President Barack Obama is traveling "a very dangerous road" by advancing policy initiatives through executive privilege, veteran Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins says.
Obama plans to sign an executive order that requires federal contractors to pay a wage of at least $10.10 per hour.
"He's going to try and use his executive powers in many instances," Rollins, a senior political analyst for Fox News, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
"But the key . . . there has always been, you don't surprise your own side, you don’t surprise the opposition.
"By him attempting to do things by executive order where people question whether he has that power to do that without some warning or some input from the Congress is a very dangerous road to go down," Rollins said Tuesday.
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Rollins, national campaign director in 1984 for the Ronald Reagan-George H.W. Bush ticket and later for Mike Huckabee's presidential bid, says Obama's use of executive orders is "basically a declaration" that he can't get anything through Congress.
"For any president, that's a declaration of real weakness . . . Presidents in the past . . . have basically tried to find compromise and try to find things that they can agree upon," he said.
"This president has basically said I'm not going to deal with this Congress, I'm going to go out and get some rhetoric and continue the class warfare that I've talked about since I first ran as a candidate. It makes him more and more irrelevant by the day.
"This president has extraordinarily low approval numbers, both on his job performance and his personal appeal at this point in time, and very much like George W. Bush at this point in his presidency, there became a fatigue factor in which people were ready to turn the page," he said.
Rollins says former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will run for the Democratic presidential nomination but she'll be forced to address more questions about her handling of the Benghazi, Libya, attack in which four Americans died.
"As she said herself, this was . . . her biggest regret. It certainly happened on her watch," Rollins said.
"The full story has not been told on this issue. We lost three Americans, including our ambassador, and it certainly was on her watch and on the president's watch, so it's certainly going to be a campaign issue.
"She's certainly going to run, she's going to be a very critical candidate, and I don't see any Democrat who's going to beat her right now, so there's a lot of other things that she'll have to defend, and that's certainly one."
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