She was speaking at the Heritage Foundation luncheon; afterward a reporter caught up to her:
Afterward, I asked Bachmann if she supported the effort within Congress to lift a cap on BP's liability and ensure that the oil company pays for all claims once the disaster is over.
"They have to lift the liability cap," said Bachmann. "But if I was the head of BP, I would let the signal get out there -- 'We're not going to be chumps, and we're not going to be fleeced.' And they shouldn't be.
It's funny because a guy wrote in to another progressive blog I write for the other day to tell everybody that Michele was a "damned good politician." I asked him what he meant by that, but he said he didn't want to get into a back and forth with me about Michele's "political skills."
I know the guy didn't mean that Michele was a great statesman when he asserted she was a "damned good politician" (he thinks she's a loon, too.) But if he was trying to compliment her on her political instincts, her judgment--well, see the quote above.
(CONTINUED)
Not only is the Bachmann statement reprehensible in and of itself: it's a stupid thing to say out loud, even if she really believes it. (All she had to say to finesse it was "BP should pay all legitimate claims"--which is what she will say if she backs down to clarify, as she so often does. If her goal was to suck up to BP and big energy, that would have done the trick: insulting the victims was so unnecessary and stupid that even BP wouldn't have done something so obviously heartless.)
In this remark, she's revealing her native demagogue instincts once again: to demonize millions of relatively powerless fellow Americans--to demonize the injured party she's supposed to be protecting, in order to take the part of those who are doing the injury. In this case, she tells us that it's BP (the authors of the biggest man-made environmental disaster since Chernobyl) who need our sympathy, and the people of the Gulf Coast are some "fount of fraud."
So why does that commenter I mentioned think that she's a "damn good politician?" We can only assume, so my assumption is that he thinks that because he read it somewhere. The notion that Bachmann's "a damn good politician" is part of a narrative that's come out the traditional media and trickled down into some of the blogs. The thinking that a legislator who's said so many wacky things and done practically nothing in ten years of elected life must be some kind of "secret genius" at politics--simply because she's survived and thrived despite her host of "macaca moments."
Nah-ah. The reason she wins elections is that she runs as a conservative Republican in a plus-7 Republican district. The reason she thrives as a national figure is that she's got the backing of the national conservative media (eg, Fox and the evangelical broadcasters.) It's not genius to win a district that always elects Republicans. It's not genius to win such a district narrowly. It's not "damned good politician-ness" that won her a national reputation and following: it's the patronage of conservative broadcasting and the national evangelical political machine, who have been relentlessly promoting her for almost a decade.
This is the mentality of too many political observers: if you win elections despite the fact that you're a nut--then it must be true that you have some sort of "formidable political mind and instincts." God forbid that those political observers should look at the facts and derive the truth: she's not a formidable anything in and of herself, in and of herself she's nothing--her success is due to the fact that she's the telegenic puppet of people who run a lot of conservative media.
Bachmann, above, is telling us what Republicans in power would do about the spill: police the victims rather than BP, and publicize any fraudulent claims against big oil in conservative media. The Dem response could be to create jobs by cleaning up the oil, keeping regional economies going for years. Who should the non-committed voters put in at election time, if those become the alternatives?
Next:
INCOMING! Look out, it's another POLL!
An NPR poll flouts conventional wisdom and includes Bachmann's seat in the ten most competitive races in the country:
...the NPR poll would appear to show at least some vulnerability for Rep. Michele Bachmann. While the study looked at 60 seats held by Democrats that could switch parties, it only listed 10 Republican seats that could turn blue, and Bachmann’s is among them. Still, CQ Politics continues listing the district as "Likely Republican," and Rothenberg Political Report lists the seat as "safe."
LINK:
Bachmann says the real victim here could be BP:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/...
LINK:
NPR poll lists Bachmann/Clark race as competitive:
http://minnesotaindependent.com/...
LINK:
NPR says it's competitive. Make it so! Send ten bucks to Tarryl Clark, Michele's sane opponent!
http://tarrylclark.com/