FRIDAY, JUNE 4, 2010
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Rep. Bachmann: Doth the lady protest too much?
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its young participants. Dead silence came over the telephone
line. After a while, it was time for the main- stream media’s next question. “Are you there, congresswoman?” The silence lengthened. “Are you there, congresswoman?”
The ‘Hardball’ moment
Bachmann’s fans know her largely through tapes of her speeches and her frequent appearances on talk radio and television, where the well-dressed 53- year-old enjoys the star status reserved for unpredictable mavericks who deliver arresting sound bites. Her quotable highlights span the spec- trum of her worries and suspicions. She has asserted that Obama has secret plans to force anyone making more than $65,000 to pay the highest tax rate. She has derided the U.S. census as part of a White House scheme intended to guar- antee indefinite congressional control to Democrats — and suggested that census data could be utilized to “get” Amer- icans. She has invoked World War II, tell- ing the interested that the government “used the U.S. census information to round up the Japanese [Americans] and put them in the internment camps.” She has stirred the faithful in a way
that has captured the attention of party elites around the country. The full meas- ure of her stature revealed itself in April, when she appeared at a roaring Minne- apolis rally alongside another telegenic lightning rod to whom she is increasing- ly compared, former Alaska governor Sa- rah Palin, who praised Bachmann for the ferocity with which she attacked the agendas of her political foes. “Michele doesn’t say no,” Palin said. “Michele says h-e-l-l no.” Afterward, Palin joined her for a fundraising dinner that packed in 800 supporters at $500 a plate. If there is a common thread to Bach-
mann’s pronouncements, it is that, other than when issuing a press release, she makes no major pronouncement to any- one outside a favored corps of conserva- tive television and radio talk-show hosts. Access to her became limited in 2008, af- ter her appearance on Chris Matthews’s MSNBC show, “Hardball.” Expressing worries to Matthews that then-candi- date Obama might have “un-American” sentiments, she suffered a backlash that made her reelection race alarmingly tight.
Although she appears occasionally on
CNN’s “Larry King Live,” these days she sticks closest to the shows of conserva- tive commentators who effusively sup- port her. It was while on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show one night that she blast- ed the idea of federal financial reg- ulatory reform as tantamount to “the federal government coming in, in a very thuggish way, and taking over the board- rooms of private industry.” “She doesn’t need mainstream media
any longer,” says Lawrence Jacobs, a po- litical science professor at the University of Minnesota and a longtime Bachmann watcher. “She has whatever cable show she wants to do, talk radio, the Internet, Fox TV. ...This is likely the new way for many conservative politicians, many outsiders.” The man who has enjoyed the best and
longest access to Bachmann is a sandy- haired, tanned 54-year-old who arrives at the Minneapolis studios of KTLK-FM to do his radio show in a golf shirt. No figure was more instrumental in Bachmann’s early political success than Jason Lewis. Although his show became nationally syndicated only a year ago, he has been a force in Minnesota for two decades, lacerating Democrats, centrist Republicans and conservative apostates. He is to Minnesota Republican politics what radio titan Walter Winchell was to New York politicians: a force capable of delivering migraines. In his studio, he takes a seat now across from where Bachmann some- times sits when she does the show. More often, he gets her on the phone. Having known each other for a decade, they are chummy on-air: A relaxed Bachmann doesn’t receive uncomfortable ques- tions, and Lewis, in turn, can steer her into intriguing discussions mainstream journalists can’t. She sounds liberated in Lewis’s world. Recently, she meandered into a dis- cussion of 2012 Republican presidential politics, taking veiled swipes both at for- mer Massachusetts governor Mitt Rom- ney (“What happened in Massachusetts is not a good thing for the state,” she said in reference to the Massachusetts health-care plan approved by Romney) and John McCain (“We need to get a presidential candidate who is a constitu- tional conservative with guts. No substi- tutes this time.”) Lewis expresses sympathy with what
he views as Bachmann’s special burden in dealing with “the establishment me- dia,” a force with waning clout, Lewis be- lieves. “They have Michele in their cross hairs,” he declares. “They used to be the media gatekeepers, but no more.” One afternoon, Lewis drives past St.
Paul, not far from the site of the annual Minnesota State Fair, the event where he interviewed Bachmann in person for the first time in 2000. She was in a primary challenge against a relatively moderate Republican state senator named Gary Laidig, a 28-year legislative veteran tar- geted for extinction by conservatives. The disgruntled had gravitated to Bachmann, a well-known community grass-roots soldier. But Bachmann faced her own challenges. A year earlier she had lost in a race to become a school board member in the Twin Cities suburb
the-earth people” is how Bachmann de- scribes her supporters. The car turns into Bachmann’s town, cruising down the main drag. “Stillwater is a kind of hoity-toity, progressive place,” Lewis observes. “Not the best place for Michele, politically.” Bachmann has never run as strong in
Stillwater as outside it. Nearby is the Sa- lem Lutheran Church, where Bachmann, her husband, their five children and many of their 23 foster children — all grown now — have attended over the years. Two church members, a couple named Vera and Vern Kumerow, met Bachmann there in the late ’90s. Though they had developed loyalties to other politicians, the Kumerows quickly switched allegiances as they got to know Bachmann, captivated by her ideals. “She is strong and that is what people want to see,” Vera Kumerow says. “She does not budge. And I see her at church and on TV.” Bachmann’s national television ap-
pearances became frequent after she won election to the House in 2006. By early 2008, her opponents argued that Bachmann was more interested in devel- oping a national profile than in the needs of her district. Her only notable legislative triumph came in the adoption of a low-profile bill that has made technical changes to the obligations of merchants who deal with credit card and debit receipts. But Bach- mann emphasizes that to focus on the passage of bills is to miss the whole point about her: She is in Washington, she says, to beat back government’s attempt to “eclipse freedom in people’s lives.” Meanwhile, some journalists have pri-
vately complained about their inability to have access to her, to even obtain a schedule of her public events. Her home- town newspaper, the Stillwater Gazette, ordinarily receives no notice about pub- lic events where a reporter might be able to pose a question to her. John Wodele, once a press secretary for former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, says, “I feel they have an abso- lute responsibility to distribute her pub- lic schedule — the public has a right to that.”
