Club for Growth Bites Back at Barbour’s Critique
The Club for Growth fired back Tuesday at former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour for discouraging GOP donors, including Congressional aides, from giving to the fiscally conservative organization.
“Haley Barbour is a good guy. When he was thinking of running for President, he was more than pleased to attend the Club for Growth’s winter economic conference, and he had nothing but nice things to say about us!” Club for Growth President Chris Chocola said in a statement. “Now that he’s back to his more familiar roles as a lobbyist and Republican Party insider, he is singing a different tune. That’s politics.”
The club included this photo of Barbour speaking to that conference in 2011:
The National Review reported that Barbour told Congressional aides to retaliate against the club at the Ripon Society’s annual conference in Virginia this weekend.
“Republican groups like the Club for Growth should stop spending money to defeat Republicans,” Barbour told the publication later in an interview. “Politics can’t be about purity. Unity wins in politics, purity loses.”
Ironically, two of the club’s favorite GOP senators, Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky, will illustrate the party’s schism Tuesday night after the State of the Union.
Rubio will deliver the GOP’s official response to President Barack Obama’s annual address, while Paul will deliver the tea party’s response.