Ryan Streeter
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She will increasingly be portrayed as a religiously motivated weirdo by an elite press corps. She will continue to defy expectations among pollsters by outflanking supposedly better-equipped candidates.
And she will keep everyone on their toes – and a few candidates on their heels – by her powerful entrance onto the national stage.
Michele Bachmann is important at this point in the campaign for at least these six reasons:
1. Her personal story is proof she’s apolitical, which matters these days. She practically got into politics by accident as a concerned mother and citizen (read Matt Continetti’s full Weekly Standard profile for the story). She was raising foster children and having plenty of her own before running for Congress entered her mind. This gives her big authenticity points among primary voters. Her honest discussion of her miscarriage only added to the authenticity factor, but she already had persuaded primary voters that she was in office for all the right reasons by then.
2. And yet her personal life is a quiet reinforcement of her public life, not a distraction as in Palin’s case. She has carefully used her family background to reinforce her qualifications without making her family an issue or subject itself. The media will try. But so far, her family has been a net positive by keeping the focus on what Bachmann cares about.
3. Her intensity scores are high. She trails only Herman Cain in Gallup’s intensity score, which measures the positive impression people have for candidates whom they recognize. But her name recognition is higher than Cain’s by a significant margin. The Left is freaked out by her, but mainstream conservatives are motivated by her.
4. Her fundraising ability is embarrassing for the likes of Tim Pawlenty. She won’t release her fundraising numbers until July 15, but given her ability to raise cash, she will likely make news. Romney, though notably behind where he was this time in the 2008 election, is still far out front. If Bachmann rises into second place behind Romny in the money category, it will be a big blow to other expected top-tier contenders such as Pawlenty and Huntsman. If her numbers are good, she will raise even more money more rapidly thereafter and give Romney reason to be a bit nervous.
5. The more elites malign her for being apocalyptic, the more the grassroots will rally around her. For instance, John Cassidy’s New Yorker piece on Bachmann chides her for her “Apocalypticism” because she claims the country is in peril (he rolls in an underhanded critique of her having attended Oral Roberts University, conveniently failing to mention she also went to William & Mary). But grassroots voters do think the country is in peril, and the facts are on Bachmann’s side, not Cassidy’s. Elites who criticized Palin upset her supporters because they didn’t like the attack on her. But criticisms of Bachmann have centered more on what she believes, and by attacking that, her critics are attacking her supporters, too.
6. She could alter the Tea Party’s overall foreign policy predilections. Bachmann seems to be carving out a defined space as a hawk on foreign policy in a way that cuts against the more isolationist preferences of Tea Partiers. Because of her Tea Party credibility, this matters a lot. So far, Pawlenty has been the most hawkish on foreign policy among the contenders, but his Tea Party street cred is nothing like Bachmann’s. More than anyone, she could give real weight to a budget-hawk/foreign-policy-hawk partnership in the primary, which would make her highly unique among the candidates.
Her biggest problem remains her lack of experience. Experience sure didn’t matter when Obama was elected, but it will matter more this time around. No one knows at this point whether Michele Bachmann will be a strong contender in three months’ time. But the truth is that she is strong right now…and she’s got the other candidates scrambling as a result.