The Economist
Republican candidates
Michele in the heartland
The latest Republican contender displays her conservative credentials
“ARE you a flake?” a news anchor asked Michele Bachmann the day before she formally launched her campaign for the presidency, summing up the pundits’ slightly dismissive view of her chances. She replied, in a suitably dignified, presidential manner, that she deserved to be taken seriously. The best evidence of that had come the day before, when a poll of likely caucus-goers in Iowa put her neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, with 22% to his 23%. Nationally her support is much lower, but since Iowa will be the first state to pass judgment on the Republican field next year, a win there would instantly confirm her as a genuine contender.
And Mrs Bachmann certainly knows how to play Iowa. She says she cried, as a girl of 12, when she learned that her family was moving out of the state where she was born. Although she now represents a prosperous exurban district in Minnesota, on June 27th she returned to Iowa, to the manufacturing town of Waterloo in the north-east, to reclaim her roots as well as launch her campaign. “Everything I need to know I learned in Iowa,” she told the crowd, picturesquely gathered on the sun-drenched lawn of a 19th-century house. America’s government, she declared predictably, had strayed too far from the values of small, hard-working places like Waterloo.
The evening before, at a less formal reception in a dance hall on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress, Mrs Bachmann had hammered home her local credentials. As a cheerful throng feasted on pulled-pork sandwiches and baked beans, she wistfully recalled the names of all the local schools and churches she had attended. Any suspicion of a shallow or incidental connection to the state was vanquished by the claim that her forebears “came here in the 1850s and were literally part of the pioneers who felled the trees and created the greatness that is Iowa”. Her parents, she added, had danced across the very floor on which she stood.
But Mrs Bachmann’s appeal is more than parochial. She is a gifted public speaker, with a knack for rousing a crowd. She was thought by most to have won the most recent debate among Republican presidential candidates. She is also a strong fund-raiser. At the last election she raised $13.6m, more than any other candidate for the House of Representatives.
Moreover, unlike Mr Romney and several other prominent candidates, Mrs Bachmann has been a consistent and ardent advocate of causes dear to the most fiscally and socially conservative Republicans. “As a constitutional conservative,” she declared in her Waterloo announcement, “I believe in the Founding Fathers’ vision of a limited government that trusts in and perceives the unlimited potential of you, the American people.” She would like to reduce the corporate tax rate to 9%, to make it the lowest among rich countries, and do away with capital-gains and inheritance taxes altogether. She has mused about replacing income tax with a national sales tax. She voted not only for the fearsome spending cuts put forward by the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, but also for the even more ruthless ones proposed by the Republican Study Committee. She voted against all the bills that have become red rags to the right, including TARP, the stimulus, cap-and-trade and health-care reform. She has been quick to embrace tea-party activists’ complaints about overweening government, and even formed a “Tea Party Caucus” in Congress.
Mrs Bachmann, who attended a Christian law school, often talks about her faith. She professes to pray for guidance on even relatively mundane matters, such as hiring campaign staff. She also makes frequent reference to her five children and to the 23 foster children she helped bring up. She was an anti-abortion activist before entering politics. During the six years she spent in the Minnesota Senate before her elevation to Congress in 2006, Mrs Bachmann led a campaign to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage, even though it was already illegal under state law.
But critics maintain that even though Mrs Bachmann has rock-solid conservative credentials, she has not got much done during her brief political career. She has never before run for statewide, let alone national office. She does not chair a committee or subcommittee. No bills or resolutions she has sponsored have become law, and only two have won approval in the House: one designating September as “National Hydrocephalus Awareness Month” and one honouring the 150th anniversary of Minnesotan statehood.
Moreover, many of the issues Mrs Bachmann has chosen to harp on about seem quixotic, to say the least. She denounced last year’s census as unwarranted government intrusion, and said she would refuse to provide any information beyond the number of people in her household. She is sponsoring a bill to roll back energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs, arguing that they restrict commercial and personal freedom. She once introduced a resolution to prohibit the Treasury from scrapping the dollar and adopting a foreign currency in its stead—not a risk that seems imminent.
Mrs Bachmann is also prone to blunders. She recently relocated the first battles of America’s struggle for independence from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. She says the Founding Fathers fought tirelessly against slavery, when many were in fact slave-owners. This week she declared, wrongly, that Waterloo was the hometown of John Wayne (it was home for a spell to John Wayne Gacy, a serial killer). PolitiFact, an outfit that assesses the accuracy of controversial statements made by politicians, has awarded Mrs Bachmann 11 “false” ratings and seven “pants on fire” to just one “true”.
Voters who admire Mrs Bachmann’s fierce conservatism will doubtless look past these slips and foibles. Her current rivals for the support of the party’s more religious and tea-steeped voters are less charismatic, in the case of Tim Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota; less rounded, in the case of Herman Cain, a pizza mogul and talk-show host; or both, in the case of Rick Santorum, a former senator. But that could change if other populist firebrands, such as Rick Perry, the governor of Texas (who also has it in for energy-efficient light bulbs), or Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and a tea-party favourite, enter the race. Mrs Palin was also in Iowa this week, attending the opening of a flattering film about herself, and stoking speculation, as usual, about her presidential ambitions.
Even if Mrs Bachmann has the party’s right wing to herself, she may still struggle to win the nomination. Republicans tend to plump for electable candidates over ideologically pure ones, and seasoned politicians over relative neophytes. Most polls show Mr Romney, for one, putting in a better showing against Barack Obama than Mrs Bachmann. Even in the party’s most conservative redoubts, after all, the ability to beat Mr Obama is the most cherished qualification of all.
http://www.economist.com/node/18897565
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