Rove: Obama Copying My Strategy, With Nod to Nixon

Taking pages from Bush-Cheney playbook may help, but flip-flops hurt credibility
By Jonas Oransky,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 10, 2008 11:53 AM CDT
Rove: Obama Copying My Strategy, With Nod to Nixon
Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., speaks at a fundraiser in New York, Wednesday, July 9, 2008.    (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

For all Barack Obama's shots at the Bush Administration, the Democrat's campaign "has cribbed an awful lot from the Bush-Cheney playbooks," their author writes in the Wall Street Journal. Karl Rove sees his own winning strategies at work, from Obama's “army of persuasion,” to Internet efforts, to electoral “microtargeting,” to attempts to bring red states back into play. But there's a problem, Rove hints.

After relying on more leftward elements to clinch the nomination, Obama’s recent swing to the center—“a world indoor record for jettisoning past positions”—is a strategy that smacks of Richard Nixon, Rove writes, cautioning the senator to mind his “reputation for truthfulness. A candidate's credibility, once lost, is very hard to restore, regardless of how fine an organization he has built." (More Barack Obama stories.)

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