Rove: Obama 'Looks Like He Was in a High School Locker Room Slapping His Towel Around'

On Thursday’s “On the Record” on the Fox News Channel, former Bush campaign adviser Karl Rove reacted to a recent Quinnipiac poll showing that 45 percent of voters say America would be better off if Mitt Romney had won the election.

Rove decried President Barack Obama’s rhetoric from earlier in the week as he reacted to House Speaker John Boehner’s lawsuit and suggested that conduct had been a part of the low polling.

“Liberals are getting conflicted because they had such aspirational goals for him. They wanted him to be a certain kind of leader that he has turned out to be,” Rove said. “Look, the president’s ability to be a strong and effective leader has been diminished in large part by his own decisions and his own conduct. We saw it this week when he sort of looked like he was in a high school locker room slapping his towel around when he gave those remarks at the Key Bridge in Washington, D.C., in which he sort of taunted Speaker Boehner, “Sue me,” and called the Republicans unpatriotic, said it was time for them to get some economic patriotism, and where he defined his proposal for highway funding by saying it’s not socialist, you know, it’s not unconstitutional. I mean, the president’s tone is simply wrong. And it’s not only hurt him among conservatives and moderates, but also causing some liberals to say, is this the best we can do.”

“Well, I wrote about this today in my Wall Street Journal column,” he added. “Because this is mystifying to me. Just take the IRS scandal. When it first broke, the president’s rhetoric was improper, inappropriate. He said, this is inappropriate, it shouldn’t happen, the IRS needs to be completely unbiased and neutral, and we need to get to the bottom of this. And now he is dismissing it as a phony scandal. In the meantime, he had blown it off by saying, well, it was a couple of bureaucrats in Cincinnati trying to enforce the law and I don’t see the big deal about it. He started out in the right place. He is in a wrong place today because, like in the recent FOX poll, three quarters, 76 percent of Americans believe that Lois Lerner’s emails were deliberately destroyed. So the president is sitting there saying, don’t worry about it, nothing to it, nothing at all, when three quarters of the American people think there might have been a criminal act involved. This is not helping him. And these scandals have eroded, I think, the public confidence. His job approval now is about, I think, 40 percent in the latest Gallup. And that’s a pretty big drop from where he was not too long ago.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor