I'm still not feeling as if she believes she can deliver like she says. It's not just her but this topic is about Bachmann.
I'm less concerned about gaffes (John Wayne) than I am with how tightly scripted she is and the bizarre controversy or statements about the father-on-law's old farm. The press isn't helping sort that and she's said things that contradict the disclosure statements she filed as a congresswoman.
At this point, I don't see her as my great hope for a Romney alternative.
I find a few others warmer, more self-assured, more passionate and less rote or like legalistic parsers.
Tennessean4Bush wrote: “In the spirit of John Wayne Gacy, I presume?”
I don't know enough about Bachmann yet to have strong opinions. What I know I generally like, but I have the same concerns about her that I do about many of the good conservative candidates, including Sarah Palin — they say the right things, their track record shows they've been hurt for taking strongly conservative stands so they obviously believe what they say, and that's a huge advantage over Mitt Romney, but there's a lack of experience showing they can effectively implement their conservative ideals.
However, while the John Wayne Gacy situation is minor by itself, it showed a major problem, and it shows more than just a lack of ability to handle the media.
True, there is an issue of “handling the media.” If she were a candidate for the county commission or a city council, I'd jump all over her for something like that. You just don't talk that way when you're running for president, **ESPECIALLY** when you are trying to claim Waterloo, Iowa, as your hometown!!!! Surely she knows that.
Now why is this important?
First, with this one dumb statement, the biggest thing she did was draw the attention of Iowans to the fact that she didn't do enough research about her claimed hometown to get her facts right. Yes, it is absolutely true that rural voters appreciate having a connection to a candidate, but rural states also don't like people perceived as “carpetbaggers” who claim local ties that don't exist. Waterloo is a fairly sizable community by Iowa standards, but this took the focus off Bachmann’s message and that should not have been allowed to happen.
Second, I might be able to forgive a stupid comment like this coming from a candidate for county commission or the state legislature. Unless they're businessmen who have mobilized their employees to work on their campaigns, local and state-level candidates in a rural state like Iowa don't have staffs to check facts. But in this case, one of three things happened: either Bachmann made an incredibly stupid unplanned ad lib (any idea why Obama uses teleprompters?) or a staff member failed to effectively fact-check her speech before she got on the podium or Bachmann failed to double-check the work of her staff. All of those answers would be really bad answers for a mistake in a small speech to a Rotary club somewhere that got videotaped by media, but in a CAMPAIGN ANNOUNCEMENT SPEECH????? This is so bad that I would not have believed it if I had not seen it with my own eyes. I hope a staff member gets fired or severely disciplined if they're responsible (but done out of public view, because the “buck stops here” with the candidate) or Bachmann sits down with her staff and says, “I screwed up big time, this is my fault, and I need your help to fact-check my stuff so this never, ever happens again.”
Third, I haven't been paying much attention until now to the arguments that Palin has been tried and tested by the media, dragged through the fire, and there's nothing else to dig up about her — but after this gaffe by Bachmann, I think there may actually be something to that argument. People now expect Sarah Palin to make occasional misspeaks. Her supporters don't care. Her opponents don't get any more traction my making those attacks; everybody knows that Palin is not a Rhodes Scholar, but neither was George W. Bush. To some extent, the electorate has been inoculated against gaffes made by Palin by listening to the attacks on her since 2008.
That brings up the fourth point: Palin was trained as a television sportscaster, but for most of her adult life her vocation has been being a mother, the wife of an oilworker and fisherman, and a community activist whose activism led her into politics. The expectations are lower than they will be for a lawyer, who has at least four years of college and three years of law school teaching her how to think on her feet and defend her positions in public.
If Bachmann, with her legal training and political experience, does stuff like this in her announcement speech, for crying out loud, what else are reporters and her Republican opponents going to dig up that she has said on C-Span or entered into the Congressional Record?
In my community, I have to deal with two community message boards, one of which has a small group of people who jump all over me when I make the tiniest mistake in an article — and that's legitimate. Reporting is what I do for a living, and I should be held to a higher standard. Likewise, a lawyer can and should be held to a higher standard, and so far Bachmann is not showing herself able to meet that standard very well.
Mistakes happen. We'll see how she does in a few weeks or months and whether this was a really unfortunate gaffe or part of a pattern of problems.