My Crazy Afternoon

Michele Bachmann, retiring from the House one step of the ethics investigators and, most likely, her district's voters. Garance Franke-Ruta watches her announcement video; Jonathan Chait remembers some of her greatest hits.

Notes?

1. No, she was never the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, or anything more than an extreme longshot.

2. Yes, she certainly did bring The Crazy. If she didn't really believe the things she said, she did an excellent job of acting as if she did.

3. No, it's not true that most Republican Members of the House are interchangably nuts. There's really only a small group, maybe only a handful, who share Bachmann's true dedication to The Crazy.

4. However, it's also true that sane conservatives in Congress are not only reluctant to criticize the Crazy Caucus, but are in many cases willing to borrow liberally (or perhaps I should say generously?) from things the Crazy Caucus comes up with or dredges up from Beck or chain emails or wherever.

5. More generally: to the extent that one of the big driving motivations for mainstream, sane conservative politicians is to avoid the "RINO" label -- and it appears that this motivation is quite strong -- they, the GOP-aligned press, and rank-and-file conservative voters give enormous power to the fringe Crazy Caucus.

6. That is, and to generalize: mainstream liberal Democrats try to differentiate themselves from the most extreme liberals in order to appeal to general election swing voters; mainstream conservative Republicans try to group themselves with the most extreme conservatives in order to appeal to primary election RINO-hunters, and have not found any way to cling to extreme but sane conservatives without also keeping fairly close to the Crazy Caucus.

7. Back to Bachmann: assuming she's not going to jail, Beck's network certainly seems like the logical destination for her. I've seen some twitter chatter about the possibility she may seek higher office, but it doesn't much matter; she's almost certainly never going to be elected statewide in Minnesota, and if she does run for president again she'll remain a fringe candidate with no realistic chance of doing anything more than (perhaps) crowding out other fringe candidates.

8. All bloggers will, naturally, miss her: our lonely eyes now turn to Louie Gohmert, and to the near-certainty that, as Sarah Posner points out, there will be others.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Stephen Strasberg, 24.

And some good stuff:

1. Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, SEK actually reads the Bachmann et al. complaint about creeping Sharia in the State Department and is, shall we say, less than impressed. It's true, you know; Bachmann really is the inferior crazy.

2. Dave Weigel explains the "magic word gaffe." Excellent concept...but it's not the name I would have chosen.

3. All political junkies will enjoy the amazing 19th century parties map, available at Mapping the Nation author Susan Schultan's blog. Via Seth Masket, who makes a great point about the stability of the Democrats and Republicans. A big part of that was the trade off with the Australian ballot and then eventually primary elections; the parties gained government support in exchange for what eventually would be some real loss of control of their nominations (although after several decades, they did learn how to regain it, but of course in very different ways). Other thing to note: the 19th century absence of Majority Leaders in the Senate.

Bachmann Out

The fun parts of the Republican race are starting to fade away: first we lost Prince Herman, and now Michele Bachmann is calling it a day.

Her withdrawal speech was vintage Bachmann, of course, although to my ears at least (even) heavier on the God talk than was her standard campaign stump speech and debate rhetoric. But it was, as usual, heavy on the socialism-bashing, and even better heavy on her special brand of self-aggrandizement: how Michele Bachmann has been all that's standing between all that is good and wholesome and blessed on the one hand, and the nefarious socialist in the White House on the other. Which, as usual, takes the form of her bragging about being the one who opposed Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank, and the debt limit increase, and everything else that...every other Republican opposed, and passed anyway. What's wonderful about her self-image is that it's so removed from reality. In reality, of course, she's not a fighter in Congress; she's an irrelevant back-bencher who was denied a subcommittee chair and mainly just shows up and says crazy things on cable news shows, and couldn't get a single Member of the House to back her bid. Not even her buddy Steve King from Iowa, who might well have helped her a bit.

