Michele Bachmann has dropped out of the Republican presidential race after a poor result in Iowa. Votes were cast. They were counted. Bachmann did not get enough of them. Pure and simple, right? Well, yes and no. The method of casting votes in the Iowa Caucuses is indeed simple; and I have no reason to doubt the purity of the vote-counters. It was the process leading up to January 3rd that left some room for quibbling in the purity and simplicity departments. Indeed, the impurity in the process was precisely its lack of simplicity. In other words, the process was rigged with enough details to hide even a pretty chubby devil. Before moving on with the remainder of the nominating race, it behooves us to take a moment to poke around in those details until we expose at least the point of this devil's tail.
Did Bachmann make mistakes? Of course she did. She allowed the early stages of her campaign to be marred by her Republican strategists, thus playing away from her strength as an anti-Establishment candidate with a strong record of standing against business as usual in Washington. She also put too much effort into courting a relationship with Donald Trump, the self-aggrandizing clown of this process, who became a major distraction at the moment when Bachmann was building early support. The last thing Bachmann needed was the appearance of allying herself with the stupid man's Newt Gingrich. This error in judgment came back to haunt Bachmann, as Trump lashed out at her in particular for refusing to participate in his publicity stunt debate at the end of December. She also made a few gaffes, as all politicians do--but hers were blown up into the status of monumental inanities by a media and Establishment apparatus looking for ways to belittle a genuine conservative.
Yes, she made mistakes. As the Romney and Gingrich apologists are so fond of saying, there is no perfect candidate. But as some of us have repeatedly replied, the lack of perfection in any option is no argument for making the most imperfect choice. In politics, as in most human endeavors, one is looking for the least imperfect of all the flawed alternatives. In this writer's view, that was Michele Bachmann.
As I have previously explained some aspects of the systematic marginalization of Bachmann, and the surgical vivisection of her campaign by the Republican Establishment (
here and
here, for example), I will not go through all those ugly details again. What's done is done--which is not to say that Tea Party conservatives ought to forgive and forget, but rather that they must accept and move on, while always remembering what happened, lest they underestimate the difficulty of the road ahead.
A brief summary of the key landmarks on the way to the eve of the Iowa Caucuses will suffice as a preface for the sad final moments of this bleak chapter in the history of modern American conservatism. Bachmann had won three Congressional elections, and served in that body for more than four years, prior to beginning her run for President. She had been a vocal supporter and leader of the Tea Party movement, a powerful, if sometimes lonely, fighter against health care "reform," financial "reform," debt ceiling "reform," and various other "reforms" whereby the Washington elite in both parties raced towards the complete destruction of the U.S. economy and the end of individual liberty as a definitive American achievement. She was passed over for a leadership position in the new Republican Congressional majority, in spite of having been as closely associated as anyone with the movement that single-handedly made that majority possible. Her treatment within the Boehner majority was as clear a sign as any of how far the Republican Establishment was prepared to go to accommodate their Tea Party benefactors--that is to say, a few yards in rhetoric, and not one inch in practice.
During the summer, while it was clear that Romney was the party man, Bachmann looked poised to challenge from the conservative side. Then came the media assault on her intelligence ("gaffes"), her integrity ("HPV"), and even her sanity (George Will's claim that she could not be trusted with the nuclear button).
And of course there was Tim Pawlenty's suggestion that her susceptibility to migraine headaches made her unfit for the Presidency, which, while not becoming a major issue in its own right, was certainly a hint of one of Bachmann's underlying problems: being female. Bachmann, who is younger than all but one of the eight candidates who remained in the campaign as of September, is the only one who was accused of being unfit for the job on health grounds--due, not to any cancer, heart problem, or other potentially life-threatening ailment, but to headaches. In other words, in her case alone, it was judged acceptable to accuse a candidate of lacking the physical capacity to handle the Presidency. Does she look unhealthy to you? So why was she alone open to such an attack? For the same reason she alone was open to the accusation of being shrill. In December, she was still being forced to defend herself against dismissive and disrespectful criticism from at least one opponent by reminding him that she was "a serious candidate for President." Why was her seriousness still in need of defense by that point?
During the final weeks of her candidacy, the so-called "new" media (quickly becoming the same as the old media) was ignoring her almost entirely, while tirelessly working, through endless headlines about polls and "surges," to create the myth of momentum for Gingrich, Romney, and Paul. (Although in Paul's case, the effort was to create a frightening spectre to scare people over to Romney and Gingrich, who were being pushed as the "anything-but-Paul" candidates.) If she was mentioned at all on The Drudge Report, for example, it was to note some defection from her campaign.
Then, in the final days, came the Santorum surge, pushed hard by the Establishment conservative media that had previously put so much of its energy into the now-flailing Gingrich campaign. As the Gingrich strategy had been an effort to curtail a genuine conservative insurgency within the party by propping up a fake conservative alternative (based on the "great debater" fantasy), so the mainstreamers were at last seeking to prop up Santorum in Newt's place. In other words, finding it too difficult to make that Tea Party label stick on the slippery Gingrich, the power brokers turned to Plan B: find someone who might pass inspection as a real conservative, but someone who is unlikely to be able to attract the kind of committed, energetic support that can hold off the Establishment avalanche that is rolling behind Romney.
