by Jules Witcover

Michele Bachmann, the latest declared Republican candidate for president, has been as leader of the House Tea Party Caucus a leading critic of the American news media. But in the run-up to her announcement of candidacy, she should be grateful to the objects of her ire.

In advance of that formal debut, the steely Minnesota congresswoman milked the full benefit of the press willingness to trumpet what prospective candidates intend to do before they do it. Bachmann cleverly made the most of it by first declaring her intent to run on a nationally televised candidate debate, gaining as much press coverage as anything said by anybody else in the debate.

Then she was handed a particular hammer with which to assail the news media during a Sunday talk-show appearance on, of all places, conservative-friendly Fox News, when moderator Chris Wallace bluntly and unprofessionally asked her, "Are you a flake?"

Bachmann, rather than lashing back, calmly blew the whistle on him. "I think that would be insulting to say something like that because I'm a serious person," she said, leaving the moderator momentarily flustered. Wallace, the host of one of the better Sunday morning political discussion shows and son of veteran CBS master inquisitor Mike Wallace, later apologized.

Next, the Des Moines Register came out with its presidential preference poll, regarded as an early bellwether of public standing for the Iowa precinct caucuses that kick off delegate selection for the presidential nominating conventions. It showed Bachmann an eyelash behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, with 22 percent support to his 23.

Taken together, these news-media gifts presents to Bachmann have helped create the early buzz that she is indeed "as serious person" who should not be dismissed as a mere Sarah Palin clone or carbon copy.

Unlike Palin, who was plucked from national obscurity as governor of Alaska by 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain as a Hail Mary pass to salvage his own campaign, Bachmann has won her own plaudits in the party as a conservative cheerleader and lately a surprisingly effective fund-raiser.

This is not to say that Bachmann does not share Palin's proclivity for misspeaking on historical facts and characterizations of opponents. She has yet to bury her 2008 remark that Obama shared "anti-American views" or her recent slip in New Hampshire that the first shots in the American Revolution were fired there rather than in Massachusetts.

In her formal announcement in her birthplace of Waterloo, Iowa, she claimed movie idol John Wayne had also been born there, when he was born in Winterset, Iowa. She apparently confused him with notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy, a one-time Waterloo resident. But candidates of both parties often fall victim to such slips; the peril is having them seen as a pattern of carelessness or just plain deception.

After the mistake in Iowa, Bachmann took refuge in the friendly confines of the show of ultraconservative talker Sean Hannity, where she noted that she least had gotten the state right. Hannity accommodatingly aired some Obama slips, including having once referred to the "57 states" of the Union. The host led Bachmann through the test, asking her "Do you know how many states are there in the United States of America?" His student-guest replied: "Fifty."

Presidential campaigns are long and strewn with potholes around which all candidates must navigate. Their length often is criticized and the risk for them can be overexposure. The candidates strive daily to sell themselves and their political views to a public often encountering them for the first time, in person in the primary and caucus election states or just on television and in the printed press.

A first imperative in a crowded field like the one that now exists in the Republican Party is to get the voters' attention and interest, and Bachmann's opening days have certainly achieve that objective. The rest is up to her, as she seeks not simply to keep firing up her conservative base but also to convince others that she deserves not to be dismissed as a flake, but judged as a serious person.

 

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