Of course, her "knowledge" of the issues, or for that matter socialism, is equally detached from reality -- my favorite one, among many greats, is her repeated charge that Obama has a secret socialist plan to phase out Medicare and replace it with "Obamacare." I mean, how do you even respond to that? I'd love to know whether she's sincere and just massively ignorant about the programs she opposes, but I guess we don't get to know things like that about our politicians. Anyway, no doubt those who watch will be seeing plenty of her on Fox News and the Chris Matthews show and other such programs, but as a presidential candidate she was entertaining in her way, and as such she'll be missed from the campaign trail,

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Ross Douthat, today:

What you see in today’s Republican primary campaign is a reaction to exactly these kinds of follies — a revolt against the ruling class that our meritocracy has forged, and a search for outsiders with thinner résumés but better instincts.
But from Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain, the outsiders haven’t risen to the challenge. It will do America no good to replace the arrogant with the ignorant, the overconfident with the incompetent.
In place of reckless meritocrats, we don’t need feckless know-nothings.

If you agree (and if you don't, what is Douthat missing): why have Republicans fallen short? Whose fault is it? What should be done about it, and by whom?

Tea Party Debate Tonight

This one is, I'd say, quite a bit lower profile than last week's Reagan Library debate. That one had Rick Perry for the first time, and the flap with Obama's speech scheduling, and the Reagan Library debate tradition. This one? I guess the Tea Party angle is something.

Apparently the big anticipation tonight is that Michele Bachmann is going to go after Rick Perry on Social Security. She basically treats the presidential nomination contest as if it was an early-afternoon cable net talk show, doesn't she? Of course, that's her skill set as a politician. I mean, not winning those shoutfests, but being willing and able to take part in them. The problem for her is that since nominations aren't like that at all her upside is very limited. The problem for Perry is that her position, which seems to be "keep the government out of my Social Security," is entirely unconstrained by rationality, and thus potentially somewhat difficult to refute (not that there's much rationality to his Ponzi scheme thing, of course).

Hmmm....trying to decide here between when Picard told Tasha that "There's no logic in this at all," or Spock's "logic is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow." I suppose the latter would be really good if Bachmann was going to take on Romney.

At any rate, getting back to the debate, it'll be interesting to see whether Perry takes the bait or not. His best bet, it seems to me, would be to shrug off anything Bachmann says and focus on establishing his policy strengths, but that's not how he's acted so far.

I'll once again be tweeting and then doing a recap over at Greg's place. Anything else we should be looking for?

Bachmann (Supposedly) Targets Very Stupid Donors

Today's fun story is courtesy of the New York Post, which "reports" that some Jews are donating to Michele Bachmann because they mistakenly believe that she's a Red Sea Pedestrian (via Goddard). No, I don't really believe the (very thinly sourced) story; I think it's just an excuse for the Post to trot out the much-hyped but little-verified story that Jews are deserting Barack Obama. But Jews who somehow pay enough attention to the political process to be ready to give money to Bachmann but not enough to know that she's a Christian? I'm just not buying it without a lot more evidence.

However, as much as I expect that absolutely nothing from that Post story will turn out to be true, I do like the idea of  a presidential candidate who would deliberately spread false rumors of her own religion or ethnicity in order to raise money from exceptionally stupid donors. So, in order do help out, I'd like to present seven important Michele Bachmann little-known facts. Or, you know, sort of facts.

1. Visit the Bay of Pigs Museum? She's Cuban! That's it.

2. I heard that between them, her grandfathers played roughly 75% of all Irish cops in 1930s through 1950s movies.

3. Oddly enough, distant cousin of both Spiro Agnew and Olympia Dukakis, but not Michael Dukakis.

4. Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley...Michele Bachmann? Could be!

5. [This item would be in Spanish and point out that she's Mexican, but unfortunately I'm not capable of producing it]

6. It's funny; she sure doesn't look Korean, and there's no real evidence that she has any Korean connections, but still...you look at her, and just think: yup, Korean.

7. Forget it, Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney -- I hear she's LDS, all the way.

Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and Press Bias

Will Wilkinson has a mostly very good piece up arguing not exactly that Ron Paul should be getting more attention in the press, but if I follow him correctly that whatever the appropriate coverage is of Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul should be getting more or less the same amount. I've been increasingly thinking that Paul and Bachmann are actually a pretty good match, so I'm glad to see his argument.

Kevin Drum has a good response, though, centering on Paul's 2008 run, and arguing that the real difference between Paul and Bachmann is that we already know Paul's ceiling, and it's far too low to make him a plausible nominee.