But Wodele, like Lewis, sees Bach- mann as a much underestimated politi- cal talent. Having worked against Bach- mann in a campaign, he learned about her appeal the hard way. “She has cap- tured the indignation of the low-tax, no- tax crowd,” he says. “That truck driver who is coming home from his welding job or going off deer hunting on the weekends, the guy working hard and bothered by taxes? A lot of those people see her as one of them.” At the national level, many analysts
believe that Bachmann’s future within the Republican Party will turn on her willingness to temper what Jacobs calls her “full-throated firebrand nature.” Some Republicans worry that her out- size profile might harm their ability to win elections in swing districts. With his radio show over on a Friday
evening, Jason Lewis meets his wife and friends for drinks and dinner. He is standing by the bar when a buddy, a 39- year-old man named Paul Hogenson, who makes his living in the mortgage business, says casually that he doesn’t like Bachmann. “Well, that’s because you’re a lib and
Michele is a conservative,” Lewis retorts. “She’s a wing nut,” Hogenson says.
BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
GETTING AROUND:Above, Rep.
Michele Bachmann at a “tea party” rally on tax day; at left, with Sarah Palin; and below, with House colleagues opposed to the health-care bill.
“What Michele says is so far out in right field that I think she does it for political gain.” “That doesn’t make sense — the ques- tion is why she does it when she knows it sometimes hurts her here,” says Lewis. “Well, because she’s a scrapper,” Ho-
genson says. A few people nearby are eavesdrop-
ping. Not one has failed to already make up his or her mind about the renegade they usually refer to here simply as “Mi- chele.”
‘Yes, I’m here’
During the brief telephone interview with her, in the wake of the question about her use of the term “reeducation camps,” a few more seconds of silence passed. Bachmann was asked again if she was there. “Yes, I’m here,” she said finally. She expressed uncertainty about
JIM MONE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
of Stillwater, the upscale town on the St. Croix River where she still lives. And al- ready she was the subject of controversy. While beloved by local conservatives for her protest at a clinic performing abor- tions, she was assailed by others who claimed that, while serving on the board at a public charter school, she had been part of an effort to censor artistic proj- ects and pressure teachers into injecting Christianity into the curriculum. “The students and teachers couldn’t do something patterned after the film ‘Aladdin’ because it had to do with mag- ic, and magic was somehow a problem,” remembers Denise Stephens, a parent. “And they couldn’t do a Native American
dream-catcher’s theme because that was associated with paganism, they said.” Supporters of Laidig portrayed Bach- mann as an extremist who would have no hope of defeating a Democrat. Lewis, who regarded her as an up-and-comer with uncommon political backbone, threw the full weight of his show behind her. “I was leading the charge to get more House crazies elected,” he remem- bers, grinning.
Bachmann soundly defeated Laidig, then won the general election, en route to three terms in the state Senate before winning election to Congress in 2006. “Jason Lewis was the enthusiastic cheerleader who offered a platform for
BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
Michele Bachmann,” says the University of Minnesota’s Jacobs. “ . . . This was part of what the new media was doing all over: It was the meshing of a niche audi- ence with conservatives’ message. The Bachmann phenomenon could never have happened without new media and people like Jason Lewis.”
Her home district
Later, Lewis is driving through Bach-
mann’s 6th Congressional District, which is about 96 percent white, leans Republican and includes a swath of east- ern Minnesota bordering Wisconsin and stretching northwest to more working- class areas toward St. Cloud. “Salt-of-
“She is strong and that is what people want to see.
She does not budge. And I see her at church and on TV.”
— Vera Kumerow, a constituent of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s
whether she wished to continue with the interview, declining to answer the ques- tion. “I’m not interested in an interview . . . with false caricatures of who I am,” she said, adding that some questions were unfairly “pointing to extreme examples of who I am . . . extreme carica- tures.” After a moment, however, she pressed
on, eventually observing that “people have the sense of the bias of mainstream media.” She indicated she had gone out- side that mainstream to find new kinds of media outlets to even the political playing field. She lauded the “democrati- zation of media,” which, she said, in- cluded the Internet. To that end, she said she wanted to
urge everyone to sign the petition on her Web site calling for support of her bill to repeal the Democrats’ new health-care plan. “I think I’ve kept faith with people back home . . . even if that that has meant getting some editorial boards up- set,” she said. “ . . . I lay my career on the line. . . . Freedom is messy. It is impor- tant to understand that we can’t be here to play it safe.” She indicated she had said what she wanted to say. The mainstream media thanked her for her time. “Thank you for your evenhanded- ness,” she concluded.
leahym@washpost.com
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