Bachmann is crazy like a fox

Some pundits and observers of the political landscape believe Michele Bachmann is crazy. She is not.

The Republican congresswoman from Minnesota and former presidential candidate got herself into yet another stew of controversy last week (she’s good at that) by insinuating government officials and high-placed employees who happen to be Muslims have connections to terrorist groups. She suggested with all the subtleness that is her style that even Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., who happens to be a Muslim, has associations and family members who might be tied to organizations linked to terrorism, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

While there is no credible evidence to support Bachmann’s allegations, that factor has not stopped her before. She has a base of support, primarily from the tea parties and tea party types; playing to them is her stock in trade. She is very good at it. However, her base is narrow — so much so that Republican leadership in the U.S. House (where she is chairwoman of the Tea Party Caucus) clamored to distance themselves from her remarks. Even Republican luminaries such as Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the party’s presidential candidate in 2008, had less-than-flattering things to say about Bachmann and her apparent Islamophobia.

Undeterred, Bachmann let her tea party pals and the regular cast of talk-radio bloviators take up the rant. In classic paranoid fashion, the tea party set morphed criticism of her comments into an attempt by mainline Republican leaders to get rid of conservatives of tea party ilk. One tea party mouthpiece said:

“Now, however, it appears that the Tea Party poses a bigger threat to the GOP than any possible security threats brought up by Michele.”

They might be on to something. Their belief in a Republican conspiracy against the tea party might not be paranoid at all. Indeed, Bachmann has always found a way of ginning up support (often using fear tactics) among members of her natural base. Her Joe McCarthy-like remarks about Muslims in government fit the script she wrote long before she ran for the Republican presidential nomination. But the record shows that once Republican primary voters began to understand what Bachmann was all about, her campaign deflated.

Is she crazy? Not at all. She’s a calculating, clever, media-savvy politician who really believes the stuff she says. What is crazy is that the tea party, which sometimes has cogent and important things to say, would hitch its wagon to Bachmann’s sideshow.

Tags: opinion, editorials, politics