How else can we explain it? I'd say there are a couple of press biases at work. One is the obvious and important bias in favor of novelty: nothing (so far at least) about the Ron Paul campaign is new, while everything about Bachmann is new. I wouldn't underrate the importance of a "fooled us once" aspect to the Paul story, also. The highly visible aspects of the 2008 Ron Paul campaign wound up spooking a lot of reporters into wondering if they were missing a huge phenomenon. Since they weren't, it's going to be hard for them to extrapolate anything from Paul this time around. Bachmann, to the extent that she is thought of as a Tea Party leader, has something of the opposite situation; Republicans accused of being too extreme to win in 2010 did, in fact, win. So it's natural (whether correct or not) that reporters tend to give Paul less credit and Bachmann more for their objective measures of success.

But the truth is that while Bachmann and Paul have some important similarities (Members of the House, moderately popular in polls, fringe beliefs even within the GOP) their is one important difference that justifies a difference in press treatment. Bachmann's issue position profile compared to the rest of the GOP is basically: the same, only more so. Paul, however, really does oppose most Republicans on several issues, most notably by opposing the bulk of the party on a broad range of foreign policy and national security issues. If Bachmann could convince Republican party actors that she was electable and that she could be counted on to work closely with them if she was in the White House, then she might win, but there are simply too many important Republican individuals and groups who oppose Paul's policy preferences for him to have any chance of winning. I don't really think that's why the press covers one and not the other, but it is one of the things that should be guiding their coverage decisions.

Catch of the Day

I really enjoyed this Greg Sargent item about Michele Bachmann. Turns out that just after Bachmann claimed (again) during the Ames debate that the S&P downgrade proved her right, the folks at S&P made it even clearer than previously that, no, a big part of the downgrade was actually the prominent political influence of people (such as Michele Bachmann) who welcome default.

Remember, Bachmann's position isn't that the deficit deal wasn't good enough. Her position was -- is -- that the debt limit should never go up. Period. End of story. No matter what the trade-off. In that sense, S&P isn't entirely wrong. The risk of US default would equal the risk that (1) Bachmann becomes president, and (2) actually carries about the policy she has pledged to carry out. I continue to believe the odds of that first one are remote indeed, and I have no idea about the second part of it, but I suppose I also have no idea how S&P should go about assessing the risk of all of that happening.

I'm not sure I can think of a presidential candidate similar to Bachmann, with her combination of fringe positions, well-rehearsed rhetoric, and lack of contact with reality. She's very different from Sarah Palin or George W. Bush, both of whom were mostly indifferent to and ignorant of government and public affairs. Bachmann isn't that. She's a lot more like Ron Paul, in some ways, but there's a partisanship to her that works a lot differently than Paul's views work for him.

See also Joe Scarborough, quoted here.

And: great catch!

Catch of the Day

Republicans claim that they should be rewarded for conceding that the debt limit should be raised at all, because their ideal policy outcome involves not raising it, end of story -- and that there's enough money coming in to cover the essentials, defined as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, salaries for the military, and then debt service to avoid a default. The problem? This is nuts; it would mean that the entire remainder of the federal government would shut down. Liberals have been making the point for weeks, but so have plenty of responsible people from every spot on the ideological spectrum, and I think Megan McArdle today has the best list yet of some of the specific effects. Highly recommended.

Remember, there's a big difference between opposing an increase in the debt limit unless certain negotiable conditions are met (perhaps irresponsible, but hardly unprecedented), and a claim that the debt limit should nevernevernever be increased and that no harm would come of keeping it where it is for good.

(Via Drum, who also has a good post on Michele Bachmann, the leader of the nevernevernever caucus).

Oh, and -- nice catch!

"Running For President Is Hard"

That's the correct conclusion Greg Sargent draws from his reporting on Michele Bachmann's tough day -- which started out with what appeared, to me at least, to be a very weakly supported story about her health and medication regimen in the often-unreliable Daily Caller, which of course meant lots of questions on the campaign trail, which unfortunately for her wound up with a couple of her campaign staffers roughing up a reporter.

(The DC story is here; I agree with what Dana Goldstein said).

There are a number of reasons why Members of the House, especially junior Members, don't compete seriously for presidential nominations. One of them -- not the only one, but one of them -- is that most of them have virtually no experience at all in contested elections with an attentive press. The skills needed to handle a bunch of reporters asking hostile questions are just different from, say, the skills needed to spar with a host on a cable show that no one watches, or the skills needed to deliver a speech to a supportive audience. Indeed, most presidential candidates who have had experience at the statewide level show a need to get up to speed when they move up to the presidential campaign trail, but at least they've probably had some similar experiences.

