Tea Party turning on Bachmann?

In an interview with CNN on Friday, Bachmann said Obama's foreign policies were worse than his economic ones and linked Obama to the war's overall death toll as well as its cost.

"Under Barack Obama's watch, we've expended $805 billion to liberate the people of Iraq and, more importantly, 4,400 American lives," she said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/28/michele-bachmann-obama-fbi-terror-training-manual_n_1064808.html

 

I hate to trot out what sounds like a stereotype of a woman, but I swear that she doesn't think before she talks. Ever. She gets emotional about something and just starts spewing. She double checks nothing. She's like listening to my crazy uncle rant about politics, based on what he heard Michael Savage say. Except she's running for president.

 

She was never gonna win.

 

She and her soulmate from Wasilla have set the whole concept of women in politics back 70 years, to the era of Betty Boop.

Boop-boop-dee-doop!!

 

This is America. If complete and utter losers, frauds and whores (literally) like Snooki can make a buck, I don't care if Palin of Bachmann or anyone else does. It's what the market will bear. If people didn't want it, they wouldn't be able to sell it.

 

True.

 

On what fantasy planet was this? She was never considered polished. Polish maybe, but never polished.

 

Oh, I could dig up lots of clips - print and video both - about how polished she had become. The word was applied constantly to her. There was an early debate - they've all run together now - where she didn't come off like a complete shit-for-brains like her doppelganger, and we were all subjected to a month of stories in which Michele Bachmann was practically being anointed the next William Jennings Bryan.

 

SO EXTREME WAS the caricature of Michele Bachmann as a kooky wild-eyed right-wing harpy that by the time she turned in a polished performance at her first candidates' debate in New Hampshire in June, speaking in smooth, fully formed paragraphs and delving into details of national policy, you could almost hear a national gasp.

Without any Palin-esque winks at the cameras or "you-betchas," the 55-year-old third-term congresswoman and mother of five from Minnesota has emerged as a serious force in the Republican presidential field, surging into second place behind frontrunner Mitt Romney in polls of Republican voters--and in at least one poll, ahead of him.

- MacLean's

And what we saw wasn't necessarily what Perry wanted us to see. He came off as hesitant at times, and his efforts to steer away from tough questions seemed ham-fisted. It was quite a contrast from polished opponents like Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who have been through this several times already.

- Louisville Courier-Journal

But with an otherwise calm and polished performance, Bachmann signaled she has no intention of going away quietly in the face of the newly ascendant Perry juggernaut, which is siphoning off her support in Iowa and South Carolina.

- CNN

Fiscal issues were front and center as the petite and polished Bachmann called for big cuts to the federal budget, reducing the deficit and repealing the Affordable Care Act.

- Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Bachmann is on a roll. She's gotten a lot more polished in television interviews and on the debate stage. It just goes to show what a little political coaching can accomplish, with someone who is willing to take advice and learn how to play this particular game. Even the fact that Bachmann readily gives mainstream media (other than Fox, of course) interviews is telling in 2012 Republican politics. Bachmann is unafraid to take the tough questions, and then give the answer to the question she would have preferred to have been asked. That sounds demeaning, but it is actually a plus for politicians today. Her answer to the "submissive wife" question just proves this, because it was nothing short of a masterful reframing of the issue from one of "submissive" to one of "equal respect." What we should expect from Bachmann in the near future is that she's going to get better and better at this game, especially now that the media is treating her seriously.

- Business Insider

Whereas Sarah Palin was once flummoxed when invited to name the newspapers—any newspaper—she read, Mrs Bachmann, the third-term congresswoman from Minnesota, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year that her favourite beachside reading included the work of Ludwig von Mises, a towering economist of the Austrian school. This column is even more impressed by her mastery of the 3.8m or so words of the ludicrous federal tax code. A lawyer who spent five years working for the Internal Revenue Service is not to be trifled with. When she says that the tax code is “a weapon of mass destruction”, she knows whereof she speaks.

If Mrs Bachmann’s cleverness was ever in question, the doubt should have been dispelled by her performance since confirming in June that she was running for the Republican presidential nomination.

- The Economist

 

Damned liberal media.

 

Excellent parallel with WJB, especially when considering the fundamentalist angle . . . though when playing politics with the big boys, she did her best to camouflage that in terms of playing to the broad public, while Bryan flaunted it. But since cowboy-boots Ricky was coming from much the same direction, had more money, and is always going to have a LOT more money, she had no shot. At all.

 

Yeah, I'm sure it would be really tough to find a potpourri list of quotes saying what a nutjob she is.

Completely agree with Hondo. If her goal is to write books, do speeches and get a job on Fox News, more power to her or anyone else who can find a following.