Michele Bachmann has a putative "apology" making its way onto the airwaves here in Minnesota.
The video is
here.
In this "apology",
she never apologises for anything. This is as close as she comes to an apology:
"I may not always get my words right, but I know that my heart is right, because my heart is for you - for your children, and for the blessings of liberty to remain for our great country."
Nothing in those words apologises for her remarks accusing Obama or fellow Congressional members of being "anti-American". She is instead sticking with her line that she never said what she said; that her remarks were merely misconstrued. Bachmann seems to be saying that
she tends to say a lot of crazy stuff, but her heart is in the right place.
And, coming from someone
who works for the government, this is bizarre:
"Once again, our nation is at a crossroads, and it's a time for choosing. We could embrace government as the answer to our problems, or we could choose freedom and liberty."
It's hard to see
how this fits in with her previous characterisation of Democrats as "anti-American". She questioned Obama's allegiance to the country based on his
weak association with Bill Ayers, not because of some "Big Government" agenda. She has always been one of those Republicans that condemns as "treasonous" anyone who criticises the President or the Iraq occupation. She has consistently voted to retain the most onerous parts of the Patriot Act, and has strongly defended the illegal wire-tapping programme.
Bachmann has never seen any legislation promoting a police state that she didn't like. And she has seldom failed to
impugn the patriotism of anyone opposing more government intrusion and surveillance.
This has always been the basis of her "anti-American" thesis: that "liberals" are, in effect, working for "the enemy".
Now, however, she has made a radical shift and claims that 'liberals" are "anti-American" because they want Big Government and are opposed to "freedom and liberty".
This isn't an apology, it's a distraction.
Many people have seen Bachmann on television and wondered about Minnesota voters. How could Minnesota have elected this crazy woman?
The answer is her made-to order, gerrymandered district and the weak Democrat who ran against her in 2006.
Bachmann was elected in 2006, at the same time as Keith Ellison was elected to the House and Amy Klobuchar was elected to the Senate. These were both Democrats, and both won by large margins. Ellison is notable for being a Muslim-American; the first in the House. So
the idea that Minnesotans are crazy wingnuts should find a full stop right there. Bachmann's district is a long and fairly narrow swath to the north of the Twin Cities metro area. This mostly exurban and suburban district has undergone a profound change in the past twenty years. The long-time rural citizens have seen
a massive influx of "refugees" from the urban core. They were fleeing pretty much the same thing: minorities, crime,
and the ordinances of the city. They were also attracted by much lower prices for land and much cheaper housing, and the chance to raise their children free of "corrupting influences". They bought themselves long commutes into the urban areas as part of the bargain, and were hard hit by the increase in gas prices.
Mostly, however, these refugees
brought all of those "corrupting influences" along with them into their new Paradise of liberty. Huge housing developments crammed people into treeless refugee zones that were not much more spacious than the urban yards they left behind. Property taxes went up markedly as localities had to expand waste-water treatment, roads, parks, landfills, etc. The new residents found their neighbours' proximity distasteful and begin to demand ordinances to deal with the problems of sharing space with farms and with the activities of their fellow "freedom-seekers". Police departments expanded. Strip malls moved in. "Big box" retailers squeezed out the local businesses. What were once friendly communities became mere groupings of individuals jealously guarding their tiny fiefdoms, screaming for the local government to
simultaneously "do something" about their neighbours and to "get off our backs".
The inherent contradiction with exurban development is that
it requires strong regulation to avoid massive inefficiencies and steep tax increases, while the people you are trying to attract are
fleeing increased regulation and high taxes.
The metro area was facing a wave of communities further and further away demanding increased amenities without increased taxes. The Metropolitan Council at last put its foot down and drew a boundary for waste-water and water services. These exurban communities would have to find
local solutions to get rid of their sewage, dig local wells, and lay their own water lines. This meant that these "enclaves of freedom" had to enforce ordinances covering septic tanks and drain tiles that simply dumped the refugee's filth into local streams. The alternative was severe contamination of the drinking water. Environmental regulations stopped people from simply dumping waste oil on the ground or draining their radiators into storm drains. Treatment plants had to be built to deal with a massive local increase in waste from the new residents who wanted
an urban lifestyle in a rural infrastructure. Landfill space became scarce, and developments were being built closer and closer to them;
regulations were demanded for noxious odours and vermin.
