Rove says Clinton flawed presidential candidate

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's political adviser Karl Rove says Democrat Hillary Clinton is a flawed presidential candidate and Republicans face a difficult environment in 2008 but can keep the White House.

Rove, who is resigning at the end of this month, is known as the architect of Bush's election victories in 2000 and 2004 but has drawn fire for the Republicans' loss of the U.S. Congress in 2006. He is a lightning rod of criticism from Democrats who say he is a polarizing figure.

But he is considered one of the smartest people in politics, and he said in an interview on Tuesday that while he thinks Clinton will win the Democratic presidential nomination, she will have a tough time in the general election in November 2008 because she carries baggage from her husband's White House years in the 1990s.

"There is no candidate on record, a front-runner for a party's nomination, who has entered the primary season with negatives as high as she has," Rove said in the telephone interview from Texas.

"She's not like a fresh and new character. She's someone who has been essentially known to the American people for 16 years. It's going to be hard to change the perceptions that people have had," he said.

Rove carefully avoided mentioning what those perceptions are, but many Republicans consider her a calculating political opportunist, and a liberal who tried to take America to an overly bureaucratic health care system when she was first lady.

A new Quinnipiac University poll showed she did have the highest unfavorable rating of the leading Democratic candidates. It found while she leads all the hopefuls, 43 percent of Americans view Clinton unfavorably compared to former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who was viewed unfavorably by 26 percent, or Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, at 22 percent.

The Clinton campaign said the New York senator's negative ratings have actually been improving and that polls show she is the most electable of a host of Democratic candidates.