance.
Partial transcript as follow:
HEWITT: Now Karl, let me switch the subject to your boss, because I have asked the Vice President, I’ve asked a lot of people, are things so bad that W. is going to actually speak up? And that also goes to whether or not David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal or John Allen, or especially James Mattis, will actually speak up, because IS is a serious threat to the United States. Do you think we are at the point where W. will actually say something in the public square about national security?
ROVE: Look, I think the former president of the United States was right when he said, and when he left office, that he wanted to give his successor a decent interval. He didn’t want him to be out there, criticizing him, not dancing on the stage. You know, President Bush had to deal with this with President Carter, who would not leave the stage. There is a role for a former president to speak about matters of import to the country. And I’m not going to speak for the former president, but I know he recognizes that there is such a role. And whether he does or not is going to be his decision. But you know, I do think that the country is recognizing the serious differences in the way that this president operates, and the former president operates. That doesn’t mean to say that George W. Bush got everything right, but people are now recognizing there is a value to moral clarity, there is a value to understanding the results of the use of American influence, and there is, most important of all, a vitality, a necessity of having a strategic framework. And Bush had one, which is why Iraq, even President Obama was forced to admit in 2011 when he was withdrawing the U.S. troops from Iraq, that Iraq was in a reasonably good place, a stable, developing democracy, and that was because of the strategic framework and the hard decisions made by his predecessor.
HEWITT: Now I think the short form that Bush won the war, and Obama lost the peace is absolutely true, and it’s going to be undeniable by history. Yesterday, Joe Scarborough said on this show that President Obama’s looking at 30 years of memoirs about his incompetence coming from insiders. Do you agree with that, Karl?
ROVE: I don’t think it’s going to be a pleasant retirement for him. First of all, I think he’s going to, I think he’s going to have an exaggerated sense of what he’s going to be able to personally materially receive in his retirement. And you know, I think it’s also going to be very unpleasant to hear the verdict of history unroll. I mean, we already saw it. When your secretary of State, when the person who has served you in the top position in your cabinet for four years goes out and says this was a failure responsible for today, for what we see today, and I’ll be tougher on Iranian sanctions, and I’ll be a stronger friend of Israel, and oh, incidentally, while I’m at it, let me just tell you great nations need organizing principles, and don’t do stupid stuff is not an organizing principle. It shows how the arc of history is going to go in a very bad way for Barack Obama.
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