Bachmann & Pawlenty Club For Growth Evaluations

The Club for Growth is a Political Action Committee that seeks to maximize economic growth through freedom. Here is its mission statement.

Club for Growth is a national network of thousands of pro-growth Americans, from all walks of life, who believe that prosperity and opportunity come through economic freedom. We work to promote public policies that encourage a high growth economy and a swift return to America's founding principles primarily through legislative involvement, issue advocacy, research, training and educational activity.

The primary tactic of the separate Club for Growth PAC is to provide financial support from Club members to viable candidates to Congress who believe in pro-growth policies, limited government, low taxes and economic freedom, both in Republican primaries and general elections.

The Club has reviewed the political records of most of the Republican presidential candidates and plans to soon have all of them reviewed. You can read the full reports here. Below are the summaries of both Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty.

Michele Bachmann:

With very few exceptions, Congresswoman Bachmann has supported pro-growth policies throughout her career. She especially deserves praise for her consistent defense of school choice. After reviewing her record, we are confident that Congresswoman Bachmann would be a pro-growth President

Tim Pawlenty:

It’s clear that Governor Pawlenty is, for the most part, hard to pin down on his exact ideological moorings. Minnesota is not a conservative state by any means, and Governor Pawlenty did veto tax hikes passed by the liberal legislature and made a relatively strong push to keep a lid on taxes. Pawlenty deserves tremendous praise for keeping Minnesota’s spending growth remarkably low. For this, and for his consistent stances on school choice, tort reform, and political free speech, he deserves credit – while his record on health care and entitlement spending is mixed. However, Pawlenty has some simply inexcusable tax hikes in his record, and he made a mistake by taking no clear position on the 2008 Legacy Amendment. His tacit support for bailouts, more job-choking regulations, and various tariffs make it difficult for us to identify his core ideological identity. His support of things like mandatory vegetable oil in gasoline, cap and trade, and a statewide smoking ban make him sound overly eager to support big government proposals to address policy fads of the day.
Given all of this, we struggle to identify the real Tim Pawlenty. We agree with those who say that Governor Pawlenty did the best he could in a state as liberal as Minnesota. And we believe he would be a stronger pro-growth executive in a more conservative climate, but his “clunkers” as he himself describes them are difficult to ignore. A President Pawlenty, we suspect, would fight for pro-growth policies, but would be susceptible to adopting “pragmatic” policies that grow government

Here are the evaluations. The choice is your's.