My column yesterday was about how Michele Bachmann could turn out to be a surprisingly formidable candidate, and one of the points I made was that reporters can't seem to write about her candidacy without talking about her and Sarah Palin as a matched set. But only because of their shared opposition to quantitative easing by the Fed -- not because they're both ladies. It's in the same way that every article about Mitt Romney talks about how he and Jon Huntsman are interchangeable, and one can only take votes from the other. Oh wait...
And so today, Politico gives us this: "Stars Collide: Michele Bachmann vs. Sarah Palin." Well, at least they didn't title the article "Reeowr: Cat Fight!"
Even though I find the thought of Michele Bachmann as president kind of horrifying, I'll bet she's getting pretty tired of this stuff, and she has every right to be. Although it might help if your campaign manager doesn't go around saying things like this: "People are going to say, 'I gotta make a choice and go with the intelligent woman who's every bit as attractive.'" That's Ed Rollins, Republican wise man and newly hired Bachmann campaign manager, speaking on a radio show about the difference between his candidate and the former Alaska governor. While it's possible that he meant "attractive" in the sense of "being an appealing candidate," if that were the case he probably would have said Bachmann was more attractive than Palin, not "every bit as attractive."
Look, there are some ways in which Bachmann and Palin are similar. For instance, they're both extremely conservative, fully embrace Founding Father Fetishism, and are not known for their policy chops. But there are ways in which nearly every candidate is similar to nearly every other candidate. If you start asking Romney about the similarities between him and Tim Pawlenty every time you interview him, and do the same with aides and the ubiquitous anonymous "strategists" reporters rely so heavily on, you'll be able to get enough quotes to fill plenty of articles about how the two are pretty much the same, and if you're a dull-former-governor-trying-to-seem-more-conservative-than-he-is kind of voter, you'll have to decide between them. But that wouldn't be particularly enlightening. So why is it necessary to do it with the female candidates?
