Rove: Obama should be ‘way ahead’

Republican strategist Karl Rove said Sunday the fact that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama does not have a large lead in the race shows that there are “grave doubts” about the Illinois senator.

“With a restive electorate, with an economy that's sort of chugging around, with a war in the background, at the end of eight years of Republican rule in the White House, Obama should be way ahead,” Rove, who engineered President Bush’s two election victories and whose name is synonymous with tough campaigning, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

{mosads}Meantime, Sen. McCain’s (Ariz.) campaign manager Rick Davis stated that, even though the Republican presidential candidate is an underdog to Obama, the campaign is happy with its current position in polls.

“‘John McCain is an underdog’ may be the understatement of the decade,” said Davis on “Fox News Sunday,” echoing Rove’s thoughts. “The mood of the country is very sour about the current administration. People don’t like the party as much as they did four years ago.”

Davis added that “if someone had told me a year ago when we started the real quest for the primary that we could wind up dead even with the Democratic nominee in this kind of a political environment just before our convention, that would have been fantastic to me.”

With Democrats increasingly claiming that McCain is using “Karl Rove-type” tactics,” Rove said while the Arizona senator was right to criticize Obama in recent weeks, the GOP candidate has to do some positive things to be able to prevail in November.

“One is he needs to use the 12 weeks that are left to lay out a bold agenda for domestic reform, and he also needs to talk more about his character,” Rove said.  

The strategist added that McCain also “needs to recognize that every election is about the future. And he needs to describe who he is.”

Rove noted that Obama had “wisely” sought to portray a McCain candidacy as a continuation of the policies of President Bush, noting that the GOP candidate has “responded badly to that.”

“Rather than saying, ‘You know what? Here’s who I am and here’s what I'm about,’ he’s responded by saying, ‘No, I’m not,’ which is the wrong answer,” Rove argued. “If the question is, ‘Who is not George Bush?’, Barack Obama is the answer. If the question is, ‘Who are you? And do you have a vision for the future?’, the answer can be Sen. McCain.”

Davis sought to distance McCain from President Bush’s record just as Obama’s campaign has begun running ads trying to tie the two together. A new Democratic ad features a video clip of McCain saying that he voted for legislation backed by Bush more than 90 percent of the time.

“Who was the biggest irritant to this administration for the last 10 years or last eight years? John McCain,” Davis said. “He sided with Democrats when he thought they were doing the right thing for the country, and sided with the Republicans when he thought they were doing the right thing for the country.”