Karl Rove: Kamala Harris Is ‘Not a Great Candidate,’ but Dems Are ‘Alive Again’

BAIER: “Let’s bring in Karl Rove, Fox News contributor, former deputy White House chief of staff. Karl, good afternoon. I know you wrote about enthusiasm on the Democratic side. They are fired up. They’ve removed some of the baggage of President Biden when it comes to age and mental competency. And there is a challenge for Republicans. This is The Wall Street Journal editorial board. ‘Kamala Harris confounds the Republicans. Democrats are newly energized as they rally behind Kamala Harris for president, which is no surprise after the weeks of despond over President Biden. Yet, Republicans seem suddenly and oddly on the back foot as they didn’t think this could happen.’ How do you see it?”

ROVE: “Well, I think that’s right. I wrote about it in my own column, as you alluded to. She’s got a lot of vulnerabilities. Let’s not kid ourselves. But she’s also got a momentary strength, which may be durable. She’s energized black, brown and young voters. Democrats are alive again. She’s going to be far more articulate than Joe Biden was in making the case for a continuation of the Biden-Harris policy. She’s going to attack on the abortion issue far more effectively than Joe Biden ever was, and Republicans had better get their act together. We’ve seen the momentum close this gap. I suspect by Labor Day, if she has a good rollout on the VP, she has a good Democratic National Convention, if she hits the road hard right afterwards and spends the last week of August campaigning, I would not be surprised to see her ahead in the polls on Labor Day. And the only way to reverse that is to stay focused on the policies that she has advocated and the policies that as vice president she has helped put implement that have given us high inflation, a gigantic mess at the border, lack of respect around the world, anti-energy policies and increasingly government interfering in the lives of American families, American communities and American businesses.”

BAIER: “As we get closer to elections, I’d like to listen to the grizzled veterans of political races gone by. You’re one of them. Another one on the left is James Carville, and he’s issuing his own warning to Democrats.”

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CARVILLE: “This is too triumphalist, ok? This is — everybody’s giddy. Everybody should feel good and liberated and everything else. But if we don’t win the election, we haven’t done anything. This kind of giddy elation is not going to be very helpful much longer because that’s not what we’re going to be faced with. And I think the vice president, put it in athletic terms, needs a really good cut man in a corner because she’s getting ready to get cut.”

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BAIER: “Yeah. And talking to Alex Castellanos earlier, Karl, saying, you know, there’s this image and voice of Kamala Harris as a political candidate on all these left ideological issues that lives on social media out there. And how is she going to deal with that and reconfigure herself prior to Chicago and the convention there?”

ROVE: “Well, I have two things. First of all, I didn’t take offense that I was called grizzled, grizzled political veteran because there are a lot of grizzled journalists as well. But anyway, she’s got to have a message that is forward-looking and she has also got to have a more effective attack on Donald Trump than Joe Biden has been able to mount. And it’s got to be focused. It’s got to be deliberate, it’s got to be laid out, and trying to do two things at once is harder than you might expect. Reintroducing herself and painting a vision of the future at the same time that she’s mounting from essentially, you know, Ground Zero, an attack on Donald Trump, is going to be a challenge for her. Look, she’s not a great candidate. We know that from 2020. She was a flash in the pan. She did well in a couple of debates, but she was not an effective candidate. She’s not good on the stump. She has a weird manner about her, the cackle is sort of off-putting. And she’s very, very, very left-wing. She was to the left of Bernie Sanders, for example, on the question of Medicare for All. And there’s a lot of material there that the Republicans can take advantage of, but they have to be disciplined. No talking about how this is a coup because Biden withdraw and she was elevated and people don’t care about that. What they care about is what affects them in their everyday lives, rising costs, the border crisis, respect for America and so forth.”

BAIER: “So, you’re saying stay away from the process, stay away from the DEI, stay towards the policy —“

ROVE: “Right, that’s counterproductive.”

BAIER: “— and the listing?”

ROVE: “Yeah, totally counterproductive. We’re now at a point, think about it, we have just over 100 days before the final day of voting. We have in some instances 40 some odd days, 45 days before people start to vote. So every moment is precious at this point in the presidential campaign, and you better be focused on what really matters to voters. And particularly what matters to that small group of voters who are weakly linked today to either candidate or are up for grabs in the battleground states because they’re truly undecided.”

BAIER: “All right, Karl Rove, thank you. And by the way, grizzled was a compliment.”

ROVE: “Thank you. Same to you.”

BAIER: “Alright, see you.”