And of course one thing that Bachmann hasn't had to deal with before this are the interactions of disgruntled former staffers with attentive reporters.

I'll put it another way: you know what successful House candidates have virtually no experience with? Unfair stories about them in the press. That's because most Members of the House get virtually no media attention. At best, they get regular gigs on cable news shows, but in that capacity their job is just to repeat party talking points; they aren't being pressed in the way that a candidate in a competitive election is being pressed (and if they say something foolish, they have the luxury of just disappearing for a few weeks until everyone forgets about it).

More broadly: Getting nominated is usually about building coalitions among party-aligned groups and organizations, and it helps a lot to enter the campaign with strong relationships with as many groups as possible. Statewide campaigns -- and actually participating in governing -- are good ways to construct those relationships. Indeed, they're good ways to learn how to construct those relationships. That's an important resource that Michele Bachmann didn't really have, most likely, at the start of her campaign. It's certainly possible to overcome such things, but at least in my view not very likely at all.

Bachmann Surges, I Suppose

Yeah, I'm still not seeing anything to change my mind that she's not likely at all to be the nominee. The latest is that she's polling well in Iowa, leading the normally very sensible Scott Lemieux to say that "Bachmann...has to be considered an overwhelming favorite in Iowa right now."

I'm sorry, but no, I don't think she has to be considered any type of favorite in Iowa right now.

Look, she got a nice bump coming out of a debate, and in the absence of any other news out there, she's polling well. You know who else did that, a few months ago? Donald Trump. It just doesn't mean very much.

Obviously, Bachmann is a more serious candidate than Trump ever was -- for one thing, she's actually running; for another, she doesn't have a history of policy positions anathema to GOP primary voters.  But that's sort of the point: is Trump can surge in the polls at this point, then anyone can.

I'm open to the possibility that I'm dead wrong about Bachmann, but her current surge in the polls isn't doing much to convince me. We have a long ways to go, and so far I don't see her overcoming the things that made her an implausible nominee a few months ago.

Gary Johnson Tries to Pick A Fight

He's attacking the Marriage Vow that Michele Bachmann signed on to this week.

Question 1: will she respond? At least in the release, Johnson doesn't mention her by name, for what it's worth.

Question 2: Johnson specifically defended "women who choose to have abortions" in his release. If he manages to get publicity on this (which is by no means certain; I saw it because Conor Friedersdorf retweeted something from the Johnson campaign, and certainly the very small anti-Paul or lukewarm on Paul libertarian wing of the GOP is paying attention to Johnson, but that's an awful small group), will it push the mainstream conservative candidates toward taking the "Vow"?

Question 3: Speaking of Ron Paul -- I don't really recall him doing something like this during the 2008 cycle, but I could be wrong. Anyone remember?

Parties, Nominations, and Bachmann

That excellent Hans Noel interview about the nomination process (and yes, you should read it), gives me an excuse to explain again why I don't believe that Michele Bachmann is a plausible nominee.

Hans talks a little about Bachmann as a Tea Party factional candidate, and why that might be a limiting factor, and I agree. But I'd flag something more general he said -- that a big part of the process for party actors is finding "someone they can trust." That's right. As I've said, for party actors, presidential nominations are terribly important, in large part because the candidate they select might well win and become president -- and after that, it's actually very difficult to control that person. Look at liberal Democrats who are disappointed with Barack Obama now, or conservatives disappointed with George W. Bush in 2004. Realistically, they have little choice but to support their president as enthusiastically as they can up through re-election; anything less, and they risk the disastrous result of handing the election to the other party.

So how do you know if you can trust someone? Well, you look at their track record (that is, you talk to people who have worked with them and know what they are actually like in office), and see what they've done over time. Sometimes, as with Mitt Romney (or John McCain in 2008), the problem is that they've changed positions over time -- which Mitt Romney would emerge if he was elected? But in other cases, the problem is that they have little or no track record. That's the problem with Bachmann, and with Members of the House in general. Bachmann hasn't been in a position to negotiate anything, or to be a leader on anything within Congress, or in any other way revealed very much about herself as a potential president at all. She's good at self-promotion (but virtually all presidential candidates are), and she's good at showing up on the cable nets and giving outrageous statements. Is that any reason to trust her as president? Or, as Jonathan Chait, who generally has thought Bachmann has a good chance, puts it: perhaps there's a "quiet sense among Republican insiders that Bachmann is crazy."

