This spring Michele Bachmann was the up-and-comer. Sure, the GOP leadership secretly despised her and thought she was a kook. But she'd played a major role in taking Congress back from the Democrats, she was fund-raising like hell from a national army of grassroots supporters of conservative evangelicals and tea party chumps, and she was riding high as an exciting new presidential candidate in a weak GOP field...
Then this summer the legit press started pointing out that she was a nut--it wasn't just a matter of liberal opinion, her "kook" status became an "electability" issue. And then Perry entered the race to take her conservative evangelical and tea party race.
And today the "Michele is done" narrative continues. From Reuters, today:
(CONTINUED)
Perry is a threat to Bachmann's fundraising and sources close to her campaign said funds may be running low.Bachmann relies on campaign money from small donors, many of them Tea Party activists. That strategy made the Minnesota congresswoman the top fundraiser in the House of Representatives last year. But to take her campaign to the next level, Bachmann needs to find major donors who pledge to collect $50,000 or more, known as bundlers, experts say.
That's probably the most significant fact, though it's buried down in the bottom of the story. The Bush campaign spent $400 million dollars beat Kerry--and Bush was an incumbent at the time. If Bachmann can't secure the big donors, those kook supporters in the grass roots are just throwing their money away on her.
Whose fault is this failure, anyway?
Sources close to the campaign told Reuters that Bachmann blamed veteran campaigner Ed Rollins and his deputy, David Polyansky, for not letting her make key decisions and for staging over-slick campaign events that do not fit into her folksy style that appeals to Tea Party conservatives.
"Sources close to the campaign" said that? Who is "sources close to the campaign?" Marcus Bachmann?
Whoever it is, he's taking a page from the Sarah Palin playbook--"it ain't my fault, it's "the man" who was keepin' us down, tellin' us the wrong thing to do, keepin' us from tellin' it like it is..." The blame game, inside the campaign, for Bachmann failure.
But in this case, the person doing the complaining hired "the man who was keepin' us down." So the blame game doesn't work, here.
Will Michele's personality cult politics see her through, and extend her career? Or will the traditional media and Republican establishment finally do what no liberal or progressive has ever done: stop this crazy, lying, bigoted rise to the top?