If there’s an 80% chance President Michele Bachmann would repeal ObamaCare, enact entitlement reform, and prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, I’m sold.
Whatever trivial misstatements she’s made in her political career, this three-term Minnesota Representative is the strongest nominee the GOP has seen so far this campaign season.
Fox News host Chris Wallace recently demonstrated his journalistic integrity and respect for women in politics by asking Bachmann, “Are you a flake?”
There’s more evidence that Barack Obama isn’t a capitalist than that Bachmann isn’t a serious candidate, though I don’t recall any journalist asking candidate Obama, “Are you a socialist?” If this is how Fox treats Bachmann, one can only imagine how the mainstream media will treat her.
Fortunately, Bachmann appears quite capable of defending her record.
Unlike candidate Obama, Bachmann has a real work history, with actual responsibilities, including five years’ tenure as a tax attorney, and experience running two mental health clinics, a charter school, and a family farm.
Unlike Senator Obama, Bachmann productively used her time in Congress, taking leadership roles on allowing drilling in ANWR, repealing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and replacing ObamaCare with free market reforms [8].
Bachmann has labeled herself a “constitutional conservative”—precisely the correct label to use in this bizarre era of pay czars, light bulb bans, and trillion-dollar deficits.
Bachmann is a more seasoned version of Sarah Palin and an excellent substitute for Palin fans who believe the former governor unelectable. (And if depicting Bachmann staring off-camera [9] is the best Saturday Night Live can do to mock her, the 2012 election is going to be no career-booster for Kristen Wiig.)
Bachmann may not have extensive foreign policy experience, but she’s clearly capable of fighting the United States’ gravest enemies, as evidenced by her having survived growing up in a Democratic household.
America’s favorite Tea Party hostess stands up to powerful RINOs in the House who refuse to get serious on spending. She organized and chairs the vital Congressional Tea Party Caucus.
To top it all off, she’s electable, as evidenced by her recent dead heat [10] showing with Mitt Romney in Iowa, her first-place [11] finish in a national Zogby poll, and her winning performance in the New Hampshire GOP primary debate this month.
Naturally, liberals have temporarily recovered from their Sarah Palin hysteria and are developing a creeping case of Bachmann Derangement Syndrome.
Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, for example, branded Bachmann a conspiracy theorist [12] for her claim that Obama wants Medicare to go broke so seniors will be forced to rely on ObamaCare. Bachmann was in fact mistaken: She failed to note that Obama also wants all private insurers [13] to go broke so the whole country will be forced to rely on ObamaCare.
Benen called [14] Bachmann’s concern that federal voluntary “community service” might lead to mandatory service “obvious madness.” Apparently Benen was unaware that the original version of the GIVE Act [15] authorized a “Congressional Commission on Civic Service” to address “whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented…” (p. 267 in a 275-page bill). No mandatory service here—move along! The Commission was eliminated from the bill after conservative uproar, but this incident highlights Democrats’ modus operandi for sneaking unpopular provisions into legislation: First they tuck something objectionable deep into a bill where few will read it; then Republicans find it and raise objections; and finally Democrats remove it, deny it was ever there, and scoff at Republicans for “fear-mongering.”
As another example, Washington Post “Fact Checker” and partisan hack Glenn Kessler derided [16] Bachmann’s claim of $105 billion in implementation funds being “hidden” in the ObamaCare bill as “ridiculous,” giving it a maximum rating of “four Pinocchios” on his truthfulness scale. In fact, former Appropriations Committee member Ernest Istook confirmed that the authors’ act of authorizing so many new programs and funding them in the same bill was highly unusual. The legislation isn’t clear on what the money will be spent on, and Obama-appointed bureaucrats are unlikely to be held accountable for it. Neither the Washington Post nor any other major news outlet reported on the $105 billion implementation sum—probably because, as Bachmann noted, it was broken into small pieces and scattered throughout the 2,000-page bill. But because the provisions weren’t written in invisible ink, Kessler claimed Bachmann was lying through her teeth.
The liberal site Think Progress blasted [17] Bachmann as being crassly calculating for observing that Democrats hope to transform American society into one that’s more dependent on government, thereby securing a permanent “power base.” In liberals’ projection of their own vile behavior, Republicans preventing Democrats from buying votes using taxpayer-funded entitlement programs is somehow the equivalent of Republicans buying votes. This is like saying that Republicans’ efforts to prevent Democratic voter fraud is Republican voter fraud.
In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi claimed [18] that on Hardball, Bachmann had demanded McCarthy-style investigations of Congress to determine which of our leaders were anti-American. In fact, Bachmann was merely responding to an endless, tiresome line of questioning from host Chris Matthews, who had introduced the label ‘anti-American’ and was trying to get Bachmann to pin it on her colleagues. Matthews whined, “How many Congresspeople… There’s 435… How many are anti-American?… How many people in the Congress… How many do you suspect?” After fending off his badgering for several minutes, Bachmann finally replied, “You’d have to ask them, Chris,” and added, “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America?” Not exactly the Salem witch trials.
These are just a few threads in the tangled web of “conspiracy theories,” “lies,” and “gaffes” that supposedly disqualify Bachmann from office.
Bachmann may not be the perfect candidate—who is? [19]—but she’s the best conservatives have among those currently in the race. I’d rather have a president with 80% of the facts at her command than one who governs according to 100% discredited crackpot redistributionist economic theories.
