AMERICA: ON CAPITOL Hill, speaker of the House John Boehner was pleading with, threatening and cajoling recalcitrant Tea Partiers in the hope of saving his plan to shaft US president Barack Obama while pulling the US back from the brink of default.
Scarcely a mile away, the founder of the Tea Party caucus, representative Michele Bachmann, glided into the ballroom of the National Press Club. She evaded a question about the possible end of Boehner’s career, even adopted his rhetoric against Obama.
But as the debt ceiling crisis hurtled out of control, this willowy woman in an ivory silk suit and single strand of pearls epitomised the shambles in the Republican Party.
“The American people are looking for someone who will say ‘No’,” Bachmann said. “I will be that person . . . I won’t raise taxes. I will reduce spending. I won’t vote to raise the debt ceiling. And I have the titanium spine to see it through.”
Bachmann has, at least temporarily, supplanted Sarah Palin as the passionara of the conservative movement.
Since she announced her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination last month in New Hampshire, she has managed to avoid gaffes. After ridiculing her for years, journalists, like those who crowded into the press club to hear her on Thursday, are showing respect.
Most opinion polls place Bachmann second, after former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in the race for the nomination. There is talk of making Bachmann the vice- presidential nominee, although her position on the far right makes her unacceptable to many.
Evangelical Christianity is an integral part of Bachmann’s persona. “I am Christian and I am proud of my faith,” she said.
“As president of the United States, I will be praying every day. I will be praying for each and every one of you.”
If Obama used a clause in the 14th amendment to unilaterally end the debt ceiling crisis, he would be a “dictator”, Bachmann warned. She has in the past called the president “anti-American” and accused him of running a “gangster government”.
“We will maintain the full faith and credit of the US,” Bachmann claimed repeatedly, without saying how. “I call on President Obama to pay our debt . . . He should take default off the table. The president is using scare tactics against veterans and senior citizens to get his way.”
As a student, Bachmann was a Democrat who campaigned for Jimmy Carter, “but when I saw the direction he took the country, how he grew government and decreased our standing in the world, I became a Republican” .
Thanks to Ronald Reagan, she saw the light. “Government doesn’t solve problems, it subsidises them.”
The little people of America, factory workers and housewives, tell her, “Michele, stand strong. Michele, don’t cave,” Bachmann recounted. “The American people are scared to death they have lived through the pinnacle of American greatness, that we may be in decline.”
Bachmann’s career is filled with contradiction. A scourge of taxation, she was a tax collector for the Internal Revenue Service until the fourth of her five children was born. She and her husband also fostered 23 teenage girls with eating disorders, for which they were paid by the state of Minnesota.
For a politician who abhors big government, Bachmann’s acceptance of government assistance seems surprising. She and her husband Marcus, a clinical psychologist, received $30,000 (€20,841) in federal and state funds for their Christian counselling practice. Her father- in-law’s farm, from which she claimed income, received $260,000 in federal subsidies.
Her son Harrison joined Teach for America, part of the AmeriCorps programme, which Bachmann once denounced as “re-education camps for young people”.
The Washington Postreported this week that Bachmann and her family received loans subsidised by government mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – which she wants to see dismantled. "It's almost impossible to buy a home in this country today without the federal government being involved," she shrugged.
Bachmann refused to comment on reports that her husband’s clinic practises “conversion therapy” to “cure” homosexuals through prayer. “I’m running for the presidency of the US. My husband is not running for the presidency,” she said.
The aura of a Republican presidential candidate seems to have dulled awareness of Bachmann’s policies. She wants to ban same-sex marriage and expand the nuclear power industry and offshore drilling. Global warming is a hoax, since carbon dioxide is “a natural byproduct of nature”, she has said.
Bachmann is the author of draft legislation to reverse healthcare and financial regulatory reform and to stop the move towards more efficient light bulbs. If Congress would only eliminate the federal minimum wage, it “would virtually wipe out unemployment”.
The US “has to keep faith” with current social security and Medicare beneficiaries, then “wean everybody else off”.
Now, through the debt ceiling crisis they created, Bachmann and her Tea Party cohorts have the US where they want it: by its economic throat.
