Posted on 09/18/2011 11:15:14 AM PDT by freespirited
Amid a hard fade in the polls and a struggle to remain in the 2012 spotlight, Michele Bachmann suddenly finds herself back in the headlines for all the wrong reasons — namely, her troubling habit of making misstatements and demonstrably false claims.
It’s a problem, former top staffers for the Minnesota congresswoman told POLITICO, that’s plagued her since she first arrived in Congress in 2007.
Three former senior aides to Bachmann painted a picture of a shoot-from-the-lip member who cavalierly makes assertions without knowing the facts — and would occasionally make them up to suit her needs. The issue was serious enough, according to the accounts of two former staffers in Bachmann’s House office, that when new senior aides arrived to work for her, they were warned: Fact-check everything she says.
“She says stuff without thinking there’s going to be any repercussions,” one aide said. “I think she can get away with that in Congress. I don’t think that you can as president.”
Bachmann’s suggestion this week that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation — widely debunked by the medical community and repudiated by the left and the right — fits the pattern. In an attempt to capitalize on a point she had scored against Texas Gov. Rick Perry in Monday’s debate, the congresswoman sought to advance her argument afterwards with an apparently groundless exaggeration that now threatens her credibility.
And yet Bachmann has refused to back down from her assertion that the Gardasil vaccine is dangerous. “I didn’t make any statements that would indicate that I’m a doctor, I’m a scientist or that I’m making any conclusions about the drug one way or another,” she told reporters in California on Thursday.
One ex-staffer said her penchant for inventing experiences out of whole cloth dates to her very first week in Congress.
It was January 2007, and Bachmann ordered a senior staff member to get her the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — then Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace — on the phone immediately.
The senior staff member told Bachmann that it would likely not be possible for a junior member of Congress to speak with the chairman so easily, and Bachmann did not speak with Pace that week.
But that didn’t stop Bachmann from going on a radio program and telling listeners that she did. “I just spoke with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Bachmann told the radio host, according to a staff member familiar with the conversation.
Soon after, Bachmann found herself in hot water for another false claim.
In a recorded interview with the St. Cloud Times, she said the U.S. had agreed to partition Iraq and turn part of it over to Iran. “They are going to get half of Iraq and that is going to be a terrorist safe haven zone,” she said at the time.
Bachmann’s comments were picked up by the popular Drudge Report website, and she was forced to issue a statement of quasi-apology: “I’m sorry if my words have been misconstrued.”
According to a former staffer who was involved in dealing with the fallout, “It turned out that the whole thing was concocted and made up and she had to apologize — and that was a normal thing.”
The former staffers explained that the congresswoman reads widely but incompletely, leading her to mix things up — when staffers try to correct her, they claimed, she ignores them. As a member of Congress, she wrote her own speeches, leaving staff to fact-check her assertions only after she’d uttered them.
“Some of her gaffes are more the fact that she reads a lot in trying to keep herself up to date but she doesn’t read it carefully enough and it’s hard to get her to correct it,” said Ron Carey, a former chief of staff in Bachmann’s congressional office who later supported Tim Pawlenty’s presidential campaign.
“She uses some of these lines and they get great applause or whatever, [so] she keeps going back to them. She keeps repeating the mistaken information,” Carey said.
An example: In 2010, he and another staffer kept telling Bachmann a statistic she frequently repeated about the national debt — that President Barack Obama had incurred more debt than all the previous presidents combined — wasn’t right; the correct statistic was that Obama was on pace to do so by the end of his first term. But Bachmann kept making the erroneous claim anyway.
Plenty of politicians say things on the campaign trail that aren’t quite true — mixing up numbers, citing misleading statistics, repeating urban legends. But Bachmann appears to be in a class by herself.
Through January 2011, Bachmann held the rare distinction of having had every one of her claims that were evaluated by PolitiFact rated either “False” or “Pants on Fire.” The streak ended at 13 when a Bachmann statement about the stimulus merited a mere “Mostly False.”
It wasn’t until this past June that Bachmann, for the first time, had a claim rated “True” by the nonpartisan website.
“As you’re looking at this race and thinking about it, you should be waiting for her to just come out and say something that’s not true,” one of the staffers said. “Especially when she gets in front of crowds she’s comfortable with and gets going a little bit, she’ll say things.”
The case of the “flying imams” was another memorable Bachmann mix-up. In a 2009 radio interview, she brought up the 2006 case in which six Muslim clerics had been pulled off a plane at the Minneapolis airport for suspicious behavior. “The imams were actually attending Congressman Keith Ellison’s victory celebration, when he won as a member of Congress,” Bachmann said, referring to her liberal Minnesota colleague, a Muslim Democrat.
In fact, the clerics were in Minneapolis for a conference of the North American Imams Federation. Ellison’s electoral victory had been celebrated some weeks earlier: The incident occurred Nov. 20.
Bachmann’s spokesman at the time didn’t even try to claim there was any truth to what she’d said.
Rather, he noted that Ellison had been a speaker at the conference the imams attended. “Whether the six imams were here for a victory party or a conference where he was a featured speaker, it doesn’t change the premise of her comments,” then-spokesman Dave Dziok told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Bachmann’s 2010 reelection opponent, Democrat Tarryl Clark, unsuccessfully sought to make an issue out of Bachmann’s credibility, citing PolitiFact ratings and similar verdicts issued by Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets. But in the crucible of a presidential campaign, Bachmann’s tendency to play fast and loose with the facts may be catching up to her.
