Rove: Hillary 'old and stale'

WASHINGTON, May 27 (UPI) -- Karl Rove may have backed down from his assertion that Hillary Clinton is hiding an insidious brain injury, but he's not through talking about what he says makes her unsuitable to win a presidential election in 2016.

Rove recalled Clinton's previous run at the presidency, in 2008, when she was granted frontrunner status but eventually ceded the nomination to then-Senator Barack Obama. The way she's going now, Rove says, the curse of inevitability could sink another run.

"People don't like people who have it sort of already made, they want to see a scrapper, they want to see a fighter," Rove said. "And if it looks like you are the candidate, then people tend to pick at your faults and tend to look at alternatives."

The Republican strategist said Americans would see Clinton as "both the third term of Barack Obama... and the third term of Bill Clinton."

"In American politics, there's a sense you want to be new, you don't want to be too familiar, you want to be something fresh, you don't want to be something old and stale," he said.

Rove conceded that if Clinton runs, she's almost certain to get the nomination, since she's in a much stronger position heading into 2016 than she was in 2006.

"On the other hand, she's in a much more vulnerable position in a general election. It's easier to make the case that this is the case of Democrats representing yesterday, let's go back to the early '90s, versus somebody who's focused on tomorrow, a Republican with a constructive conservative agenda with the future," Rove said.