|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Gingrich: Karl Rove Strategy 'Maniacally Dumb'
Karl Rove’s political strategy for President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign was "maniacally dumb,” declares Newt Gingrich – who says the right can’t retain power if it alienates the center. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg for The New Yorker magazine, the former House Speaker said Rove left Bush with "no political capital.” Gingrich observed: "All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote.” The Bush campaign failed to wage a campaign based on ideology, said Gingrich, and instead of suggesting that Kerry was "to the left of Ted Kennedy,” it focused on attacking Kerry’s war record.
Gingrich has gotten heat of late from some conservatives for reaching out to center-right voters, Goldberg notes. But Gingrich said he wants to bring the center into a coalition with the right "because I want to give the right power. The right can have power only by being allied with the center.”
Story Continues Below
Failure to recognize that was Rove’s mistake in 2004, according to Gingrich, who feels Republicans risk alienating "America’s natural majority.” The GOP’s only hope of holding on to the White House in 2008 is to nominate a candidate who runs against Bush, just as Nicolas Sarkozy won France’s presidency by "making his own president, Jacques Chirac, his virtual opponent,” said Gingrich. Goldberg writes that Gingrich "says the Bush administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter presidency, when nothing seemed to go right.”
Gingrich also warned: "When you have the collapse of the Republican Party, you have an immediate turn toward the Democrats, not because the Democrats are offering anything better, but on a ‘not them’ basis. And if you end up in a 2008 campaign between ‘them’ and ‘not them,’ ‘not them’ is going to win.”
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
2008 Presidential Race Inside Cover Stories
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2012 NewsMax.Com |