Michelle Bachmann and Her Own Private Iowa

A Facebook friend took some flack for liking yesterday's post on Michelle Bachmann.

An interlocutor came after that post because it doesn't deal with the substantive issues.  I had (it was alleged) pilloried Bachmann for her Christianity and her take on the age of the earth.

'Scuze me.

Not so but far otherwise.

The substantive issue in a presidential election is the political orientation of the candidate, which I dealt with in some detail.  Michelle Bachmann's political orientation, as I remarked yesterday, is quite serious, and quite awful.

Bruce Fein has done a fairly good job of analyzing her position on The U.S. Constitution, in my view.  The links and follow-ups I posted yesterday do a decent job of pointing out that she's less than candid.  Certainly her unwillingness to back down from her insistence that John Quincy Adams was a founding father of the United States is a tiresome and unwelcome point of comparison to the lunar mindscape of Sarah Palin.

That's bad enough.

But my own issue was yesterday and remains today that a person who can say that "Everything I need to know, I learned in Iowa" is either lying or unfit to govern the fifty several states.  Even if she hadn't said it, even if she can be excused as an Iowan speaking in Iowa, her comments about culture and American politics suggest she means just what she said.

And it argues a smallness of spirit that cannot be trusted to exploit the potentially powerful alliance of faith and politics.

There's nothing wrong with her own private Iowa; Iowa's wonderful.  But if it's all you know, if your world is so small that you've nothing to learn that isn't in the Bible or in Iowa, you don't know enough about America to govern it.

And sure, we can talk about policy decisions, if you like.  We can parrot the platform.

But the only credential here is passion, which is a stunningly bad credential: the Iowa comment was a declaration that the small world is the better world, that a narrow view is better than a broad one.   The evidence is that this is really her view.  And no policy's benefits will survive that.   Goodness is not in the bottom line: it's in what you do to create a just and stable and secure community of fifty diverse states and a really, really diverse citizenry.

This nation is not your own private Iowa.

People live around here.

Comments

[Jake Jones]

I can't see how you think Bachmann is so awful. Obama basically took the constitution and stomped all over it. Will Obama Get Reelected in 2012

[Otter]

Hi, Jake, and welcome.

What Obama has or has not done is not really under discussion here. I'm always up for that talk, but not when it distracts from your first objection.

I think Bachmann is so awful because she's participating in a recent Right Wing habit, best exemplified by Sarah Palin, of treating facts as though they're something private, something accessible only to people like herself. Not all politicians have this very bad habit, but she certainly does.

Putting it another way, it's not really "reality" that Bachmann is living in (though I think she has some provocative and good things to say about the economy).

When you're caught saying that John Quincy Adams is a founding father, you blush and say, "I misspoke, but what I meant is...."

But not in today's Right Wing. There, you go and change Wikipedia so it agrees with you.

Sad, really.

But in a serious candidate who has otherwise some things to say, this shit has to go away. It's too Palin. And it's deadly to the mind.