Of course, trust isn't the only question. If only one candidate agrees with you on the issue that matters most, then you're certainly likely to support that candidate, even if you're not absolutely certain that she would actually stick with you if elected. But as I've said, Bachmann doesn't really have that going for her, at least against most of the candidates on most issues. Tim Pawlenty, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney are all doing their best to keep any space from opening up to their right on most issues. So for most party actors, electability and trust are going to be the important criteria, and it's hard to see Bachmann doing well on that.

Unless, that is, the party really has been overrun by people who sincerely believe that Michele Bachmann would be the strongest general election candidate, and that saying crazy things on cable nets is a better marker of a candidate's true positions than building a track record of long-term support for party interests and issues through the governing process and previous campaigns.

Bachmann's Fine Line

Ed Kilgore has an excellent piece over at TNR about the challenges Michele Bachmann faces as she tries to move from gadfly to actual presidential contender. As he points out, she's going to be pressured, both by the press and by rival candidates. Click through and read the whole thing for his analysis, which I think is quite good.

To add to it, however, I'd say that Bachmann's sweet spot is, it seems to me, exceedingly small. If she gives conventional answers to tough questions, she runs the risk of being Just Another Conservative, albeit one with a back-history of oddball statements and positions. In other words, by doing what she can to reassure the people in the party who care about winning in November, she risks her ability to stand out from the Cain-Santorum part of the field.

Another way to look at it: there just isn't much actual policy space to the right of Romney, Pawlenty, and (presumably) Perry for Bachmann to occupy by herself, even if she could monopolize that space -- at least, not much space that won't get her labeled a nut. That leaves attitude, not policy positions, but the sorts of things that signal that she's a true believer are problematic for plenty of people.

And yet if she doesn't do that...well, we're a long ways from Iowa, still. Six months of campaigning as a regular mainstream conservative, and it wouldn't be surprising if a lot of rank-and-file voters see her as one, and look to Cain or one of the others (Roy Moore!) for a real insurgent candidacy.

Which gets back to Kilgore's point: she's going to be tested, and she's going to have to be an awfully good politician to get through it and wind up as viable as many (but, still, not me) currently believe she is.

Catch of the Day

Shared, to Conor Friedersdorf, who explained why "Are you a flake?" is a softball question to ask a presidential candidate, and to David S. Bernstein, who tweeted it earlier.

For those behind the news a bit, this is about Chris Wallace of Fox, who asked it of Michele Bachmann this morning. Friedersdorf and my brother are exactly right -- it's a question that just tees it up for the candidate to say whatever she wants and, if she's so inclined, to also complain about being picked on by the press. Although as James Fallows pointed out earlier, Bachmann has shown at least some basic skills at handling tougher questions, too.

All that said: I'm just as much of a Bachmann skeptic as ever. Let me just hit one part of it...Jonathan Chait believes that Bachmann skeptics are missing an important point:

[T]he religious right has changed -- its power to bend the party to its will has decreased, and its focus has largely merged with that of the GOP as a whole, so that the religious right is almost as concerned with economics and foreign policy as with social issues. Bachmann represents that transformation...And there's hardly any difference in the way she discusses these issues and the way most other Republicans do. They are all speaking the same apocalyptic language now.

I think Chait is correct about Republicans, and conservatives, and Bachmann. Where I think he's wrong is that I don't think that's going to set her apart from the rest of the field -- certainly not Santorum and Cain, but also not from Pawlenty and Perry, and on issue positions and current rhetoric, probably not from Romney, either. I definitely do think that a candidate from Bachmann's wing of the party can win it; I just don't think that it's likely at all that Bachmann can.

Catch of the Day

Jonathan Chait had a quick item that wasn't bad, and Steve Benen goes into more detail today, but the Catch goes to Mark Kleiman for being the first I saw to point out that Michele Bachmann's accusation that Barack Obama has a secret plan to replace Medicare with "Obamacare" is really an accusation that Obama secretly supports Paul Ryan's plan. Bingo!

