STANLEY KURTZ AND ANDREW McCARTHY: TWO COLUMNS ON MICHELE BACHMANN
Bachmann Smart, Media Dumb
Seems like only yesterday when Michelle Bachmann was supposed to be dumb. Come to think of it, it was yesterday, until about 8:30pm anyway. I found out how silly it was to think of Bachmann that way late last year, when I heard her speak at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend. I was sitting at a table full of professor types. We kept turning to each other and saying, “This woman is sharp, not at all the dunce she’s been portrayed as.”
Liberalism nowadays may be the last great holdout of old-fashioned prejudice. By telling themselves they’re against group hatreds of all kinds, and dismissing their opponents’ arguments as nothing but bigotry in disguise, liberals grant themselves license to despise. They swear, mock, and hate with a clean conscience, never guessing they’re turning liberalism itself into an outpost of bigotry in reverse. The flip side of liberal guilt is this hidden license to hate.
The greatest targets of this wave of liberal bigotry of late have been Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. By joining the pariah class of conservatives, Palin and Bachmann turn themselves into legitimate outlets for the left’s suppressed prejudice against women. That yields shock when Palin’s emails show her to have been a good governor and an admirable person, or when Bachmann shines in debate.
The liberal mavens of the media have enabled these slurs on Palin and Bachmann. What a pleasure to see these two women expose their tormenters as fools.
| Re: Bachmann Smart, Media Dumb
I second Stanley’s analysis. I also saw Michele in person for the first time at David Horowitz’s retreat, and I was amazed at her combination of command and charisma. She spoke at great length about a wide variety of topics and took questions from the very engaged audience — without notes, with clarity and depth, and with a nice mix of humor and charm. She’s got a good lawyer’s mind for getting from A to B to C without losing the big picture, and she has the rare ability to grasp wonky details without sounding like a wonk. We ended up having a long chat afterwards. She wanted to talk about Gitmo, enemy combatants, and the relative merits of military commissions versus civilian trials. I was really impressed. This was not her area of the law (she was a tax lawyer in real life), but she clearly got it: Her questions were pointed, I got the sense that she really wanted to know why civilian trials were problematic (i.e., she wasn’t looking for a couple of soundbites that she could slide into the next speech), and she was a quick study — there was no need to revisit at the end of the conversation some esoteric point we’d covered at the beginning of the conversation. Obviously, I was impressed. We ended up collaborating on an op-ed — which ran here on NRO and in the New York Post — on why, if the Obama administration did not reverse its decision to give KSM and the 9/11 jihadists a civilian trial, Congress should step in and force the president’s hand. Michele was a dynamo on this issue, and her forcefulness had a lot to do with the public and congressional pressure that ultimately induced the administration to back down. It would be a huge mistake to underestimate her. I think she’s going to make a lot of her critics look awfully dumb by the time this is over. The Dems moved heaven and earth to try to unseat her in the last two elections because they know she’s a force to be reckoned with. Oh … and did I mention that she beat them handily? |
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