Bachmann for President?
by Michelle Goldberg
America’s craziest member of Congress has hinted at running for the nation’s highest office, and who can blame her? Even her latest outbursts haven’t threatened her bulletproof status, Michelle Goldberg reports.
Michele Bachmann has always been on the far right of her right-wing party, but for the past year, her lunacy has been particularly vigorous. First was the McCarthyite demand for an investigation of “anti-American” members of Congress. Then came her fear that Obama was creating “re-education camps” via the AmeriCorps program (a program her son has since joined). There was her call for Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous” revolutionaries against cap-and-trade legislation and her paranoid opposition to the Census. And on Monday, railing against health-care reform in Colorado, she implored a crowd “to make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass.”
All this raises a question: Will Bachmann ever pay a political price for her fevered outbursts? In today’s GOP, is there such a thing as too crazy?
Obviously, the Democrats hope so, which is why there’s already lots of energy around Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District's primary race. “An extraordinary amount of money is pouring into this race very early,” says Brian Melendez, chairman of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the state’s Democratic Party is called.
Bachmann, he says, “is not just America’s craziest congressperson, she’s also one of the least effective members of Congress. She does nothing for her district, she brings nothing home, she has no legislative accomplishments she can point to.” He adds, “I’m confident that her true colors have been displayed since the last election in a way that they have not been before.”
At first glance, Melendez’s statement seems quixotic. Last time around, Bachmann’s challenger, Elwyn Tinklenberg, raised $1 million in the days after Bachmann’s outburst about anti-American congressmen. If Bachmann could be beat, 2008 should have been the year to do it.
“You had an election with a strong trend away from Republicans toward Democrats,” says Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (and Minnesota native). “You had a reasonably attractive, not terribly weak challenger against her, who ended up, because of the notoriety that she achieved, getting fairly well funded. You had her demonstrating her embarrassing nuttiness repeatedly. And she still won.”
more...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-03/bachmann-for-president/full/