Posted on 06/28/2011 10:53:59 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
RAYMOND N.H. — New GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann charmed a backyard of Granite State voters yesterday with her trademark straight talk but bristled at comparisons to fellow Tea Party star Sarah Palin, telling the Herald she’s got a style all her own.
“We both have unique skill sets. I have great respect and admiration for Gov. Palin, I consider her a friend, but I have a unique skill set that I bring to the table,” said Bachmann, 55, after announcing her presidential campaign to New Hampshire voters yesterday morning.
Andy Schwargler, 45, of Orford, N.H., drove more than an hour to see Bachmann, saying he appreciates her down-to-earth style.
“I like the fact that she speaks her mind. I don’t get the feeling that everything coming out of her mouth is a political calculation,” he said.
Granite State political observers said in yesterday’s Herald that former Palin backers are warming up to the Minnesota congresswoman, a claim that Bachmann supported during a wide-ranging interview with the Herald.
“We’ve made multiple trips here to New Hampshire and the momentum is only growing and building and exploding — and people that we have talked to have called up and said they want to leave the candidate they thought they were going to support and support me,” Bachmann said.
Both Bachmann and Palin are anti-abortion Tea Party favorites known for their independent streaks and challenging business as usual in Washington, D.C. Both also have a blunt, tell-it-like-it-is speaking style that resonates with voters.
Bachmann said that while she’d like Palin’s endorsement, she won’t be reaching out to her.
“I would love to have Gov. Palin’s support in this effort. I don’t have her cell phone number so I don’t know how to get in touch with her, but I wish her well,” Bachmann said. She added, “The field is wide open . . . people can come into the race, but I also know that people have resonated with my message.”
Bachmann dismissed claims that her high-profile gaffes have undercut her campaign’s credibility. She said Monday that movie legend John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa, when it was actually serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
“Those are the small issues that quite honestly no one cares about, because everywhere I go people are concerned about the economy,” Bachmann said.
Exhibiting her feisty no-nonsense style, Bachmann told the amped-up New Hampshire crowd that she’d run the White House with a “titanium spine” while touting her economic know-how and her ability to load a shotgun and speak on the fly.
“President Bachmann will be banning the teleprompter from the White House,” she said in a dig at President Obama. “The American people have had enough. They’ve had it up to here. . . . President Obama, you are a one-term president.”
If so, if her spine really is titanium... then will you support her in the general?
She isn’t going to get to the general. I don’t think she will make it to Iowa.
Until and unless palin gets in - we need to defeat romney. He is the worst of the worst. I would take anyone over romney, including rp, gary johnson, etc.
The palin or nothing crowd is going to ensure a romney win if they keep trashing the only one now in the race who can take him out.
Shaking head in disbelief...
The palin flash mob prefers obama for a second term over bachmann winning.
I’m NH born and bred — the Concord thing hit me close to home and MB has been on probation since then. Talk about how people “resonate with [her] message” definitely violates the terms of her probation, and it’s not the first violation.
I don’t see any cult or blind adoration of anyone around here.
What I do see is respect, admiration and appreciation for someone with morals and impeccable character, things that you rarely see in politicians these days. I see someone with an impeccable record who has been unfairly and undeservedly beaten up by the media, so much so that they’ve twisted her into some sort of monster , in some peoples eyes , when it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s sickening enough to see this done by liberals in the
MSM and on the internet, but it’s downright disgusting to come here at the most conservative site on the internet and have to read it here.
That’s why we defend her here.We’ll defend her anywhere. There’s no cult. We believe in her and trust
her. She fights for us, we fight for her.
When Palin officially gets in the race, a vote for Bachmann becomes a vote for Romney, which is a vote for four more years of Øbama.The real contenders are Romney and Palin. It is a fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party and the heart and soul of America. I can assure Mrs Bachmann that the only former Palin backers that might be supporting her are people who don’t think Sarah will run or people who do not understand how back room politics work and have no idea what a stalking horse is.
