Oh God...
Michele Bachmann has always been on the far right of her right-wing party, but for the past year, her lunacy has been particularly vigorous. First was the McCarthyite demand for an investigation of “anti-American” members of Congress. Then came her fear that Obama was creating “re-education camps” via the AmeriCorps program (a program her son has since joined). There was her call for Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous” revolutionaries against cap-and-trade legislation and her paranoid opposition to the Census. And on Monday, railing against health-care reform in Colorado, she implored a crowd “to make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass.”
All this raises a question: Will Bachmann ever pay a political price for her fevered outbursts? In today’s GOP, is there such a thing as too crazy?
Obviously, the Democrats hope so, which is why there’s already lots of energy around Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District's primary race. “An extraordinary amount of money is pouring into this race very early,” says Brian Melendez, chairman of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the state’s Democratic Party is called. Bachmann, he says, “is not just America’s craziest congressperson, she’s also one of the least effective members of Congress. She does nothing for her district, she brings nothing home, she has no legislative accomplishments she can point to.” He adds, “I’m confident that her true colors have been displayed since the last election in a way that they have not been before.”
At first glance, Melendez’s statement seems quixotic. Last time around, Bachmann’s challenger, Elwyn Tinklenberg, raised $1 million in the days after Bachmann’s outburst about anti-American congressmen. If Bachmann could be beat, 2008 should have been the year to do it.
“You had an election with a strong trend away from Republicans toward Democrats,” says Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (and Minnesota native). “You had a reasonably attractive, not terribly weak challenger against her, who ended up, because of the notoriety that she achieved, getting fairly well funded. You had her demonstrating her embarrassing nuttiness repeatedly. And she still won.”
Nevertheless, some think Bachmann’s Palin act might be wearing thin. In July, Roll Call reported that the National Republican Congressional Committee had added her to a program meant to boost fundraising for vulnerable incumbents. Physician Maureen Reed, who is battling state Senator Tarryl Clark for the Democratic nomination, recently raised $230,000 in eight weeks, according to Jason Isaacson, her campaign manager. Clark won’t reveal how much she has raised, but says, “We’re going to be competitive. Things are going quite well.”
“The bottom line is that the 6th District isn’t as conservative as [Bachmann] is,” says Isaacson. It’s certainly the most right-wing district in the state—it went for John McCain by almost nine points in 2008—but Isaacson insists that a challenger who is seen as a moderate, rather than a liberal, can “make Michele Bachmann pay for her political craziness.”
Even in 2008, Clark points out, most people in the district voted against Bachmann—but 10 percent of them went for a third-party candidate. (Bachmann won 46 percent, while 44 percent went for Tinklenberg.) Meanwhile, Clark adds, the district has the highest foreclosure rate in the state, something she says Bachmann has done nothing to ameliorate—the congresswoman has voted against every major foreclosure-relief bill and called struggling homeowners “irresponsible.”
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