Few American presidential campaigns would be complete without the slapstick banana-skin pratfall. Now that Sarah Palin, the prime Republican exponent of the art, is in the wings inspecting her bruises, the Tea Party’s latest poster girl has obligingly stepped in. Perversely, Michele Bachmann’s gaffe-strewn performances are giving her the last laugh.
Bachmann, a 55-year-old congresswoman with staring eyes who frightens some of her own party as much as the Democrats, prompted guffaws when she officially launched her campaign last week in her home town of Waterloo, Iowa. She was proud, she said, to come from the same place as John Wayne, the Hollywood actor. “That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too.”
The comparison between the hulking film star and a 5ft 2in woman who has raised 23 foster children seemed a little tenuous, though few would dispute that Bachmann shoots from the hip and doesn’t pull any punches. What filled Bachmann’s enemies with glee is that Wayne was born 150 miles away, in the Iowa town of Winterset. It was John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer responsible for the murders of 33 young men and boys, who lived in Waterloo.
Political foes reckon that if the banana skins don’t do the trick, her husband’s views on homosexuality will Oops. “People can make mistakes,” she told CNN the next day, “and I wish I could be perfect every time I say something, but I can’t.” If the glitch had all the hallmarks of a Palin howler, what followed came straight out of the former vice-presidential candidate’s repair manual. Bachmann’s faithful groupies creatively edited the John Wayne entry in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, changing the actor’s birthplace to Waterloo.
The same thing happened when Bachmann asserted that John Quincy Adams, the sixth US president, was one of America’s founding fathers. Unfortunately, Adams was not one of the country’s founding fathers, although his father John was. Wikipedia was duly tweaked again.
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Such cavalier disregard for historical accuracy prompted a fact-checking agency to examine 24 of Bachmann’s statements, some relating to her personal finances. Only one was found to be completely true and 17 were rated false (of which seven were categorised as “pants-on-fire” untrue).
This record of a politician who claims to have lived by Christian principles ever since she “surrendered my life over to Christ” at the age of 16 might have spelt her Waterloo. On the contrary, her popularity ratings have leapt by eight points in New Hampshire, where she is in second place behind Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and the Republican frontrunner. Her name recognition has jumped 17 points to 69% in the latest Gallup poll, ranking her fifth behind Palin, Newt Gingrich, Romney and Ron Paul.
It is hard to mistake her these days on television chat shows, where she enjoys mostfavoured status — while providing ample material for late-night shows and stand-up comedians. In person, she displays a calm worthy of the federal tax lawyer she once was, rather than the fiery figure whose rhetoric electrifies Tea Party conventions. One critic puts it another way: “She genuinely believes what she says, whether it’s false or not.”
She has supported Palin’s accusation that President Barack Obama has been “palling around” with terrorists and has condemned his healthcare bill as “a crime against democracy”. She has called global warming a “hoax” and has warned of the possibility of the White House setting up “re-education camps” for America’s youth. Revealing a sketchy grasp of geography, she once claimed the oil-rich Arctic belonged to America: “This is ours!”
The Minnesota congresswoman is often compared to Palin. Both have five children, are born-again Christians, were drawn into politics through their children’s education, and are Republicans loathed by Democrats. Both are “mocked and marginalised”, lamented Bachmann: “If you are unashamed and vocal about your position as a conservative, that’s what happens.”
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Somewhat surprisingly, given that Bachmann has usurped Palin as queen of the Tea Party, she counts the former Alaskan governor as her friend. “People want to see a mud-wrestling fight. They won’t get it from me because I like Sarah Palin and I respect her,” she has said. However, the two camps are said to be cooling towards each other. Palin has yet to announce her presidential intentions.
When Bachmann arrived on the national scene in 2007, her prominence in the conservative movement grew by leaps and bounds. Energetic, attractive and adept at tailoring her soundbites to her audience, she showed a combativeness that delighted evangelical conservatives eager to fight Obama.
She was still seen as a fringe candidate until the first big presidential debate last month, when she received a standing ovation after besting six mostly dull male Republican candidates. By the end of the week she had secured a book contract to write her memoirs, a virtual prerequisite for any aspiring president. Asked why she would make a better president than Romney, she was assumed to be joking when she replied: “Well, I think it’s obvious — because I’m shorter.”
Political foes reckon that if the banana skins don’t do the trick, her husband’s views on homosexuality will. Marcus Bachmann, her spouse of 32 years, is her main political adviser and a clinical therapist who runs a Christian counselling clinic in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, that tries to turn homosexuals “straight”. He told a Christian radio station last year: “Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined and just because someone feels this or thinks this doesn’t mean that we’re supposed to go down that road.” At the Minnesota pastors summit in 2005 he gave a presentation featuring several people who said they had been “cured” of being gay. His views are shared by his wife. She campaigned to ban same-sex marriages, splitting her family. Her lesbian stepsister, Helen LaFave, has lived with her girlfriend for more than 15 years.
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Born in Waterloo into a family of Lutheran Democrats on April 6, 1956, Bachmann was the second of four children. Her father, David Amble, was an engineer descended from Norwegian immigrants who traced their roots back seven generations in Iowa, and her mother, Jean, worked as a bank teller. David’s promotion led the family to settle in Anoka, Minnesota, but when Bachmann was 13 her parents divorced and her mother struggled to support the children on about $4,800 a year.
Taking to heart her mother’s words that “one thing that can never be taken away from you is your education”, Bachmann became a diligent, popular student. She also turned to God: “As a teenager, I began to grasp the concept of Christ’s true love and forgiveness.” When her parents remarried, she acquired two stepsiblings from her mother and five from her stepfather.
On finishing high school, she spent the summer working on an Israeli kibbutz. “All the Bible is about Israel,” she reasoned. Waking at 4am, she and other volunteers were driven out to pull up weeds in cotton fields, escorted everywhere by soldiers. She is now one of Israel’s strongest supporters in Congress and a member of Christians United for Israel. Returning to Anoka, Bachmann worked her way through community college with a variety of jobs including school bus driver and restaurant hostess. That summer she worked for an uncle in Alaska before attending Winona State University in southern Minnesota, where she embraced the teachings of Francis Schaeffer, a theologian.
At university she met Marcus and together they volunteered for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. Invited to the Democratic candidate’s inauguration, they turned up in a van “like the Beverly Hillbillies” she recalled. However, they were “disappointed on almost every level” with the peanut farmer’s presidency. Bachmann credits Burr, Gore Vidal’s scathing novel about America’s founders, with her conversion to Republicanism.
Juggling a growing family and her law degrees, Bachmann worked as a tax lawyer until the birth of her fourth child, when the couple opened their home to girls with eating disorders. Although Bachmann seldom misses an opportunity to mention her parenting skills and her foster children, it has been suggested that some only stayed for weekends.
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Bachmann entered politics after seeing failings in public schooling: “The kids were colouring posters in 11th grade algebra class.” She decided to do her duty and go to the Republican convention, where she led a mutiny against the long-standing nominee for the state Senate. Bachmann, “a nobody from nowhere” dressed in “jeans, a sweatshirt with a hole in it [and] white moccasins”, gave a five-minute speech, won the nomination and “he was out on his keister”. She never looked back.
Bachmann could win the opening caucuses in Iowa when voting to select a Republican presidential candidate begins in February — if she can stay the course. As she told Der Spiegel magazine recently: “I have a spine made out of titanium.” It is a statement that will no doubt be subjected to forensic scrutiny.