The Bachmann transformation

THE BACHMANN TRANSFORMATION: From small town isolationist to Republican front-runner. Ryan Lizza observes:

Bachmann was getting interested in politics just as her party was getting interested in people like her. In the late nineteen-nineties, she began travelling throughout Minnesota, delivering lectures in churches, and writing pamphlets, on the perils of a federal education law known as School to Work, which supported vocational training, and a Minnesota education law known as Profile of Learning, which set state education standards. In one pamphlet, she wrote that federal education law “embraces a socialist, globalist worldview; loyalty to all government and not America.” In another, she warned of a “new restructuring of American society,” beginning with “workforce boards” that would tell every student the specific career options he or she could pursue, turning children into “human resources for a centrally planned economy.”

Once in the State Senate, Bachmann rallied Republicans against Profile of Learning, and the statute was eventually repealed. She led fights to defend the public display of the Ten Commandments and to ban same-sex marriage. A gay member of the State Senate says that she once prayed over his desk. In 2006, she was elected to Congress, and, within a year, because of her frequent, and controversial, appearances on cable TV, she had become one of the most recognizable faces in the Republican caucus. Soon, evangelical activists were talking about her as a potential Presidential candidate. This year, Bachmann was selected by the Tea Party to give its response to Obama’s State of the Union address. 

An astute piece, and one worth reading in full. Sorry, by the way, about my obsession with this woman over the last few weeks. It's a sort of morbid fascination.