The Washington Post has been running a series about the remaining GOP Goat Rodeo competitors this week. They have covered Mitt Romney and Rick Perry but today’s article is about Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Anyone who reads my work knows I am no fan of Bachmann, but even with that bias the thing that caught my attention was the really horrible picture they picked for the piece. It makes the three term Representative look old and tired.
I know, I know that is such a superficial thing, but it kind of sets the tone for the article. The Post really did not do Rep. Bachmann any favors in their reporting, which is, according the interminable ads one has heard on local radio, supposed to get behind the hype and the candidates own ads and get to the “real” candidate.
Maybe there is not really a lot of there, there, but I didn’t find out anything really new about the Teahadist favorite. She is a born again Christian who had her “rebirth” during college and has been on a steadily more conservative trajectory ever since.
To me the article misses the point about Rep. Bachmann. As its main premise it says that her surety is her strength and her weakness. Which is accurate, but it after stating that it does not really explore what it means to have a candidate who will not veer from wrong-headed policies or missteps no matter what.
The Minnesota Republican really hit most folk’s political radar in 2008 when she said on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Mathews, that she thought the press should investigate whether members of Congress were anti-American.
She said it with that blithe crazy-eyed assurance that she makes most of her statements with and a total lack of historical understanding of McCarthyism. It was so startling that it even jolted Mathews out of his preplanned questions and made him really try to pin down her views. Sadly for everyone involved she had stated them clearly.
For those who had been following her career in Minnesota, she has been the driving force behind the attempt to get a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality in that Midwestern state. This was even on top of the law that already discriminated against gay citizens in regards to marriage.
She is still a huge proponent of this, and to the eternal shame of Minnesotans this blatant bit of bigotry will be voted on this election cycle.
Which leads me to my point (I hear the “Thank God’s” out there you know). Is unswerving commitment to principle really what anyone would want in a politician? I completely understand how attractive it is, this all go, no stop, always my way point of view.
It looks very strong, but it turns into a conflict between principle and facts very quickly.
Governance has been called the art of the possible. I like that phrase, but it has a implied level that the possible deals with real facts.
This is really where the divergence between the Left and the Right has formed in the last few decades. It used to be accepted that you could have your own opinions but you were not entitled to your own facts. That seems to no longer be the case in American politics.
Michele Bachmann is the quintessential example of this. She is the woman that even though she has a gay stepsister thinks homosexuality is a choice. She was more than willing to jump on and defend and repeat the totally baseless meme that Gardasil, the vaccine for human papillomavirus has caused retardation in girls who receive it.
The list of Bachmann gaffes is too long to reproduce here, including the one where she claimed after Gov. Rick Perry self-destructed in a debate that she had never made a gaffe, ever.
But it is a great example of how she holds out that her principles, are far more important than the facts. In Rep. Bachmann’s world the facts are mutable, but principles can never be. This is real problem for someone who wants to run the nation.
It is a problem for the rest of us as well. We have one of the two major parties in the grip of know-nothingism that rewards the most hyperbolic and erroneous statements as long as they match up with the orthodoxy at the moment.
It is true that there is exactly zero chance (barring a Final Destination like killing off of the entire rest of the field) of Rep. Bachmann being the Republican nominee. Yet there are even now people on the ground in Iowa who are pushing for her to be just that.
It is often said, but I suspect not really intellectualized, that government is not a game. This nation has real problems, high unemployment, income inequality, crumbling infrastructure, climate change, the list goes on and on.
To have anyone who would, for even 30 seconds, consider that marriage equality is somehow damaging to out nation in the face of these problems would be a laugh line if it were not so tragic. Yet that is exactly the role that candidates like Bachmann play.
She was never going to be the nominee, but she has managed to take up time and divert the conversation away from our real issues, to things like that, or insisting to our harm, that waterboarding is effective and should be used.
This is what you get from certainty, the inability to look at evidence and change your position or even doubt for a second that you might be wrong. Without that ability or willingness to re-evaluate your positions you might become popular, you will certainly look strong, but you will in no way be the kind of person that should be the head of our government, or for that matter involved in it at all.
In Michele Bachmann we see all that is wrong with the modern Republican Party. Sadly there does not seem to be any cure to this kind of certainty.
The floor is yours.