Putting up Bachmann as a good alternative appears to me to be more and more of a cult of personality than Palin ever had. Michele (and Rollins) is now saying she's getting Palin supporters? Just another gaffe in a week full of gaffes.
Do you expect the people on FR to fall all over themselves for a candidate who has run nothing, accomplished nothing, and has no substance? No executive experience (congresscritter), no legislative accomplishments, no life experience that would prepare her for the presidency. I mean, what could go wrong with a candidate who gaffes almost every day and has that kind of resume?
Worth a chuckle. Thanks for that.
Dude ya’ll are getting downright catty with your hate for Bachmann, Anybody can spout out lame stream media notations.As Bachmann put it she is her own self and she highly complimented your goddess.<-—put the kool down you’re drunk on it! And what part of Palin has no chance of gaining indy voters don’t ya’ll get? Bachmann may not either but she has a far cry better chance than Palin.Bachmann is actually ahhhhh.... running she gained traction. Palin is not Reagan reincarnated in high heels she has no independence support.If she would actually run she could gain traction but she is playing games.
How did Phil Crane hurt Reagan? As I recall, Reagan went on to win the general election rather handily.
The similarity to Crane could be that Bachmann is advancing a conservative agenda until such time as Palin enters the race, same as Crane did (at a time when conservative was not cool) and Reagan was delaiyng entering the race.
Thank God for that. That is the goal we need focused on.In FastandFuriousGate alone we got a whistle blower on Obama and the admin getting fired. Obama needs stopped folks!
No, it is my opinion that we ended up with McCain because conservatives were never able to recruit and run a conservative that everybody would support. Most of the conservatives running turned out to be boring so nobody would give them the time of day since they couldn’t win (like Duncan Hunter), and everybody chose a different candidate and then trash-talked all the others.
Remember Tancredo, Brownback, Gilmore? All could be considered conservative candidates of differing types, all were in the race, and none gained any traction.
And when we weren’t all clinging to our preferred candidate, we were all pining for someone new to get into the race, mostly Fred Thompson although there were those wistfully talking of others, including Alan Keyes.
I was one of those pushing for Thompson. And when he got in, he got trashed as well, although he also in my opinion turned out to be not a very good campaigner, and was just too late to get traction.
Meanwhile, McCain’s poll numbers had fallen through a hole, and he was written off. But (or maybe because of that), he was able to win in New Hampshire and get the “comeback” meme. Heck, some freepers actually supported him in New Hampshire, because they wanted to stop Romney and assumed McCain was still a dead candidate.
By the time it was clear McCain had the momentum, the only candidates left were Giuliani, Huckabee, and Romney. You know who I picked of those three. Rush was actually pushing Giuliani and Romney, anything to stop McCain. Other talk show hosts were pushing Romney, or Huckabee, again mostly because anything was better than McCain.
I do understand that others have a different opinion of how we ended up where we did. Heck, in part our problem was we never had a good, well-liked, truly conservative candidate to rally around. That’s why conservative polling kept splitting the vote between Thompson, Huckabee, and Romney, with conservatives in each camp spending most of their time telling the others all the bad things that made the other candidates unacceptable.
I see that happening in this election, only the “McCain” of this one could end up being Romney. We’ve got at least two candidates in the wings that are being promoted, Perry and Palin. We’ve got several conservatives in the race, in my opinion better than the conservative choices in 2008; they each have supporters, but are also taking big hits here by people supporting other candidates, or other unannounced candidates.
I don’t think it’s too late yet. Also, I’m not saying Free Republic is the best barometer for conservative opinion when it comes to these major elections. But I’ll feel a lot better if, by september, there’s a candidate IN the race who gets mostly positive comments here. If we haven’t coalesced around a candidate (or candidates, if they are both acceptable), I think it’s going to get rough.
