Checking In With Michele Bachmann

God love Michele Bachman. (I am sure she never doubts it.) She is the Minnesota congresswoman who damn-near explicitly accused her fellow Congressional members (starting with Obama) of traitorous behavior during the 2008 presidential campaign. A tax attorney who obtained her law degree from Oral Roberts’ now-defunct law school, Bachmann is an evangelical Christian who was long deeply involved in the prolife movement and had a stint many moons ago as a local rabblerouser, petitioning her local school board to teach intelligent design. Of course, she denied or sought to downplay her ID connections when she first ran for Congress. All of this information is available on Bachmann’s quite lengthy Wiki page.

Let’s see what this lady crusader for true American values has been up to lately. From Salon‘s “War Room,” we learn Bachmann spent time with Bill Bennett on his radio show earlier this month, lamenting radicalism’s infiltration of government from all directions. According to Bachmann, we are taking the “final leap to socialism.” Shriek! Sob! Traitors everywhere! We’ve covered socialism before. Here is a spot-on, decades-old observation from Upton Sinclair:

The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to ‘End Poverty in California’ I got 879,000.

More recently, Bachmann’s been in a little rhetorical trouble. She adamantly denied taking earmarks, which, necessarily, proved false. In fact she accepted “$3.8 million in earmarks that went to her Twin Cities suburban district last year.” With a population of about 615,000, Bachmann’s per capita earmark spending amounts to just over six dollars. Granted, six dollars per person isn’t much, but it IS six dollars more than zero.

About next week’s visit by V.P. Biden to St. Cloud’s New Flyer Bus plant, a growing business in Bachmann’s district, the Congresswoman’s flacks said:

We’re more than happy to have the vice president come to town. … We hope he gets a chance to speak with everyday St. Cloud residents, who will share with him the same thing the congresswoman has been saying: ‘Stop spending our money.’

Are Bachmann’s constituents saying, “Stop spending our money.”? If the 6th District is representative of Minnesota, the answer is, “No.” According to a recent Rasmussen poll (published on March 6), 62% of voters in the state approve of Obama’s job performance, with 47% strongly approving. A majority of voters (53%) approve of the way Obama is handling the economy, assessing the president as “good” or “excellent” on this front. Only 30% of voters believe Obama’s handling of the economy has been poor. Not surprising with attitudinal measures, there is the odd result: 51% of voters “think it is likely the [stimulus] plan will make things worse instead of better,” at the same time, a whopping 67% believe their governor (Tim Pawlenty) should accept all of the stimulus monies due their state.

It’s difficult to know exactly what zeitgeist Bachmann believes she has captured, but not knowing is half the fun of following her antics. The other half comes from witnessing glory in action, so because it is one of my favorite clips …