Republican commentator Karl Rove led a full-throated denunciation of the Obama administration before a confident GOP audience Friday night at the annual Lincoln Day dinner of the Allegheny County Republican Party.

The former White House aide and strategist flayed the president's policies on spending, health care and the environment as he predicted that Pennsylvania Republican candidates would lead a GOP resurgence in the November elections.

"You're going to be a battleground in 2010," he said. "You win big in the commonwealth this fall and we will win big in America."

"We will have a general leading our army, General Corbett," he said, using the formal title of the state's top prosecutor, Tom Corbett, the Republican Party's endorsed candidate and favored for the nomination in his race against state Rep. Sam Rohrer.

"General, you're not going to be a general much longer," he added.

As the health care debate nears a climax in Washington, Mr. Rove said it was essential to defeat the Obama administration's chief initiative.

"You pass this bill and our premiums are going to go up faster and heavier than they would otherwise," he said, claiming that the legislation would spawn a litany of ills ranging from higher deficits to the erosion of the doctor-patient relationship.

"We need health care we can afford, not health care that's going to make the economy sick," he said.

Mr. Rove denounced the administration for engaging in "an orgy of spending," but he managed to muster a few good words about the Democrat who, in his analysis, "stood up to the left wing of his party," in his policies on Iraq and Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, those policies earned the Rovian seal of approval because, in his characterization, they amounted to continuations of the approaches of his former boss, President George W. Bush.

Mr. Rove appeared at the dinner while in the midst of a tour promoting his new memoir, "Courage and Consequence."

Mr. Rove, aka "The Architect," aka "Bush's Brain," was the chief strategist for Mr. Bush's two winning presidential campaigns.

Invoking the 2004 campaign as a model, he urged the Republican partisans to mount an intense grass-roots push to capitalize on discontent with the economy and the incumbent administration.

In the White House, Mr. Rove supervised the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison and the Office of Strategic Initiatives. He left the executive branch at the end of August 2007 and became a commentator for Fox News as well as a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Reports on the book have focused on his defense of Mr. Bush's use of the threat of the non-existent weapons of mass destruction to justify going to war in Iraq.

Mr. Rove points out that that assessment was shared by leading figures of both parties and said that his own greatest mistake in the White House was in failing to more effectively rebut criticism that Mr. Bush took the nation to war based on lies.

It was the best attended Lincoln Day dinner in recent memory. An exuberant Jim Roddey, the county chairman, called it the best in history, as speaker after speaker predicted Republican gains reversing the Democratic tides of 2006 and 2008.

The dinner drew about 600 guests who paid $125 to $250 for their meal.

Washington correspondent Daniel Malloy writes the "Pittsburgh On The Potomac" blog exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.