Making my normal rounds about the blogsphere I first caught my eye on a Politico running tally of super delegates, showing Senator Clinton leading Senator Obama by 19 super delegates; somehow in my daily routines I had missed how close that part of the race had become.

Anyway, what really caught my eye was an article on Newsweek titled “Dear Senator Obama…” with the subtitle “Karl Rove: My Advice for Barack Obama”

So anyone who has been out of the loop for a while, Karl Rove was the Deputy Chief of Staff to President G. W. Bush until August of 2007 when Rove resigned amidst scandal about emails with official documents being sent from personal accounts as well as the firing of some US attorneys. Now Rove contributes to Newsweek and Fox News.

Rove offers Obama six points of advice, ranging from speech topics, to controversy, to the question inexperience.

Rove offers some words of possible encouragement to Obama:

You have talent, intelligence and tapped into something powerful early in your campaign. But running for president is unlike anything you’ve ever done. You’re making mistakes and making people worry that you’re an elitist. So while you’ll almost certainly win the nomination, Democrats are nervous about the fall. You’ve given them reasons to be.

1. Your stump speech is sounding old and out of touch. You made a mistake by not giving the bored press (and voters) something new last Tuesday when you lost Pennsylvania. Come up with something fresh that’s focused on the general election. Recapture the optimistic tone of your start and discard the weary, prickly and distracted tone you’ve taken on.

2. When you get into trouble, pick one, simple explanation. And stay with it. Take the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. You said you weren’t sitting in church when he said those ugly things. Two days later, you excused him, saying his comments didn’t give “a well-rounded portrait” of him. Two days after that, you condemned his statements as “not only wrong but divisive” but still couldn’t “disavow him” any more than you could your grandmother. Ten days later, you implied if Wright hadn’t retired, you might have left his church. It would have been better to say from the start that Wright’s words were wrong and offensive and you should have spoken out earlier. The applause would have been deafening.

3. Your lack of achievements undercuts your core themes. It’s powerful when you say America is not “Red States or Blue States but the United States.” The problem is, you don’t have a long Senate record of working across party lines. So build one. In the coming months, say that you’ll appoint Republicans to your cabinet and get a couple to say they’d serve. Highlight initiatives Republicans can agree on. Most importantly, push for a bipartisan issue now before Congress.

4. You speak of the “fierce urgency of now” that calls leaders to confront important challenges. Sounds good, but people are asking, what urgent issues have drawn your enormous talents? It’s counterintuitive, but spend less time campaigning and more time working the Senate. Pick a big issue and fight hard for it. Win or lose, you’ll give your argument substance.

5. Stop the attacks. They undermine your claim to a post-partisan new politics. You soared when you seemed above politics, lost altitude when you did what you criticize. Attacks are momentarily satisfying but ultimately corrode your appeal.

6. To answer growing questions about your inexperience, people need to know, in concrete and credible ways, what they can expect from you as president. That’s missing now. And don’t think those position papers written by academics and posted on the Web do the job. They have a check-the-box quality to them. Americans want to see your passion and commitment to things they care about, in ways that give them confidence you’re up to the job. They can smell when something is poll-tested and focus-grouped, not from the heart. Also, you can’t bluff anymore like you did on “Meet the Press” in October 2006. (You weren’t officially running for president yet, but it’s still telling.) Tim Russert pointed to the passage in “The Audacity of Hope” that says “no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised,” and he asked for an example. You cited Medicaid and Medicare, saying: “I think that there’s no doubt that we could squeeze more efficiencies out of those systems there. Simple example, we don’t use electronic billing for Medicare and Medicaid providers. Now there’s no other business on earth that still has people filling out paper forms to get reimbursed, especially for a system that large. We could drastically reduce the costs of those systems.”

The only problem is, the Bush administration, building on the good work of the Clinton administration, already put in place in 2003 a regulation that requires electronic billing of Medicaid and Medicare. Since then, all but a handful have been electronic. You won’t get a pass on bluffing anymore. You’ll have to do both your homework and occasionally something that’s difficult for you (and most other politicians): admit you don’t know.