Club for Growth President Chris Chocola charged that Republican establishment figure Karl Rove cares more about the Republican brand than Republican "core beliefs."
"What Karl Rove and some of the establishment groups only care about is the brand," he said during an appearance on CBS' "Face to Face."
"They only care if someone's a Republican or not. They don't really care what their core beliefs are. I think voters actually care what their core beliefs are."
Rove and Chocola are expected to butt heads in 2014 over a number of upcoming House and Senate races, as both are the heads of groups expected to play in GOP primaries and beyond.
The group launched by Rove and his allies, the Conservative Victory Project, aims to elect the most conservative candidates that can also win in general elections, an attempt to avoid the nomination of a weak or unprepared candidate — a scenario which, many Republicans say, cost them winnable seats in 2012.
But Chocola, who heads the free-market conservative group Club for Growth, has been an outspoken critic of Rove and his planned attempts to engage in primaries.
In his interview with CBS, he repeated his previous criticism, and defended the Club for Growth as focusing on "whether [candidates] have core beliefs based on pro-growth policy."
“If you go to the grocery store and you have a box of cereal that just has that brand but you don’t know what’s inside, you know, you’re not going to be too enthusiastic about buying it,” Chocola said.
“But if you know what’s inside every single time, you’re going to become a loyal supporter of that brand. I think they’ve gotten the brand loyalty kind of backwards.”
