(Flickr/Gage Skidmore)Michele Bachmann is on fire. And all it took was a CNN debate in which she didn't say anything particularly stupid, pandered to the crowd effectively, and announced that she is, in fact, running. So today she's got an
article in the New York Times, an
article in the Washington Post (on the front page), and 9,302 hits on Google News in the past 24 hours. It's Bachmannia. But the one story you want to read is TAP senior correspondent
Michelle Goldberg's in the Daily Beast. You can learn about Bachmann's deep roots in the religious right, her belief that gayness is satanic and can be cured, how as a student at Oral Roberts University she was the research assistant for a book advocating that America become a Christian theocracy, how the idea that she "raised" 23 foster children may be a wee bit of an exaggeration (as admirable as being a foster parent is, she had a foster care license for 7 ½ years; some of those 23 kids could have been with her family for as little as a week or a month), and how she got her start by turning a sleepy school board election into a culture war throwdown. Bachmann is not going to be president -- she's far too much of a factional candidate to ever garner support outside the GOP's right wing. But she is going to be a force in this race. The question is whether she pulls candidates with a better shot of winning, like
Mitt Romney, to the right in order to compete with her, or whether she frees them up to focus more on the economy and less on the godless socialist homosexual menace.
