CORRECTION APPENDED

Former White House adviser Karl Rove analyzed the 2008 presidential campaign and criticized Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama at an event sponsored by the Harvard Republican Club on Friday.

Over 200 people filled the Winthrop House Junior Common Room (JCR) to hear Rove speak about the election and answer questions.

Rove—who attacked Obama but spared his opponent, Senator Hillary Clinton—said that the Illinois senator had built his campaign around a message of bipartisanship but that the rhetoric was not supported by his record.

“Senator Obama has found himself out on the far-Left fringe, unwilling to work with anybody,” Rove said.

Rove denounced Obama’s response to the comments made by his pastor, saying that Obama “threw his grandmother under the bus” in his speech when he equated her “fear of black men” with the comments of his reverend.

He also accused Obama of twisting the words of presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. Rove said that Obama had made it seem as though McCain supported 100 years of war in Iraq when, in fact, the Arizona senator was only saying that he might support an American troop presence in Iraq for up to 100 years.

“If there’s one man in America who has the right to say that he opposes 100 years of war, it’s a man who has been through five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton,” Rove said, referring to McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

While Rove said he questioned Obama’s character, he left Obama’s rival relatively untouched.

“Say what you want about Hillary Clinton,” Rove said of the New York Democrat. “She isn’t one of my favorites, but you can’t say she hasn’t tried.”

Following the speech, Rove answered questions on subjects ranging from the term used to refer to the estate tax to the possibility of a U.S. troop presence in Iran.

When asked for his predictions for the 2008 president election, Rove replied with one word: “Victory.”

Joanna I. Naples-Mitchell ’10 asked Rove why he was a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and had influence over President Bush’s decision to send troops to Iraq even though he was a political consultant with no background in the military or diplomacy.

Rove initially replied by telling Naples-Mitchell, who is the political director for the Harvard College Democrats, that WHIG did not exist until 2004, two years after she claimed it had. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

When Naples-Mitchell pressed her question, Rove responded by reading quotes that were supportive of military action in Iraq.

After Naples-Mitchell said she disagreed with all the quotations, Rove revealed that all the speakers were Democrats, eliciting a round of applause from the audience.

“I was dissatisfied, but I didn’t expect to be satisfied,” Naples-Mitchell said about Rove’s response to her question after the event. “I kind of enjoyed the experience, though. I would rather take the bullet myself to call him out on the rug.”

Rove’s speech had been widely anticipated by politically minded students at Harvard.

Thirty minutes before the start of the event on Friday, people lined up from the door of the JCR to the main door of Winthrop waiting to get in to the speech.

Only Harvard affiliates were allowed to attend the speech, and some people who tried to enter the JCR had to be turned away because of lack of space.

Unlike the raucous response Rove received during his appearance at the University of Iowa last month, there were no interruptions to Rove’s speech on Friday.

“I’m confident everything will go smoothly,” Rove said before the speech. “We’re at Harvard, which is respectful of free speech.”

Caleb L. Weatherl ’10, president of the Harvard Republicans, introduced Rove, saying that Rove was instrumental in the ascent of the Republican Party in formerly Democratic Texas.

“Personally, I’m hoping that after this speech he can preside over a similar rise of the Republican Party right here at Harvard,” Weatherl said.

Unsurprisingly, Rove—who is credited with masterminding Bush’s election and reelection—received a less-than-cordial welcome from the Harvard College Democrats, who issued a press release on Friday calling Rove “a historical reminder of the dirty and dishonest Bush campaigns.”

“We call on the [Republican Club] to uphold its own mission by denouncing Rove’s infamous tactics and welcoming him as an example of the actions of the past rather than as a model for the future conduct of their members,” Jarret A. Zafran ’09, president of the Harvard College Democrats, said in the statement.

Rove’s presence and the Dems’ statement set of a small tiff between the leaders of the campus political groups.

“This is just an example of the Democrats trying and failing to make themselves relevant.” Weatherl said. “Personally, I’m actually flattered that the Dems have nothing better to do with their time than to issue press releases about [us] and the speakers we bring in.”

“Our qualm is not with the HRC,” Zafran said in response, “but with who they chose to bring in to represent themselves on campus.”

—Staff writer Lauren D. Kiel can be reached at lkiel@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION

The March 7 story, "Rove Denounces Obama for Empty Rhetoric," misstated the date of the creation of the White House Iraq Group. The group was set up in August 2002, not in 2004, as Karl Rove asserted in his speech.