Karl Rove has solid platforms on Fox News and on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal if he wants to promote another Bush for the top job in the White House. But he isn’t using them for that.
In recent months, Rove, a Republican strategist and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, has barely even mentioned likely GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush in any of his multiple Fox hits or his weekly Journal column.
On his last nine appearances on Fox to analyze the GOP presidential primary, Rove only offered two substantial commentaries on Bush, both of which were slightly negative.
“The Bush effort, frankly, made a mistake in one respect,” Rove said May 1 on Fox. “Somebody [on Bush’s team] went out and said we’re going to raise $100 million. … [I]t’s going to be in a way the first primary test for Jeb Bush. He better be close to or make significant progress toward that $100 million number or people are going to say, ‘Well, you’re not showing us what we thought we’d see.'”
On April 6, Rove pushed back against a popular idea among political commentators that Bush is all but certain to be the GOP’s nominee. “This is the most wide-open Republican presidential sweepstakes we’ve seen in our modern era,” he said. “[E]verybody’s going to have their moment in the sun. … It’s going to be a wide-open contest and Gov. Bush, who does bring a lot of strengths to the table, is by no stretch of the imagination the inevitable nominee.”
Rove also had appearances to discuss the presidential race on April 23, April 30 and May 5, wherein he didn’t mention Bush’s name at all.
In his Journal columns, the most Rove has said about Bush since November, other than referring to his fundraising and national poll numbers, was that he’s “a big thinker and effective communicator with a giant fundraising network.” He asked, “But can another Bush win?”
A Politico report on Tuesday suggested that there is a rift between Rove and Bush. “[A]fter more than a decade’s worth of backstage disputes between the man who was the president’s political gatekeeper and the brother who now hopes to follow him into the White House, the frostiness has become the stuff of legend, attributable, people close to them say, to everything from personality differences to professional circumstances,” the report said.
Rove himself offered his own excuse on Fox News in late April for declining to delve much into the Republican primary, in terms of who his favorite candidates are. “We’re not going to get involved in the Republican primary,” Rove said, referring to his American Crossroads political action committee, which is widely credited as instrumental in Republican victories in the 2014 midterm elections. “That’s for other people.”