For the short term--which was all that was necessary or desirable, in the party's eyes--Plan B worked. The Santorum "surge," partly manufactured through a Rasmussen poll in combination with a feverish news cycle of Santorum buzz (as I described
here), worked because it was timed well, and because Iowa conservatives were looking for a viable option to defeat Romney, where viable meant "within range this late in the race."
The final sting from the Establishment scorpion came on January 2
nd, the last day before Iowa. Drudge's above the logo headline early that day was "Photo Finish," featuring pictures of Romney, Santorum and Paul. Later in the afternoon, it was "The Anti-Romney?" above a photo of Santorum. And then, through the evening hours, it was "Rupert Twitters Rick!" The single most powerful man in the so-called "conservative media" had, in effect, endorsed Santorum--his prerogative, of course, but, as would be expected of a media genius, a simple endorsement back in November would not have sufficed. (Nor, in all likelihood, would it have crossed Murdoch's mind to bother with Santorum in November, as the media strategy was focused elsewhere at that time.) No, it had to be the tweet heard round the world (with an assist from Drudge), within hours of the Iowa Caucuses. That is to say, simply telling people what he thought was not the point. The point was to have maximum effect on the outcome, by boosting the sense of "momentum" and "anointment" around the Santorum campaign. Fair and balanced, indeed.
The second biggest photo on The Drudge Report during that final evening before Iowa was a picture of Bachmann, above one of the very few headlines she was given on the site in the final weeks of her campaign. The headline: "Palin on Michele Bachmann: It's Not Her Time..."
And here we arrive at one of the thorniest issues of this presidential campaign season, one that was, until a few days ago, a true unmentionable. (Rush Limbaugh mentioned it, albeit briefly.) Just as Murdoch wanted to give Santorum a last minute spike with his tweet, so Palin could not resist the urge to give a starting gun tug on the back of Bachmann's jersey, to help ensure her defeat.
"And as for Michele Bachmann," Palin said, "she has a lot to offer also, but I don't think it's her time this go around, and I believe that unless she, too, wants to spend her own money, or start borrowing money, and perhaps go into debt, which--heaven forbid, you know, you do that to your family--perhaps she is one, too, who would start saying, 'Hey, supporters of mine, why don't we coalesce around one of the other candidates, and let's move together as a team to get that right primary candidate chosen.'"
Of course, before any votes had been cast anywhere, Bachmann was within her rights to feel that she herself was "that right primary candidate." Why should she have been feeling anything else, except, of course, for that excruciating pain of--no, not a headache, but rather a knife lodged firmly in her back?
One of the unfortunate facts of the Bachmann campaign is that she was forced to wage it in the shadow of Sarah Palin. The reason for this is obvious. They are both conservative women with strong Tea Party support, and the mentality and style of anti-Establishment outsiders. The entire description in that last sentence ought to have made them spiritual allies, apart from one key word: "women."
As the two most prominent conservative women, and the only two viewed as potential leaders of the Republican Party, they are rivals in a manner far more personal than is true for any two male competitors. From Bachmann's perspective, campaigning in Palin World was like running in deep sand. She continually had to prove that she was not the poor man's Sarah. For Palin, on the other hand, once she decided not to run for President in 2012, this campaign season became largely about protecting her turf for a possible future run. And that, sad to say, meant preventing Bachmann from stealing her thunder. A Bachmann nomination would have made her the toast of American conservatives, thereby completely extricating her from Palin's shadow forever, while perhaps even putting Palin in exactly the opposite position. This would not be true between two conservative men, but the sheer scarcity of women in this position causes them to be judged partly in relation to one another--always, though unnecessarily, to the detriment of one or the other of them.
Thus, while Ronald Reagan, who was not running for anything, campaigned for another anti-Establishment conservative, Barry Goldwater, Palin, who chose not to run, has thus far abstained from getting her hands dirty on anyone else's behalf. It is interesting, though futile in the end, to speculate on how things might have been different had she done so.
This speculation is all the more pertinent, in my view, in that Palin's strength is precisely in campaigning for the conservative vote. That is to say, she is great at rallying the troops. She is not, on the other hand, at her best when it comes to delineating and expressing fundamental principles. This is not to say that she does not have genuinely conservative beliefs, but merely that she does not make the moral case for constitutionalism in a way that is likely to win over open-minded non-constitutionalists. Bachmann, on the other hand, does make that strong moral case, the case that is the one road available to Americans who wish to save their country from ruin.
For all the Palin-Reagan comparisons, those two are in fact very different in their capacities. Reagan could articulate his basic political vision and principles with great clarity, and genuine statesmanlike depth. Palin is wonderful at preaching to the converted. She will get out the vote. Reagan could win new voters. Bachmann's appeal is more akin to Reagan's--if not distorted by bad advisers, a dishonest media, and, most importantly, a Republican Establishment that wanted nothing more than to bury her serious constitutionalist campaign before it could gain steam.
As I have explained recently, and as should be obvious to anyone with com mon sense, an establishment is, by definition, unwelcoming of anyone who is anti-establishmentarian. If the establishment in question is a fortress of decency, integrity, and good faith, then this natural defensiveness is a valuable instinct. If the establishment in question is the very opposite of such a fortress, as is the case with today's Washington Republican Establishment (including its media appendages), then anti-establishmentarianism is exactly the trait you ought to be looking for, and hoping to foster. Palin ought to have supported Bachmann, not undermined her.
Whom did the Republican Establishment most want to destroy? That is the person they feared most. And for that very reason, this person should have been considered a true friend to America and Americans. She was, and is.
