Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has some advice for presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump: drop the scandals and get back to the issues.
"Get this campaign back to the fact that two-thirds of Americans think our country is going in the wrong direction," Barbour, the Republican National Committee chairman, told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.
"That's been over 60 percent of the polls for three years now. And the main reason they think it's going in the wrong direction is because [President Barack] Obama's economic policies have been bad policies and they've failed. "
Further, said Barbour, the nation under Obama "has had the slowest growth in any recession since World War II and the nation's median household income is lower now than when he became president."
Still, Barbour pointed out that Trump has won the nomination and is on the path to get some 12 million votes or maybe even more than any other Republican nominee in history, and he believes Trump to be a better presidential candidate than Hillary Clinton.
He admitted that some of Trump's strategies, such as talking about the conspiracy theories behind former Clinton aide Vince Foster's death in the 1990s, confuses him, but at the same time, he pointed out that Trump was asked about Foster and didn't bring it up himself.
"I guess if you get asked a question by somebody out of the clear blue sky, sometimes you do make a response that doesn't make any sense because maybe the question didn't make any sense," explained Barbour.
The Republican National Committee chairman also discussed potential frontrunners for Trump's vice presidential pick, and when asked about speculation over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich becoming Trump's running mate, he said he does not know who could be named.
He called Gingrich a "bright, bright guy," but there are some "geographical advantages with others, such as Marco Rubio in Florida or Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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