Politics & Power Quote by Karl Rove

Rove’s sentence is built like a polite reprimand and lands like a strategic punch. He starts by granting Obama a brand claim: “promised hope and civility.” That’s not generosity; it’s a setup. By invoking Obama’s own aspirational slogan as the measuring stick, Rove turns “hope” into a liability and “civility” into an expectation Obama can be accused of violating. The phrase “borderline obsessiveness” does the heavy lifting: it medicalizes criticism, suggesting not just political disagreement but an unhealthy compulsion. “Borderline” is a lawyerly hedge that lets Rove imply pathology without owning the full diagnosis.

The subtext is pure reputational jujitsu. If Obama talks about Bush-era wars, deficits, or the financial crisis, Rove wants the audience to hear whining, not accountability. “Blaming” is the key verb: it collapses policy continuity and historical causality into a moral flaw. The implication is that a “civil” leader should absorb inherited problems quietly, as though naming them is indecorous.

Context matters: Rove, as Bush’s architect and defender, isn’t merely analyzing tone; he’s defending a legacy by shifting the frame from outcomes to etiquette. It’s also an early map of a broader conservative strategy in the Obama years: recast oversight and diagnosis as divisive grievance, and you can treat any reference to the previous administration as proof of personal pettiness rather than evidence. The line doesn’t argue the facts of Bush’s record; it argues that bringing them up is itself unseemly, which is a convenient way to make history off-limits.