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What Michele Bachmann learned from Sarah Palin — and Hillary Clinton
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| Parent(s) |
Candidate
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| Contributor | Jason |
| Last Edited | Jason Aug 19, 2011 06:56pm |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Media | Newspaper - Washington Post |
| News Date | Saturday, August 6, 2011 12:55:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | I never imagined anyone like Michele Bachmann when I envisioned the country’s first female president. In fact, I imagined someone quite different. In the aftermath of the defeats of Sarah Palin and Hillary Rodham Clinton on the national stage in 2008, I created President Charlotte Kramer, the fictional heroine of my novel “Eighteen Acres.” I wanted to spend some time with the woman who ultimately cracks that final glass ceiling in American politics, if only in a book.
Kramer was a fantasy president — a principled conservative with Margaret Thatcher’s clarity on foreign affairs and Clinton’s stoic tolerance of the indignities of public office. Yet she strove to be post-partisan, and if Bachmann were in Congress during a Kramer administration, she would be the president’s chief antagonist. But Bachmann does have something in common with my heroine: She has used the experiences, missteps and successes of past female candidates to propel her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
If the Minnesota congresswoman, who is polling strongly in Iowa, does well in the debate there Thursday and claims victory in that state’s key straw poll on Aug. 13, it will be because she learned all the right lessons from the failed campaigns of Clinton and Palin. I say that having seen one of those campaigns up close, as a senior adviser to the McCain-Palin effort.
Bachmann may not be writing any new rules, but she has resisted the temptation to fight the same old battles. She understands, for instance, that making a factual mistake about American history while on the stump is something that a candidate should acknowledge and apologize for. Even though she has made high-profile errors — naming John Quincy Adams as a founding father, mixing up the geography of the first shots fired in the American Revolution — she has endeared herself to some voters by explaining that she’s simply human and prone to the occasional misstep. |
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