WASHINGTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would present a credible threat to presumptive Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton should she decide to run for president in 2016, Karl Rove said Monday evening.
"She'd certainly give her a scare," the former George W. Bush political guru said in an interview with the Hugh Hewitt radio show. "I think Elizabeth Warren's hard-left prescriptions on the economy sing to the heart of Democratic primary voters. So yeah, I think she could give her a run for her money."
"I don't know at the end of the day if she could beat her," he added. "Clinton is going to have a lot of money. She does have an expert political adviser in her husband. And she's about ready get a master mind of her presidential campaign in the form of John Podesta who's tough enough to keep the warring factions that always make up a Clinton campaign together."
The Massachusetts Democrat has repeatedly said she is not running for the nomination, nor has she made any moves toward a prospective campaign, such as the hiring of staff in key primary states. She has also consistently lagged behind Clinton in early presidential polling. That has not stopped multiple progressive organizations, however, from calling on her to run.
Rove, who remains a key player in politics via his American Crossroads super PAC, said that Clinton faces a more immediate problem.
"What's her message? She went out by trying to borrow from Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren by saying corporations and businesses don't create jobs. It was so transparently unnatural to her that she didn't get applause from anybody," he said.
"What is it that she's done? She can't point to her successes as secretary of state. That's going to be a huge problem for her," he added. "Does anybody think that in a year or eighteen months that the world is going to look a lot safer and a lot more peaceful and calm than it does today? I don't think so."
Obama's longtime adviser, David Axelrod, agrees with Rove on the prospects of a potential Warren campaign. In a recent interview, however, he pushed back on the notion that Clinton has a thin resume.
"There are number of other important advances that she had on her watch, which ended four years ago, that went to helping put together the international coalition in the midst of the financial crisis, putting together international coalitions around arms control, making sure that we had supply routes open so our troops could be resupplied in Afghanistan," he said.
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