Karl Rove's interview with Gentleman's Quarterly carries another interersting passage in addition to Rove's citation of John Hinderaker's utter demolition of the 60 Minutes hit job on Rove. Here Rove assesses Barack Obama:

I got to know [Obama] because we have a mutual friend, Ken Mehlman, who was his law-school classmate at Harvard. And so as a result, whenever in the last three years he's been around at the White House, I've gotten to see him, and we sort of would hang around and chitchat about things. I'm actually in his book. He wrote that "people like Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove say we are a Christian nation." And I did not say that. I confronted him about it. At the White House.

And what did he say?

Well, first he denied that I was in the book! And then he denied that it said that I said that it was a Christian nation. And then when I pulled out the thing [he had a copy of the offensive page with him] and showed it to him, he sort of blah-blah-blah-blah-blah- blah-blah. And I thought, That's who he is. I mean, look, he may claim that he's for a different kind of politics, but that was a cheap shot. And I'm not certain if any of the four said it either. But it was like, you know, Let's just strap it in there and see if it goes someplace.

This is a vivid example of Obama acting in the mode of an old-style political fabulist that also gives some heft to Mark Steyn's assessment of Dreams From My Father -- "it feels like a novel" -- and to John's assessment "that Rove occupies a special zone where he can be smeared groundlessly and with impunity."

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