With former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the likely presidential nominee of Democrats in 2016, GOP strategist Karl Rove says his party has three key items to focus on in defeating her.
Appearing Wednesday on
Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," Rove said Republicans must hit Clinton on foreign policy, jobs and the economy, and the national debt.
Foreign policy is the most obvious, Rove said, because Clinton was secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
"You can't look around the world and not see a problem," he said. "She was the architect of the Russian re-set."
Then there is Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State (ISIS.)
"You can't point to any success, and my suspicion is, by 2016 under this president we are not going to be a more peaceful world, not going to be more secure," Rove said. "It's going to be even more complicated than it is today."
The attacks in Benghazi, Libya, could be a problem, Rove admitted, but Clinton is in some sense insulated from it. She might be happy to let conservatives keep talking about it much the same way Obama allowed questions about his birth certificate to continue.
Clinton's problem relating to jobs will be that she doesn't understand how the economy works, Rove said.
"She doesn't have a real concrete vision of how she thinks it ought to go. She is going to be stuck defending the anemic recovery that we have had under Barack Obama," he said.
Finally, Rove said, Obama will have added an enormous amount to the national debt by the time Hillary Clinton runs.
"Forty percent of the national debt of the United States will have been raised on his time in office," Rove said.
Host Bill O'Reilly expressed doubt the public would pay attention to the debt, but Rove pointed to a new report by the Congressional Budget Office that said the public debt will stabilize to 74 percent of GDP through 2016, but then will begin to rise.
A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed terrorism, jobs and the national debt are the top three issues on voters' minds, he said.
"Those are going to be issues that are her problem in 2016," Rove said.