Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush still has time before voting begins in Iowa, Republican strategist Karl Rove said Friday, and hopefully by then he'll speak with "greater clarity" than he used when answering a question on the Iraq War this week.
"This is the kind of question that ultimately there's only one answer that the media wants ... knowing what we know now, I wouldn't have gone in," Rove said on Friday's "Fox & Friends" program. "I'm glad he cleaned it up, and I hope, I suspect there's a lesson learned here."
"He's got 36 weeks, 250 days until we start voting in Iowa, and my suspicion is, he'll speak with greater clarity, and if greater clarity is needed he'll clean it up quicker," Rove continued, in a wrap-up of a week's worth of controversy on the Bush statement.
The issue started Sunday when Bush, who will most likely seek the GOP presidential nomination, told Fox News that he would have authorized the invasion, feeding a narrative pushed by Democrats that he is little different from his brother, former President George W. Bush, who left office in early 2009 with his popularity weakened by the Iraq War and a faltering U.S. economy.
Bush said on Tuesday that "mistakes were made" in the Iraq War, moving to disavow a controversial statement he made Sunday in support of the 2003 invasion ordered by his brother, then-President George W. Bush.
And on Thursday,
Bush showed annoyance with the hypothetical question and said he would not have ordered the war if he knew then what he knows now.
"If we're all supposed to answer hypothetical questions, knowing what we know now, what would you have done?" Bush said with a twinge of annoyance while campaigning in Arizona. "I would have not engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq."
Rove said he also does not think it was a mistake for
Bush to say that he'd take his older brother's advice on Israel.
"No, it's not bad for him to say inside a Republican primary, that my brother is known in Israel and the United States as one of the greatest supporters of the state of Israel, and is somebody whose advice I take on Israel ... everybody will make a mistake at some point or another and the question will be, do they make it early and learn from it or make it late and suffer from it?"
Rove also commented on the controversy surrounding $75,000 in donations made by ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos to the Clinton Foundation.
On Thursday, the anchor, who was a key operative during President Bill Clinton's terms in office,
bowed out as moderator of the upcoming presidential debates. On Friday, Stephanopoulos apologized during ABC's "Good Morning America,"
reports The New York Times, saying that it was a mistake for him to donate money over the past three years and for not disclosing his donations.
"He's put at risk a career that he has worked hard to create," said Rove. "And he's put at risk by this, by this bad judgment."
However, Rove said he doesn't agree that Stephanopoulos' issues would have been solved by disclosure alone, and that there were other ways to help causes than to donate to the Clinton Foundation.
"The Clinton Foundation does very little original work," said Rove. "Most of the money [collected] flows through to other organizations."
Instead, said Rove, Stephanopoulos could have helped finance AIDS research or children's issues by making individual donations to the organizations and not through the Clinton Foundation, which collects money and distributes it.
"He's worked hard to ask tough questions but undermined his reputation," said Rove. "So that was a false promise. The Republicans were never going to accept him as a moderator of a debate because he was so close personally to Bill and Hillary Clinton."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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