Cain says Rove attacking his campaign to help Romney

Presidential candidate Herman Cain hit back at Karl Rove's criticism of his campaign Monday, saying the former adviser to ex-President George W. Bush was deliberately attacking him for being a non-traditional Republican candidate. Cain also said he believed that Rove wanted rival Mitt Romney to earn the Republican nomination.

"It's a good thing the voters are not looking at Karl Rove's little whiteboard," Cain told The Washington Examiner. "I believe it is a deliberate attempt to damage me because I am not, quote unquote, the establishment choice. But why not go with the choice that the people seem to like?"

Rove, in an appearance Monday morning on Fox News, used a a whiteboard to list a number of Cain's gaffes that could hurt his campaign, including his comments last week on abortion that raised eyebrows among some conservatives, his Afghan and Palestinian foreign policy positions, and statements in an interview that he was unfamiliar with the neoconservative moment.

Rove also critiqued Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan.

"I think it has created an image of him as not being up to this task," Rove said on Fox News. "That’s really deadly."

But Cain said that the Republican strategist was biased against campaigns with big organizations and large fundraising totals.

"What has Karl Rove done?" Cain said. "If I become the nominee, he has given Democrats talking points for a commercial to attack me. It makes no sense unless it's a deliberate attempt on his part to try to push me down so that the candidate he wants rises to the top."

Cain is not the first Republican candidate to earn Rove's criticism. In September, Rove said that Texas Gov. Rick Perry's position on Social Security — repeatedly calling the program a "Ponzi scheme" — was "toxic" to his candidacy.

---