Michele Bachmann

I read an interesting profile of Michele Bachmann by Ryan Lizza in the current issue of the New Yorker. Bachmann, who eked out a victory in a largely meaningless Iowa straw poll last week, is undergoing her moment in the Republican race for president, and thus has invited even more scrutiny. This is encouraging to liberal Democrats like me, because the more stuff they dig up, the more lunatic fringe she seems. But, of course, be careful what you wish for.

I will give Bachmann this--for a two-term congresswoman, she's made incredible progress. Normally someone with as little experience as she has would be a back-bencher, but she's turned frequent appearances on news channels, particularly Fox News, to her advantage, and she's become one of the most prominent faces of the Tea Party movement. As a woman, she's also managed to push aside the other putative female candidate, Sarah Palin. While Palin has dithered and cashed in, Bachmann has put her money where her mouth is and thrown her hat in the ring.

I first heard of her on Wonkette, the D.C. gossip site. Before a State of the Union addressed, she gave George W. Bush a kiss flush on the lips, and stared at him longingly, like a teeny-bopper gazing at Justin Bieber. The snarks had a field day, as they have with many of her frequent gaffes, from being suspicious of the U.S. census, to confusing John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy, to wishing Elvis Presley happy birthday on the anniversary of his death. More delitiriously, she called Barack Obama "un-American," apologized for it, and then retracted her apology.

Beyond being a gaffe machine--let's face it, so is Joe Biden--Bachmann has disturbing connections with some scary people. If Obama was falsely accused of "palling around with terrorists," Bachmann has openly consorted with some far-right haters. She has spoken highly of Dominionism, a movement started by Frances Schaeffer, who made a documentary called "How Should We Then Live?" which blasts Renaissance art as blasphemous. His movement has been defined as "Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns."

Bachmann studied law at Oral Roberts University, which defines its mandate "to equip our students with the ability to bring God's healing power to reconcile individuals and to restore community wholeness" and "to restore law to its historic roots in the Bible." And Bachmann says she believes in the Constitution! While at O.R.U., she worked for a professor named John Eidsmoe. Last year Eidsmoe addressed an event in Alabama on Secession Day, and said that it was the state's "constitutional right to secede," and that "Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than did Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Webster." The problem is, Bachmann has not distanced herself from him. Expect his to be a household name should she get close to the nomination.

Bachmann also, on her website, listed as a recommendation a biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins, who proposes the theory that "the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the North." In his book, Wilkins condemns "the radical abolitionists of New England" and that "most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a suffiency of goods for a comfortable, though--by modern standards--spare existence."

These connections are sure to be viewed with dismay in the black community, as they should by thinking people everywhere. Bachmann's husband, a psychologist, has been involved with some sort of treatment for gays. Bachmann and her kind are on the losing side of history when it comes to gay issues, and I hope she pays for it.

I can't see Bachmann winning the nomination. She may have her die-hard supporters, but the men in the cigar-smoked-filled room will surely see that she can't capture the middle, not with her kooky ideas and racist bedfellows. As they did with Mike Huckabee last time, the establishment will coalesce around someone who is perceived as more electable, who is probably Mitt Romney. In the meantime, though, liberals can watch, slack-jawed, as the center becomes farther and farther right.