Bachmann "inhabits an alternative universe...Bible-bashing, Fox News-watching white America"...

[pampango]

In courting the grass roots of the Republican Party, she inhabits an alternative universe to the one where many of her critics live: Bible-bashing, Fox News-watching white America, a land where all too many eagerly accept the notion that East Coast élites are busy selling hard-working Americans down the drain for the price of a Wall Street campaign contribution or a hat-tip from George Clooney. .

From National Socialism to Poujadism to the Tea Party, the suggestion that the motherland needs reclaiming from alien forces has been central to populist right-wing movements. This was clearly what Bachmann was driving at when she commented in 2008 that President Obama “may have anti-American views,” and, even though she’s since expressed the wish she had expressed herself differently, her supporters get the message loud and clear.

On matters of substance, she hits Obama where he is weakest, exploiting the widespread (and mistaken) perception that his policies, and the economic philosophy they are based on, have failed. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Bachmann’s speech was her appeal to disgruntled supporters of the opposing party. “I grew up a Democrat,” she said. “My first involvement in politics was working for Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. But when I saw the direction President Carter took our country, how his big spending liberal majority grew government, weakened our standing in the world, and how they decreased our liberties, I became a Republican. ”

This passage was a straight lift from Ronald Reagan, who was forever saying that the Democratic Party left him rather than vice-versa. It can be no coincidence that Ed Rollins, who masterminded Reagan’s 1984 landslide, recently signed on with Bachmann. At sixty-eight, Rollins is getting on a bit, but he still knows how to run a populist Presidential campaign aimed at swing voters in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.



http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2011/06/bachmanns-bounce-the-view-from-brooklyn.html