President Barack Obama is too stubborn to be effective in addressing policy initiatives for the country, Republican strategist Karl Rove charged Monday.
"Instead of choosing a path of cooperation and compromise, the president, it looks like, he's going to set a tone for this year of, 'My way or the highway,'" Rove told Fox News' "America's Newsroom"
Obama will outline his agenda for the year in his State of the Union address Tuesday evening. He is expected to highlight domestic policy issues, including raising the minimum wage and overhauling the nation's immigration laws. He has threatened to use executive action to move his policies forward if Congress fails to act.
Rove, former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, said the White House could find "common ground" between Democrats and Republicans if it wished. To move policies forward, he maintained the president should compromise and "give everybody a little bit of something."
"Instead, their attitude is, 'Forget it.' When you do what the president and his people are doing, say, 'Forget it. Congress doesn't matter to us. We're going to go around Congress,' it tends to breed more distrust and more problems.
"It is the stubbornness of President Obama," he added.
Rove said the difficulty for President Obama in 2013 was not, as presidential advisor Dan Pfeiffer allegedly described in a White House memo, that the president "too often governed more like a prime minister than a president." Instead, he indicated the problem stemmed from "no good ideas, no cooperation with Congress."
"It wasn't that the president worked too much with Congress. It's that he worked too little with Congress," Rove said.
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