Thus, the influx of "liberty-seekers" became their own undoing.
And local politicians were simply not up to the task. These refugees moved into local politics, bringing a simplistic libertarian view and a visceral hatred of taxes. Thus, precious lead time was squandered with stop-gap solutions that made no one happy and merely made more expensive options inevitable. This made it even easier to frame "government" as the "problem". And the interests of the long-time residents consistently lost out to those of the new refugees.
Culturally, the district was a seething battleground of people unable to come together for the common good due to the "get off my back" ideology of the refugees. Evangelical churches made big inroads, due to the refugees' desire to raise their children in an uncorrupted environment.
And so the stage was set for Republican domination of the district. The evangelical church communities were organised into political influence groups, and the Republican message of less regulation and "traditional values" found fertile ground. The one thing everyone agreed on was their
profound hatred of the "other": racial minorities, immigrants, non-Christians, and those "communist" city folk.
Into this breach stepped Michelle Bachmann.
Strongly evangelical, she claimed that God chose her for Congress. Who can argue with God, after all? If one didn't vote for her, you were then
voting against God. Jumping fully on the fading Bush Bandwagon, her election was seen by Party officials as some kind of rebound in a year when Republicans were generally kicked out of office. In spite of a fairly narrow win margin, she behaved as if she had been crowned Prom Queen. She proudly tied herself to the national neo-con agenda and forgot all about her little backwater district. She said all of the right things, sucked up to all of the right people, and voted as she was told to by the Republican Party masters. Bachmann was the perfect drone for movement conservatives.
The voters in her district were completely taken for granted. When gas prices hit these refugee commuters hard, she had a typical and grossly simplistic solution: drill, baby, drill. Regulations were the problem, not her constituents' choice to live an hour away from their jobs or their lifestyles' complete dependence on multiple vehicles. When foreclosures threatened the dreams of these urban refugees, it was the damnable regulations that were to blame. And when the economy crashed, it was again "hyper-regulation" of banks and investment firms that caused it. Meanwhile, she made regular appearances on local Christian radio programmes to keep up the drumbeat of hatred against gays, Muslims, and "baby killers".
While many see her remarks on "Hardball" as her downfall, the truth is that the handwriting was on the wall with
the Petters' scandal. Bachmann
endorsed a con man with a shady history, and on the strength of that voucher many Christian charities and churches were fleeced on a large scale. Pastors lost their homes, charities shut down, and churches were in a financial crisis.
Bachmann did some public hand-wringing for evangelical consumption, but this was one case where she could not blame regulations for the situation. If Michelle was truly guided by God, how this could immense lapse of judgement have occurred? Faith was shaken, angry people wanted answers, and so Bachmann did what movement conservatives always do:
created a distraction.
Never mind about Bachmann's links to the con man Vennes -
the real thing we all need to fear is the "anti-American views" of Obama and other members of Congress. She creates another false dichotomy similar to her endorsement by God: if you
don't vote for me, people
who hate America will gain power. Bachmann is on the job, folks, guarding against excessive regulations
and the treasonous elite out to destroy us. That makes you
trust her again, right?
Bachmann really said nothing different on Hardball that she hasn't said before to neo-con audiences, or that movement conservatives don't say on a regular basis
to each other. It's the Party line narrative: Democrats hate America, they want us to lose in Iraq and in the GWOT, they are guilty of treason, they have a socialist agenda, they hate Christians and God, etc.
Bachmann's real mistake, the one for which the GOP has taken her to task for,
was to speak those internal talking points to the masses. To the Republican faithful, Bachmann is merely
a big-mouth, not a crazy McCarthyite.
And so she claims she was taken out of context. She claims she never said what everyone can plainly see in the video she said. She denies saying that she thinks "liberals are anti-American", when
nobody ever said she did. She said
Obama is anti-American due to his "associations with Ayers", and she said that
members of Congress should be examined for potential anti-American views -
not "liberals".
Then she announces an "apology" in which she frames the issue as a struggle between "liberty" and "government",
which has nothing to do with putatively "anti-American views".
If Bachmann loses this election, it will mean that
movement conservatism cannot prevail in a district tailor-made for that philosophy. It will mean that her "politics of false dichotomy" are not strong enough to prevail in Minnesota. And it will mean that the neo-cons will lose another pawn in Congress.
