If so – here's that irony – the person to thank for the election of a sensationally ignorant, anti-gay rights zealot will be not Rush Limbaugh or Rupert Murdoch. It will be that venerable grand dame of out-and-proud homosexuality, that paragon of cultured liberalism and intellectual hauteur, Gore Vidal. It was while reading a novel of his that the Minnesota congresswoman, then a liberal and erstwhile Jimmy Carter campaign volunteer, swapped sides.
"I was reading this snotty novel called Burr," she confided, "and read how he mocked our Founding Fathers. And as a reasonable, decent, fair-minded person" – no sarcasm detectable – "who happened to be a Democrat, I thought, 'You know what? This mocking of people that I revere, and the country that I love, and that I would lay my life down to defend ... At that point I put the book down. I looked out of the window, and I laughed. And I said, 'You know what? I think I must be a Republican. I don't think I'm a Democrat'."
This week, some 30 years after that epiphany, she formally declared her candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination. Everyone expected a borderline barking mom of five, narcissist Tea Party MILF to have a crack. Just not, until recently, this one. There is still a small chance that Sarah Palin will also run. Watching Bachmann soak up all the publicity might stir her into action. You cannot discount the motivational power of Vidal's dictum that every time a friend succeeds, a little piece of me dies.
Yet Palin's unfavourable ratings with Republicans, let alone independents, are so horrendous that even in her protective bubble of zany self-absorption, she must see that any campaign would be a kamikaze one. Bachmann, on the other hand, has swiftly soared into a share of the polling lead with Mitt Romney. The sleeper in this campaign is a good ol' boy Texas Governor with a hotline to the Lord and a passion for executing prisoners – and it's been much too long since one of those occupied the Oval Office – by the name of Rick Perry. If he enters the fray, everything will change. For now, this race is shaping into the usual primary battle between the establishment front-runner (Romney) and, in Bachmann, the telegenic insurgent.
This in mind, three questions pose themselves. Could she seize the White House? Can she even win the GOP nomination? And just how thick or crazy, or both, is Michele Bachmann? In tribute to the late Eric Morley, we will take them in reverse order. While accurately gauging her idiocy-derangement ratio is hard in the absence of a psychiatric report, Bachmann's mouth is a reliable launch pad for astounding foolishness.