You do have to wonder about the thought process that gets her to that one, though. I can think of several possibilities, with the first one probably the most likely:

1. She doesn't care what Medicare is or what ACA is: she just knows a good applause line when she thinks of it.

2. She knows exactly what Medicare, ACA, and Ryan's plan are. She's already expressed some skepticism about Ryan; here, she's doubling down. Because she thinks Ryan is going to get into the presidential race, and she intends to use the similarities between Ryan's plan and ACA against him.

3. She believes that ACA sets up a British-style government health care system, and supports Medicare as the less socialist option.

4. She really believes "keep government's hands off of my Medicare" -- Medicare is some sort of natural thing, sort of like property rights, and government should never interfere with it.

5. She doesn't actually believe either #3 or #4, but thinks it's good politics for her to pretend to believe one or both of those things.

6. It's a Paul Revere strategy; what she's really trying to do is to get outraged reactions from liberals.

OK, that's all I can think of.

I should note one thing about all of this..."Obamacare." ACA isn't a single program; it's a whole bunch of health care reforms, stitched together in one bill but in many cases essentially unrelated. What Kleiman and the others (and me, too) are interpreting Bachmann as saying is that Obama would turn Medicare into an exchanges-plus-subsidies scheme, which is both what ACA does for the individual insurance market for those outside of Medicare who don't get insurance through employment, and what Paul Ryan would do for Medicare. But ACA for Medicare eligibles is something else entirely; it consists, for them, of removing some subsidies for Medicare Advantage plans and finding new savings (or at least trying to!) within regular Medicare. And for those who have insurance through their jobs, ACA is yet another thing. The idea that there's a single program that ACA is imposing on everyone just isn't right.

Oh, and by the way: Michele Bachmann is now a presidential candidate who some people think has a real shot of winning the nomination. Hey, reporters: you might want to actually follow up on this one.

And also: nice catch!

More on Bachmann

I recommend to everyone interested in learning more about Michele Bachmann a helpful profile from Michelle Goldberg. The main takeaway is that some of Bachmann's statements that may appear to be wacko are, in context, a reflection of her Christian conservative world view, not any personal, idiosyncratic craziness. I'm not sure whether or not I agree with that implication (which, I should say, isn't stated explicitly in the article) in full, but I do think it's a very useful corrective.

Jonathan Chait, a Bachmann optimist (that is, he thinks she's a very viable candidate), notes that "many" Bachmann pessimists underestimate her based on a misunderstanding of the current GOP:

The skepticism about Bachmann's prospects reflects an antiquated assumption that there's a natural ceiling within the GOP on the support base of a hard-core religious conservative. Yet both the movement and the party have changed in ways that make that less and less true.

I agree with that part of that; I disagreed with those who didn't take the Huck seriously on similar grounds. Very solid support from Christian conservatives is a strong plus, not a ceiling, in the Republican Party. Christian conservatives are mainstream movement conservatives, not weird freaks.

And yet even within that, Bachmann isn't just a run-of-the-mill conservative, either in actions or in reputation. That's too some extent reflected in her voting in the House (she ranked 407th on a liberal-to-conservative scale of Members of the House in the 111th Congress, and 409th in the 110th Congress). It's also reflected in her back-catalog of Greatest Hits crazy-sounding statements. Even if what she's said makes perfect sense to many rank-and-file primary voters, that's not apt to help her should she be nominated -- and therefore, those Republicans who want a strong November candidate are apt to strongly oppose her.

My own Bachmann pessimism is based on both the electoral self-interest of those Republicans who want to win, and on the general structural disadvantages of running from the House. Well, those things, and also that in my view, in the current Republican Party, movement conservatives don't have to go to a candidate perceived as an extremist to find someone who supports them on at least most of their issues.

That latter point is pretty important. In 1964, the difference for conservatives between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller was enormous (and the difference between Rockefeller and Lyndon Johnson not all that great); under those circumstances, accepting a smaller chance of victory in November in exchange for ideological purity was a reasonable bargain. In 2012, the difference between Bachmann and, say, Mitt Romney is small -- and the difference between Romney and Barack Obama is large. If they are convinced that Bachmann would be a poor candidate in the fall, even very conservative Republicans may choose Romney (or, even more likely, Tim Pawlenty or Rick Perry).

