The College Fix

Karl Rove said he’s had a “damn difficult” time giving up swearing for Lent, in a talk at Cornell University Wednesday night.

It was an appropriate introduction for Rove’s lecture on the 2012 future for Republicans and the Obama presidency.

“This is the first election in recent times where there is no clear frontrunner for the Republicans,” Rove said. “They all have the same three challenges. What’s their narrative? Why shouldn’t it be Obama? Why should it be them?”

This week, Mitt Romney announced his exploratory committee for a presidential run, while Tim Pawlenty said he would run for president.

In an event sponsored by the Cornell College Republicans, Rove, the architect of President George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, told a room packed with faculty and students that the economy and job production would be the biggest issues to address for whatever Republican candidate is chosen for the 2012 presidential election.

People want to know, Rove said, “Are you going to be able to bring us together at the end of this? They’re going to have to do something to convince people they’re up to the job.”

Rove said that the American people are looking for a candidate who will be able to bridge the gap between the left and right. Obama, he said, portrayed himself as an ‘American state’ candidate, but once elected, acted as a ‘blue state’ president that operated in strict opposition to the Republican Party. Rove declined to predict a nominee, instead focusing on the national debt and Obamacare.

Government spending and the nation’s deficit are “bound up together in a toxic stew for 2012,” he said. “At this rate, deficit will double by 2012 to 80 percent of GDP. We’re on the same way as Greece except on steroids.”

Rove heavily criticized Obama’s healthcare overhaul, which he said has failed massively and caused business owners to fire employees.

“It’s not just the little guys who are doing this.”

“The government has done such a lousy job signing people up for healthcare and their solution is to come up with another lousy plan for the government to sign people up,” he said. “This is Bernie-Madoff style economics.”

Oliver Renick is an editor of the Cornell Review and blogs at the Cornell Insider. He’s a member of the Student Free Press Association.

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