Michele Bachman is scary. Behold her terrible gaze! Already the Eye of Moron has used her eldritch power to drive Little Timmy Pawlenty weeping from the GOP race. Tremble, America!
What makes Bachmann scary? First, she’s, well, sort of crazy. She believes some pretty wacky things. Perhaps “crazy” is too harsh. Let’s just say she’s not a big fan of the fact based environment. Bachmann got her start in politics doing things like trying to get Disney’s Aladdin banned because of it’s pro-occult stance. The Lion King is dangerous because of all the gay music by gay Elton John, which might make your children gay. In the Minnesota Senate, she would go over to the desk of Scott Dibble, an openly gay senator from Minneapolis, and pray the gay out of the Senate chamber. Apparently, in the Bachmannverse, gay is some sort of virus that can be spread through children’s DVDs and office furniture, and Elton John is Patient Zero. The Eye of Moron sees all, Elton John!
Maybe crazy isn’t too harsh. She’s afraid of Census Bureau concentration camps. She thinks that slavery got kind of a bad rap, and that it was good for African American families. Just to set the record straight, the Census Bureau is not secretly compiling a list of dissenters to send to Soviet-style re-education camps, and slavery was actually really bad.
So, first, she’s crazy. Second, she’s also inexplicably popular with a certain segment of particularly demented GOP voters. Her devoted following propelled her to victory in the meaningless yet strangely important Ames Straw Poll and Corn Dog Eating Contest. Crazy is one thing, but crazy with a devoted political following? That’s scary. So, how scared should you be?
Some reasons not to worry:
She’s not polling so well in New Hampshire, and Texas Governor and hair-tonic huckster Rick Perry seems to be eating into her share of the crazy demographic, when you look at pre-Perry polls from last month. The presidential race is a long slog, and Bachmann may have peaked too soon.
She’s not a governor. Members of the House of Representatives tend to not go the distance in presidential races. Only two sitting House members became major party nominees: Henry Clay in 1824, and James Garfield in 1880. Unseating an incumbent president is not easy, and for the past century presidents have only been beaten by governors. Being a governor is like being a mini-president. The powers a governor has are more analogous to the powers of a president, and it’s easier for a governor to make a case against a president. “I balanced my state’s budget” is usually a more powerful argument than “I passed a resolution making March 14th National Donut Day.” The power of crazy only gets you so far. On the other hand…
Reasons to worry:
Conventional wisdom may not be working so well this time. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty went after her in the last debate and she let the air out of him like he was a sad, cheap balloon. Being a governor and having an actual record is actually turning out to be a liability for GOP candidates. The two candidates who did the best in the Ames Straw Poll were Bachmann and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, both of whom are known for ideological purity rather than an actual record of governing or legislative accomplishment. Can she go any farther, or has she already peaked? What an actual Bachmann presidency would look like is difficult to predict – I would guess Mordor-esque hellscape – but it might make us long for the quiet competence of George W. Bush.
