Rove: Perry's Bernanke Comments Went Too Far

 

“You don’t want to accuse the Federal Reserve chairman of being guilty of a crime punishable by death, which is what treason is. I thought Governor Perry was, you know, not very adept in his remarks yesterday,” Rove told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “But I thought he was very skilled this afternoon when The New York Times tried to bait him into repeating the charge — and he said: I stand by my remarks about the decline in the value of our currency, but he refused to repeat the charge.

 

“And that — you know, [shows] he’s learned his lesson — he’s going to step away,” Rove said. “It’s one thing to say the Federal Reserve is following a policy with its quantitative easing that’s undermining the value of our currency, and that is wrong for America, wrong for our prosperity, wrong for our future — and [another] accusing him of a crime that, again, is punishable by death.”
 

Rove said it was good that Perry’s gaffe happened at the start of his campaign and the memory of his comments will probably fade with time.
 

“Governor Perry will come across tough — he will come across strong — but he need not come across with the kind of remarks that impugn the integrity or accuse somebody of violating the law,” Rove said. “And I suspect this was a — it was good to happen now. And in the next couple of weeks and months, the memory of it is going to fade unless he repeats the same kind of thing again — and I doubt that he is.”

Van Susteren asked Rove whether the latest  Rasmussen Reports poll, which has Perry up 11 points, at 29 percent, over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 18 percent, makes the Texas governor the true front-runner in the race for the GOP nomination — and why.

“Well, we’ve seen this happen three times before with people getting big bumps up,” Rove said “We saw with it Herman Cain with a good debate performance — we saw it with Donald Trump getting into the race — we saw it with Michele Bachmann with having a boomlet, which has now started to fade.

“Governor Perry adroitly handled his announcement — he dominated the coverage even before he announced. He held his announcement on the same day as the Iowa Straw Poll, so he ate up most of the oxygen that day,” he said. “And the next day, in the reports on the announcement — or on the straw poll results, Michele Bachmann was the first paragraph, but he was the second paragraph.

“So he’s got a bump in the polls — the question now is, can he do the things necessary to sustain it over the next two or three weeks, and can he do this in more than one poll?,” Rove continued. “Let’s be careful: This is one poll, and sometimes we get different results from polls taken at the same time.”