Notes on the GOP Debate

No big headline, just some various notes on the big GOP debate last night...

1. Yeah, I'm still very much a Michele Bachmann skeptic. Yes, she got good reviews last night. Also, Herman Cain got good reviews after the last debate, and Donald Trump had momentum before that. She's less implausible than those two, but next time she'll have to do more to impress, and we'll see where it takes her. By the way, she sounds much more Generic House Republican to my ears than anything else; I don't know that that's a bad thing, but I don't get why it's the same space as Palin. So for example I do expect Bachmann to appear to be familiar with the issues...that's not her potential problem.

2. The Pawlenty flop -- or the perception of a Pawlenty flop, which is the same thing -- is one of those things that'll almost certainly not matter at all going forward (unless that's the straw that brings in Rick Perry, but I'm sort of guessing that Perry's decision -- whatever it is -- was made long ago).

3. Experience helps. Romney's been through this before; the others (well, except for Ron Paul) haven't. Doesn't mean that Romney's liabilities have disappeared, or even diminished in the slightest.

4. I agree with Ed Kilgore that these folks are in full-on pander mode to conservative movement rhetoric on domestic policy. My strong sense is that they've bought in to the rhetoric far more than to the actual policies, but that's a constraint, too. The interesting thing as the year goes on will be whether and where the crowd that really wants to run on the policies (Bachmann, Cain, Santorum) will find ways to press the group that wants to run on the rhetoric (Pawlenty, Romney, and probably Perry). For example: what will Romney say to a proposal to shut down the Department of Education? The EPA? Pick an agency.

5.Uh -- is this NYT thing the worst fact-check column ever? There are virtually no facts being checked in the entire piece. Hint: if Romney says he'll "repeal Obamacare," pointing out that his MA plan was similar is not, actually, a correction on a matter of fact.

6. And you know what? I'm perfectly fine with John King's goofy "Coke or Pepsi" questions. This is debate #2, and we still have seven or eight months to go to Iowa, and if it's a competitive race we could easily have another half-dozen of these things after Iowa. A few seconds of frivolity lightens things up. I'm not as thrilled with some of the questioning, but no one has really ever figured out how to handle these early very large fields...the only criticism I fully sign on to is that interrupting things to read questions from Facebook which you then never actually ask seems totally pointless to me. I'm not saying the questions were great, but just that the goofball stuff seems pretty harmless to me, but apparently not to any of the twitter feeds I was looking at. Oh, and I almost forget -- King seemed to totally botch whatever he was going for in the Palin vs. Biden question, and asking what they learned during the debate was undeniably stupid and useless. But the quickies, which were basically: pretend to be a real person for a few seconds? No harm in that.

I think that's it. Just to drill it in again: Barack Obama flopped repeatedly in the early debates in 2008; Herman Cain had people all excited because he supposedly dominated the first GOP debate this time around. Debates can matter in primary elections, but there are going to be lots of them, and people forget them far quicker than they expect.

Debate! (and the Case Against Bachmann)

Ah, the Republicans are debating again, this time with half the libertarians but with the Mittster and four, count 'em four, conservatives who I've been calling implausible nominees. My general "what to watch for" is over at Greg's place, but I'll take the opportunity here to talk a little Michele Bachmann.

I've noticed that there's another round of people saying that we should Take Bachmann Seriously, sparked at least to some extent because she handled an interview with Stephen Moore in the WSJ reasonably well. I continue to dissent, although it depends a bit on what the claims are. It's certainly possible that Bachmann could finish top three in Iowa; indeed, if Perry (and Jeb and Palin) don't wind up in, then it's certain that one of the groups that I'm calling implausible will finish top three in Iowa. I've argued that I think her chances of winning there are not great, but they aren't zero, either.

But as far as winning the nomination...it's no coincidence that no one with qualifications remotely resembling Bachmann's has come even close to getting a nomination.

There are several things involved. One is that running a nationwide campaign really is a different animal than running a campaign with an electorate of under a million people. Another is that the press scrutiny of almost all House campaigns is negligible; yes, statewide candidates receiving nothing resembling the press attention that a national campaign gets, but at least there's something that's at least in the same type of experience. Statewide elected officials also bring better developed fundraising networks to the campaign -- perhaps not quite as important in the age of online fundraising, but still at least somewhat meaningful.

