On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” former Bush administration deputy chief of staff and Fox News political analyst Karl Rove criticized efforts by President Barack Obama’s campaign to paint Mitt Romney as a felon for allegedly misleading the Securities and Exchange Commission about his role at Bain Capital more than a decade ago.
According to Rove, remarks by Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter last week were disingenuous but still mishandled by the Romney campaign.
“Two different attacks — one is he didn’t take a leave of absence to run the Olympics Committee and run Bain,” Rove said. “Total baloney — even The Washington Post said this was baloney. The fact of the matter is, look, when Steve Jobs was the CEO of Apple and took a leave of absence for medical reasons, nobody continued to say, ‘Well you are the guy who made the day-to-day decisions.’ Romney was busy running the Olympics and they were ready for this particular attack. I agree with Joe. They were not ready for the regular attack on the six companies that Obama raised [saying] these companies all outsource jobs. It took them a week to respond and say four of these companies didn’t outsource jobs, move a single job overseas. They created jobs at home and two companies were brought by Bain after Romney left.”
Rove added that, if the Obama campaign continues this line of attack, it could ultimately hurt the president.
“But the fact of the matter is, if the president makes the charge … [the] outrageous charge that Mitt Romney is guilty of felonious activity and committed a felony — that is it a big mistake. Remember who is up for grabs in this election: independent voters,” Rove said. “They were drawn to Obama in 2008 because he was going to change politics and would raise and elevate the discourse. This is gutter politics of the worst Chicago sort.”