Twice in August, the congresswoman was forced to explain statements that appeared to be directly contradicted by fact. Bachmann repeatedly told interviewers the morning of August 14 that she was looking forward to a family reunion that was taking place that afternoon. And that evening, when a reporter asked her why she’d arrived late to the Black Hawk County Republican Party dinner, Bachmann responded, “We had a big family reunion just north of Waterloo.”
But her mother and two cousins told POLITICO afterward that they were at that reunion — and Bachmann did not attend.
Campaign spokeswoman Alice Stewart said that the congresswoman’s statement was not false: “She was meeting with family members at a different location,” at the same time the reunion was going on. But Stewart declined to say who the family members were, where they met or why Bachmann referred to a specific event as if she’d been there.
Around the same time, Bachmann was also forced to explain long-standing questions about her ownership stake in her husband’s family farm. She has listed it as a source of income on her congressional financial disclosures since 2006.
Through 2008, the farm had received more than a quarter-million dollars in federal agricultural subsidies, leading to questions about whether that was incompatible with the congresswoman’s opposition to government handouts. Her staff has claimed that Bachmann wasn’t involved in the decision to seek the subsidies and though she got a share of the profits, she didn’t directly benefit because it was reinvested. Bachmann herself has said she and her husband haven’t received “a penny” from their share of his family’s farm.
Yet when she filed her latest financial disclosure in August, she again listed income from the farm.
Her staffers often fall on their swords, shouldering the blame themselves for Bachmann’s flubs.
“Michele is an extremely intelligent person. On occasion she is given incorrect information and, as a campaign, we do everything we can to make sure she has the most accurate information to work with,” Stewart said.
Bachmann herself, confronted with the litany of falsehoods, tends to shrug them off as inadvertent.
“Well, certainly, when you speak six times a day, slip-ups can occur,” she told reporters after an appearance in South Carolina last month. What voters really care about, she added, was the economy.
The congresswoman also has another tactic: Blame the media. That’s what she did in an interview she gave to a local Christian radio station in the aftermath of the flap over her Iran-Iraq partition claim in 2007.
“It’s an interesting thing. There’s a reason why a lot of politicians don’t say anything or are very unwilling to speak up. Especially if you’re a conservative, you’re just slapped up mercilessly in the press,” she said. “That being said, I have to be extremely careful what I say and how I say it.”
Uh, I disagree. I have 100% confidence that if she is President she will eliminate Obamacare - which is right now the greatest threat to our nation.
Still patiently waiting for critical media coverage of Bachmann’s coffee beverage preferences. Once that happens, we’ll have the perfecta of identical trashing as occurred with Katherine Harris during her 2006 U.S. Senate run.
For now I am switching to Cain to carry the conservative message in the debates. After the debates, if it comes down to Perry vs. Romney, I would have to go with Perry. During the debates I like to support the candidate who can most effectively advance the conservative message. Right now, that appears to be Cain, though Newt is doing a good job as well.
Cain has been my favorite from the get go, but I’ve accepted that his chances of getting the nomination are close to zero. Maybe he could get a cabinet post. I really admire him.
Good points, all. Agree that Newt adds an important and valuable dimension to the GOP debates. He is a senior statesman and his quick wit is unmatched. I hope he remains with the pack of candidates for several more months. The rest of the group can learn a lot from him.
Stick a fork in her.
Unless congress repeals it or the Supreme Court rules it unconstitutional, the Constitution requires that the President faithfully execute the laws, including Obamacare.
We are not electing a dictator, or at least we shouldn't. The only Constitutional method of eliminating Obamacare is for congress to repeal it or the Supreme Court to overturn it.
If Bachmann were to "eliminate" it through some kind of dictatorial executive edict, then she would be a dictator and not the president of a constitutional republic.
Wow - you really called it! It DOES remind me of the trashing of Katherine Harris. All this time, I knew there was something reminiscent about this - the mocking of her eyes, her hair, her makeup; the chronic use of the word “shrill.” Personally, I won’t participate in the destruction of a Conservative woman. No now, not ever.
I have always liked Cain as well, but thought that Bachmann had a better grasp of conservative issues overall. For a while she was the one who I thought was most effectively presenting the conservative cause. In her desperation to regain support lost to Perry, she is getting off message and coming off as shrill. Cain has kept his cool and remained on message, while his overall knowledge of the issues seems to have increased with each debate. If he does not get a cabinet post, he could certainly leverage the support he got during the election to some kind of effort to continue advancing the conservative message.
That's Newt. He has been on fire.
As Rush said last week about Newt, "think what could have been" if he hadn't lost control of his mouth and made so many bad decisions so many years ago.
Neither will I, but I also won't cover for a Conservative woman who is self destructing. If Bachmann lied about the crying woman who approached her, that on top of everything else will do it for me.
Bachmann’s ability to dissemble reminds me — and has, for some time — of a close family member.
This relative simply does not recognize the line between truth and fabrication. She tells stories about things that never happened, shades the truth to make herself look good, outright lies when it suits her.
And you sure ‘nuf better not challenge her. She absolutely does not see herself as dishonest. Once she tells a story or tells a fib, it is truth to her.
To casual friends, she’s a lovely, vivacious and successful lady, lots of fun to be around.
But those of us closest to her know just to enjoy the moment, because she’s simply not to be trusted.
It’s sad. And Bachmann’s demeanor has reminded me of her since she first got into the race.
funny how some people thought of her as the smarter gaffe-free version of Palin.
If she’s self-destructing, why don’t you leave her alone?
I’m surprised no one has mentioned how much alike Harris and Bachmann look. They could be sisters.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.