The second part of why I think Bachmann's highly unlikely to win is, as I've argued before, that organized groups really care a lot about presidential nominations, and are very unlikely to support a candidate who they have little confidence in if she wins -- either that she would be a strong candidate in November, or she'll be a good president, or that she'll be a reliable ally. Of course, that latter problem is hardly unique to Bachmann in the current GOP field, and there are several groups or factions who would be quite confident that she would be on their side. But Bachmann's reputation as flaky is definitely a problem for those who would have to accept her nomination. It's worth noting that she doesn't appear to have any clout in the House and she hasn't shown any sides of being a good inside player, which might indicate that her cable news persona was mostly an act that insiders don't take seriously. Not that every nominee has to be an insider favorite; John McCain, for one, certainly wasn't. But McCain, everyone believed, was at least likely to be a strong general election candidate, something that presumably no one really believes about Bachmann.

The other problem (and you may notice that there are really a whole lot of problems here) with the case for Bachmann is that it's not all that likely that she really can achieve the kind of issue separation that might override all of these other problems. By all accounts, neither Mitt Romney nor Tim Pawlenty is going to allow any significant gaps to pop up between themselves and movement conservatives or Tea Party activists.

So. Could Bachmann shine in a debate? Sure -- although there's no guarantee that she can stand out from a panel of other conservatives, especially since Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorum all have strong incentives to out-crazy her and each other. Could she generate some enthusiasm at the grass roots? Yup, with the same caveat.

But what we don't know is how she'll hold up the first time someone in her campaign gets caught leaking something ugly to a reporter; how she will handle it when she gets attacked, instead of automatically supported, by GOP-aligned media (and, yes, if she starts doing well that's going to happen at some point). The odds are strong that those things could trip her up, because the evidence over the years is that they do in fact tend to trip people up. Even more crucial is that we don't how many Republican major players simply wouldn't support her no matter what. The nature of these things suggests that the answer to that last one is going to be "too many," and therefore even if she beats the odds and runs a terrific campaign, the chances of anything coming of it are very, very slim.

Goofy Punditry Alert

More minor presidential campaign news yesterday: Michele Bachmann signed up veteran GOP famous guy Ed Rollins to run her campaign.

Outside of my skepticism about whether Rollins is actually any good at the job -- yes, he did help navigate Mike Huckabee to a win in Iowa in 2008, but other than that his big claim to fame was managing Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign in 1984, which wasn't exactly piloting the Miracle Mets or anything like that -- what really puzzles me is Mark Halperin's reaction:

This is bad news for Tim Pawlenty (Rollins managed Huckabee to an Iowa caucuses win four years ago) and great news for Romney (a strong Bachmann will push the establishment faster into the arms of the frontrunner.

This seems to be, as far as I can tell, a complete misreading of the GOP field. Pawlenty is running as the all-of-the-above candidate; he stands to win if Republicans want a normally credentialed nominee who is solid on every issue without being crazy and if, for a variety of possible reasons, the party rejects Mitt Romney.

As such, he certainly needs to demonstrate at least some ability to draw votes in Iowa, but that's about it; most of what matters to Pawlenty is whether any other candidate shows up who encroaches on his turf, and then what happens to Romney. Bachmann is mostly irrelevant to that.

Now, it could play out the way that Halperin I suppose sees it: Pawlenty finishes well back in Iowa, Bachmann looks like a threat to win the nomination, and Romney is the only one remaining to stop her. But really, the key is Pawlenty doing bad, not the rest of it. If, for example, Iowa finishes Bachmann/Pawlenty/Romney, well, it's just as likely that the former Minnesota governor becomes the focus of Stop Bachmann efforts.

My best guess is that Bachmann is massively overrated by those who pay a lot of attention to cable news networks; I suspect she won't wear well as a presidential candidate. But I guess the main point here is that I'm not at all convinced that it matters very much exactly how well she does in Iowa. She wins or she finishes a weak third or fizzles out and places sixth -- either way, Republicans who want a candidate who is acceptable to conservatives and also promises to be a respectable nominee are choosing between Pawlenty and Romney (and, if he gets in, Rick Perry).