Is Michele Bachmann the new Sarah Palin? Republicans warm to woman they once saw as a joke
Michele Bachmann is winning more attention than Sarah Palin as a Republican presidential hopeful. Now she's getting serious, says Alex Spillius in Washington.
Michele Bachmann is a former tax lawyer who many moderates in the party think could prove its biggest liability in the forthcoming primary for the 2012 nomination Photo: GETTY
By Alex Spillius, Washington 4:15PM GMT 26 Mar 2011
Until last week Michele Bachmann was considered something of a joke by members of Washington's Republican establishment. But after announcing that she was almost certainly running for US president, their smiles quickly vanished.
A Tea Party favourite, Mrs Bachmann is a former tax lawyer who many moderates in the party think could prove its biggest liability in the forthcoming primary for the 2012 nomination.
Her gift of the gaffe is such that a leading Republican consultant recently said that she made Sarah Palin look like Count Metternich.
That was after Bachmann mistakenly placed Lexington and Concord, scenes of the first battles in the American War of Independence, in the state of New Hampshire, where she was speaking at the time. They are in fact in Massachusetts, as every US schoolchild knows.
Rarely shy of a conspiracy theory, she has suggested that Democrats wanted to do away with the dollar, and during the Iraq war claimed to have knowledge of a plot to annex part of the country to Iran.
During the bird flu scare, she hinted that President Barack Obama – who she once derided as "anti-American" – was to blame for the virus. It is no surprise she has chosen to fan the flames of the notion – which is popular among many grassroots conservatives – that the president is not American-born.
A cable television interviewer once called her a "balloon-head" after she delivered a McCarthyesque rant about suspicious liberals in Congress, and she has remained a demon among Democrats ever since. The rather wild-eyed congresswoman from Minnesota is, in other words, a dreadfully divisive, and much derided, figure.
The similarities with Sarah Palin are striking. They are both working women with large families – Bachmann, 54, has five children and has fostered 23 over the years – who revel in their charismatic challenge to the orthodox image of a Republican politician as a stuffy, suited, country club male.
Like the former Alaska governor, Bachmann is feisty cheerleader for her vision of what makes America great. Even when delivering barbs, she is full of smiles and Midwestern good cheer. She is unapologetically anti-establishment, anti-big government, anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage, and though she may lack the same megawatt celebrity as Palin, Bachmann is now threatening to nudge her more famous ideological sister out of the limelight.
With her poll numbers declining, Palin is still only flirting with entering the race. Despite her experience as John McCain's 2008 running mate, she has yet to raise a meaningful national staff or establish a network in Iowa, where the crucial first caucuses will be held early next year.
Bachmann, on the other hand, has begun recruiting and spent five days in the state last week, never failing to remind an audience that she was born and raised there for 11 years. She has only been considered in two Gallup polls, but is already in sixth place in a long list of probable contenders.
Like Palin, she has a widespread following of arch conservatives willing to donate in small amounts over the internet, and in her 2010 re-election campaign, raised a record of $13.5 million for a House of Representatives battle.
It is that sort of prowess that gives old school Republicans palpitations. Bachmann is unlikely to win the primary because her evangelical, Tea Party support-base will be too narrow, but she could stay in the race for months and become a fixture on numerous televised debates.
Her blunders and provocations, it is believed, would then be exposed to a wider public and would cause collateral damage to the eventual winner of the primary, who is likely to be drawn from among the more experienced but less magnetic male candidates.
As Mike Murphy, a seasoned Republican strategist, wrote: "The vital swing voters who will decide the 2012 election will look at Michele Bachmann and howl like villagers getting their first torchlit glimpse of Frankenstein's monster. They will stampede quickly in the opposite direction, away from the GOP."
Democrats are privately rejoicing at the prospect of Bachmann running, assuming that Obama would benefit from a kooky, antagonistic politician with poor command of the facts.
That attitude may prove complacent, however. Look at what happened in the 2010 midterms. Palin and Bachmann led the Tea Party charge and the Republicans seized the House and halved the Democrat's majority in the Senate.
If she won the nomination, Bachmann would certainly guarantee Obama another term, such is her divisiveness. But after a credible defeat, she could play the kingmaker whose endorsement of the Republican nominee would come with a demand that the Tea Party's values be embraced.
Meanwhile, the anger at the economy that humbled the Democrats four months ago may not abate significantly before 2012. Bachmann might prove trouble than the White House expected, and more help than dubious Republican wiseacres ever envisaged.
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