A top aide to Rand Paul’s president campaign denied that the Kentucky senator refuses to put in the work required to raise money.

“Those are stories put out by bad guys,” campaign manager Chip Englander told National Review editor Rich Lowry during an event featuring several presidential campaign managers at Google’s Washington D.C. headquarters. “He does the necessary things to be successful.”

Paul has been widely reported as having weak fundraising habits, most pointedly in a Politico report that portrayed him as undisciplined.

“He’s simply not willing to do the stroking and courting that powerful donors expect,” Politico reported. “Earlier this year, the senator had agreed to speak at the Dialog Retreat, a gathering hosted by Auren Hoffman, a prominent investor with deep ties in the well-heeled Silicon Valley world. But just before he was to appear at Hoffman’s, Paul pulled out so that he could take his family on a spring-break excursion to Florida. Paul’s aides were aghast, realizing they’d missed an opportunity to cultivate the very type of donors likely to be receptive to his small-government philosophy.”

Paul won the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference straw poll over the weekend, which supporters note has correctly predicted the eventual winner of the Michigan primary the last two presidential cycles; a second-place finish there helped Senator John McCain (R., Ariz.) revive his 2008 bid. Paul is at 3.5 percent in the Real Clear Politics polling average.

— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.

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