When things don’t go your way, you can accept defeat gracefully. Or you can throw a Karl Rove.
The prominent Republican strategist and former Bush White House guru didn’t seem able to deal with Mitt Romney’s loss on Election Night. When the network he was appearing on, Fox News, called that Ohio had voted for President Barack Obama, thereby effectively ending the election, Rove strongly pushed back.
“I think this is premature,” Rove said, insisting that only part of the vote had been counted. “I don’t know what the outcome is going to be, but we gotta be careful about calling things when we have like 991 votes separating the two candidates.”
Rove put up so much protest, in fact, that anchor Megyn Kelly traveled back into Fox’s studio to speak with their statisticians and experts who were calling each state. Even before Rove almost had a conniption, Fox in fact had been one of the last to call Ohio for Obama, trailing CNN, NBC and The Associated Press.
For not being able to face defeat, and fighting the facts, Karl Rove wins the Whopper of the Week, a distinction given by the Washington Guardian to the most misleading, inaccurate or just plain wrong statements by political figures.
And Rove still seems unable to handle the defeat. Appearing on Fox a few days later, he accused the president of underhanded tricks in winning re-election.
“He succeeded by suppressing the vote,” Rove said, and tried to paint the election results in a bad light, eventually leading to Kelly reminding him that Obama had won.
Part of the problem is that Rove had a vested interest in Romney, including spending tens of millions of dollars to bolster the former governor’s campaign. Rove was in charge of the conservative SuperPAC American Crossroads, which ran a firestorm of television ads targeting Obama.
And therein lies the problem. As a political fund-raiser and ardent supporter, there’s little room for Rove to maintain his objectivity analyzing vote counts.
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