Karl Rove said in an interview on Fox News Thursday night that Sarah Palin doesn’t think the rules of presidential campaigns apply to her.
“She doesn’t need to have the traditional trappings of a presidential campaign — no finance committee, she can raise the money, she doesn’t need to go shake a lot of hands,” Rove said.
“Here’s the thing. She gets to decide what the rules are to govern her campaign and go accordingly. Politics is changing. Some people have done things that have been outside the norm of custom and have won,” Rove said.
“I think this bus tour is part of this. She is going up the east coast. Not to Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, the early primary states. She is going to make a public presence on the east coast with a bus tour over the Memorial Day weekend. I think this is an interesting way to run for president, and I think she is going to run for President,” he continued.
But, Rove warned, “there’s a difference between crowds and what you need to run a campaign. Some of the biggest campaign crowds that you have ever seen in modern American politics occurred in the 1972 election, when there were crowds for George McGovern, who wound up going down in a huge defeat,” Rove said.
“You can’t equate size of crowds with your acceptance by a broader populace. She has her own way of doing things. It going to be interesting to watch,” he said.
“She has kept her viability by sending out 140 character messages on Twitter or filing statements on Facebook. She’s been up there in Wasilla, Alaska — and she has not been inside the beltway in or the early primary states in the way other candidates have.”