Romney has no real shot at the nomination. He was a tough call in 2008 when his campaign platform was almost pure conservative (even if he wasn’t), and he didn’t have Obamacare hanging around his neck, and wasn’t pandering to the left-wing of the republican party with comments like his stupid “I can work with Democrats” meme. Like I said, he’s looking like the McCain of 2012.
But he has a 50-state campaign organization, and a ton of money, and lots of friends who will give him a ton more money. He’s got the ‘next in line’ thing, and the establishment “we trust him more than those tea-party types” vote. None of those groups can win the majority; but remember McCain took over the nomination process while winning 30-40% of the votes. He didn’t start breaking 50% until he was the de-facto winner.
I see done to Michelle what I saw done to Romney 4 years ago. But Michelle isn’t a former supporter of abortion who gave money to Planned Parenthood and buddied up with Ted Kennedy. She didn’t just come around to her conservative positions in the last decade.
I’m not a fan of Michelle. I see her errors as a big deal, because as a conservative the media will pounce on every minor mistake she makes, and she seems to make a lot of minor mistakes. I’d support Palin over Bachmann, if I had the choice.
But Bachmann is in this race to win it, and it bothers me to see her torn down so, by the same folks who praised her as the tea party advocate in congress (she did give the “tea party” response to the SOTU, after all, and I remember people here defending her strongly against the attacks that she was stepping on the GOP response).
How do you know she isn’t getting Palin supporters? It’s a pretty natural fit; Palin had said many good things about Bachmann, and Bachmann about Palin. Bachmann was a darling of the tea party, and gets high marks from all three legs of conservatism.
Palin isn’t in the race yet, and if she isn’t, her supporters have to vote for one of the candidates that are, and Bachmann is certainly in the top three of the announced candidates to get that support.
I know some Palin supporters here are upset with her about the Rollins thing, although there’s been no indication yet that Palin herself was upset, or has asked anybody to attack Bachmann like her supporters here are doing. So while people here may not think Palin supporters would support Bachmann, unless you have a poll or something that shows she’s wrong, your assertion is simple speculation on your part.
She has tripled her support in the polls — those votes came from somewhere, and given Palin still isn’t in the race, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that she has a lot of Palin supporters (which means if Palin enters, Bachmann’s poll numbers would drop back down).
this is the most corrupt, divisive and incompetent administration ever, and it has to go.
That said, Bachmann has no potential to be anything but an obstacle to conservative success. She can't win the nomination. Her candidacy will either be entirely futile or a boon to Mitt Romney. Her supporters can wrap themselves up in the security blanket of a few early polls that reflect the ludicrous media puffery that followed Bachmann’s adequate performance in the first debate. She's going nowhere.
The media has just been fattening her for Mitt's ritual slaughter and as part of an effort to scare Sarah Palin out of the race. Either a serious candidate will emerge to Romney's right (where there is a lot of room) or Bachmann will occupy that space alone. If someone else enters the race Bachmann will quickly find herself restored to also-ran status. She just isn't particularly good at being “not Romney.” If the field remains as it is, Romney will crush her, early and often.
That's reality. There is nobody here who wouldn't prefer MB to both Romney and Obama. There are a lot of us who believe that Bachmann is only making an Obama v. Romney match more likely.
I’m not aiming this at you, 2ndDiv, but you’re atop the thread, so please don’t take offence.
I’m a real Sarahbot, Palinista or whatever the PDS’ers want to call us, and I’ve noticed a lot of anti-Bachmann venom over the past few days and it bothers me. Nothing wrong with spirited debate, but it’s approaching the name calling level of the PDS’ers on FR and I hate to see our side descending to that - assuming it’s not merely a bunch of new trolls.
Just my two Canadian cents (about 2.2 cents U.S. these days, though you’d never know it when you convert funds up here, LOL!).
Cheers - and keep up the good work with the Sarah threads, 2ndDiv.
Jim
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