June 30, 2011

 
     Hot new face in the GOP presidential race?   Looks that way now with Michele Bachmann.  She is the 55 year old Congresswoman from Minnesota who strikes some people as hot---a lot hotter than the presumed front-runner, Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts.   In one Iowa poll, she's just a point or two behind him.
 
     A voter, James Littman, at an event in South Carolina (an early primary state) told Politico, "She's fifty times smarter than the people who think she's stupid....We need a counter-revolutionary after this mess (the Obama administration). The last person that is, is Mitt Romney."  A personal note:  Romney has always reminded me of Gertrude Stein's line, "There is no there there."  Bachman seems to have plenty of there.
 
     She makes mistakes.  She told a crowd in New Hampshire, "You're in the state where the shot was heard round the world in Lexington and Concord."  Well, no.  She was in Concord all right but the Concord in the famous quote is in Massachusetts.  She once claimed that the men who wrote our country's founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, wanted to end slavery.  No again.  The writers, from free and slave states, knew they were writing to voters in both.  When they wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...." they knew that wasn't true in their America.
 
      Still, she makes it interesting.  And if Sarah Palin runs too, that'll be a debate I'll want to watch.