Former White House adviser Karl Rove’s bare-knuckled response to recent statements by Vice President Joe Biden has brought into public view a growing resentment on the part of Bush administration veterans over what they regard as repeated and unwarranted slams from the Obama White House.
The current president and his team are being “gratuitous, slightly petty, and slightly obsessive in blaming Bush for things,” one former White House adviser told me.
“Completely gratuitous,” said another.
“Unfair,” said a third.
The hard feelings surfaced after an April 7 interview on CNN in which Biden recounted a visit with George W. Bush. “I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office…he said, ‘Well, Joe, I’m a leader.'” Biden recalled. “And I said, ‘Mr. President, turn around and look behind you. No one’s following.'”
A few days later, Rove accused Biden of lying. “It didn’t happen,” Rove said on Fox News. “He’s making these things up out of whole cloth…It is a habit he ought to drop….You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the vice president of the United States.”
Rove said he had checked with fellow Bushies like former chief of staff Andrew Card and former congressional liaison Candida Wolff, who did not remember anything like Biden’s story. What was left unsaid was that while former top White House officials denied it, there was little doubt that the former top White House official, George W. Bush, denied it, too. Rove and the former president stay in touch; it would be very, very surprising for Rove to say something so definitive about Biden without checking with the best possible source for the story, Bush himself.
But the former president has vowed to stay out of the public debate on the Obama administration. “I’m not going to spend my time criticizing him,” Bush said during a recent speech in Canada. “There are plenty of critics in the arena. He deserves my silence.”
As for the rest of the Bush White House, former aides say the new administration has gone overboard blaming its predecessor. On Obama’s recent overseas trip, they were angered by Obama’s statement that the United States has “shown arrogance” and been “dismissive, even derisive.” No one had any doubt he was referring to Bush. They were irritated when Obama said, incorrectly, that “George Bush didn’t believe in climate change.” And they bristled when Obama said that Bush’s decisions had “lowered our standing in the world.”
The irritation extends to the most minor things, as when the Obama White House announced that for the first time ever, the annual Easter Egg Roll would be webcast live on the White House website. “Not true,” a Bush veteran told me; the Bushies did it years ago.
When I mentioned the bad blood to a former Bush aide — the one who accused Team Obama of being “gratuitous, slightly petty, and slightly obsessive” — I got a long and impassioned speech. “It’s becoming tiresome,” the former official said. “A surprising lack of grace on his part…a surprising degree of whining and finger-pointing…it’s not unusual for a president of another party to lay some blame and responsibility on a previous administration, but he’s overdoing it…the word ‘inherited’ has replaced ‘hope’ and ‘change’ in the Obama lexicon…if he didn’t want to inherit challenges, then he should reflect on the nature of the office.”
For their part, Obama defenders say it’s the Bushies who are throwing stones. They point to an interview in which former Vice President Dick Cheney was asked whether Obama policies like closing Guantanamo and CIA detention facilities have “made Americans less safe.” “I do,” Cheney answered. “He is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”
Cheney’s words outraged Team Obama. But the Bush sources I spoke to not only supported Cheney but wondered what the fuss was about. Didn’t Obama and other Democrats spend years accusing Bush, the sitting president, of making America less safe? (Indeed they did; you can look it up.)
With Obama in the White House, there’s been a decision to continue the blame-Bush theme, even during the president’s overseas travels. Now, Bush veterans, led by Rove, are pushing back. If there is no cease-fire agreement soon, things will undoubtedly get much rougher.
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts can be read daily at ExaminerPolitics.com.
