“The economy is tanking,” she said at a press conference at the Capitol on Wednesday, a day after returning from her latest campaign trip to Iowa. A standing-room-only crowd of reporters scribbled notes and clicked pictures. “The real world is telling all the politicians, get your act together. Stop being political. Stop playing with us. ... Pay off the interest on the debt. You can do that.”
Her influence is more muted on Capitol Hill, where she has positioned herself as an outsider and shown little interest in the kind of deal-making that yields results there. A third-term congresswoman from the 6th District of Minnesota, she has sponsored few successful bills and does not hold a leadership post.
Since the beginning of the session, Bachmann has been the lead sponsor of seven bills, none of them yet successful. Of the flurry of bills introduced to deal with the debt limit, Bachmann is listed as a co-sponsor of two. Fellow members of Congress say she has not reached out to convince them of her position on the debt ceiling, nor has she affected their vote.
Bachmann has shot back at her critics, saying she has served as a loyal opposition, voting against efforts that increased government spending and regulation. And she said that her influence over the grass roots is significant, noting that masses of conservative activists who converged for a rally she helped organize against last year’s health-care overhaul.
Her supporters note that Obama had less than three years in the U.S. Senate before he announced his candidacy for president.
Grilled by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly this week about her lack of executive experience, she spun it this way: “I have executive experience in the real world and in the private sector. It’s nice to have government experience, but quite frankly what’s more important is, am I right on the issues and am I right on the policies?”
The apparent effectiveness gap between Michele Bachmann the legislator and Michele Bachmann the presidential candidate and tea party hero has become fodder for her critics. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, another GOP hopeful, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that Bachmann’s congressional record is “nonexistent” and that Republican voters want more than “just speech capabilities.”
Tom Ridge, Homeland Security head under President George W. Bush, told the Washington Times this week that the job of president “requires a set of experiences that [Bachmann] just doesn’t have in her portfolio.”
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