Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's missteps in a speech she gave on foreign policy will hurt her chances if she decides to run for president in 2016, Republican strategist Karl Rove told Fox News' "America's Newsroom."
Speaking at Georgetown University on Wednesday, Clinton said America should use an approach she called "smart power" to better "understand" the nation's enemies.
"This is what we call smart power, using every possible tool and partner to advance peace and security, leaving no one on the sidelines, showing respect even for one's enemies, trying to understand, and insofar as psychologically possible, emphasize with their perspective and point of view," Clinton said.
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"This speech was badly written, badly delivered, and is going to continue to cause her problems," Rove said Friday. "She's creating a general election problem for herself, and making it more difficult for herself to put distance between she and president [Barack] Obama."
Rove, who served as deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, questioned if Clinton was suggesting Americans were "supposed to look at our adversaries, like [Russian President] Vladimir Putin or ISIS [the Islamic State], and have a deferential regard for them and admire them."
"We're supposed to look inside of ISIS and say, 'Look, we empathize with you. We understand why you feel compelled to behead American citizens?'
"We look at Vladimir Putin and say, 'We understand that you're upset that you're no longer the Soviet Empire — that you aren't even the Russian Empire of the 19th century, and that's why you're taking Crimea and destabilizing Ukraine?'" he asked.
Rove maintained Clinton shouldn't be "mimicking, echoing the president's lines, with regard to our adversaries and our enemies" if she wanted to distance herself from Obama's failed foreign policies, which are unlikely to change over the next two years.
Instead, he said it would have been more "appropriate" for Clinton to have said, "We need to understand their capabilities. We need to understand what motivates them. We need to understand what their abilities are, in order to deal with them effectively."
Rove also said it was "crude sexism" when Clinton suggested the need to have "women more involved in conflict resolution and military efforts, because they're better able to solve these problems."
"Does she really believe that there are jobs in government that women are better than men at? If so, she needs to tell us what jobs she thinks men are inherently better than women at in government," Rove said. "She's trying to appeal by saying, 'I'm going to be the first woman president.'"
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