Bachmann's Money Machine Doesn't Make Her A Presidential Contender

But her latest contradiction shows how badly she wants to run

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's war chest had a great first quarter. Between the $1.7 million raised for her re-election and another half-a-million from a political action committee, the leader of the Tea Party Caucus finished ahead of every presumptive Republican presidential contender in fundraising for the first three months of 2011. And it shouldn't be surprising. She won re-election last year after raising $13.5 million, more than any other candidate for the House last season.

The Daily Mail wants to make out with her

As a quick aside, The Daily Mail ran the Bachmann fundraising story with this headline:

The lede and the first few grafs set up a story about how all other presidential hopefuls, including the President himself, should start preparing to tangle with her in 2012. But the story they deliver is that Obama -- who raised $1.5 million at a single fundraiser last week, has several similar events planned in the next few months, and raised $750 million in his 2008 campaign -- probably won't lose a money fight with Bachmann, if she runs in 2012.

But I digress. Where the Daily Mail failed, The Christian Science Monitor succeeded in explaining what exactly will determine whether she runs and how successful she will be if she does.

On the minus side for Bachmann, she has a fairly thin political resume... She can be polarizing. And she has a tendency to misspeak... Still, she has nothing to lose by running for president, analysts say. She can liven up the debates and carry a torch for the small-government, low-tax tea party movement. And if she falls short of the nomination, she can still run for reelection to the House. “She will be a well-funded candidate; that isn’t her problem,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. “Her problem is that most Republicans are going to understand that if they nominate her, they have a small chance of winning in November.”

Her staunch opposition to President Obama makes her a logical choice to run against him in 2012. Her fundraising abilities make that a possibility. But her chances of actually beating him, even if she puts up a really good fight, seem insurmountably slim -- unless you write headlines for The Daily Mail.

But the real reason I chose to write about Bachmann today is the speech she gave at a Tea Party Express rally a few days ago. It was at the Robert A. Taft Memorial on Capitol Hill. Don't feel ashamed that you don't know who that is. He was the son of President William Howard Taft, but that's not why he got a memorial. Seventy years ago Taft, a Republican Senator from Ohio, was a conservative poster-boy who earned his bona fides by opposing the New Deal.  Bonus Trivia: The "A." stands for Alphonso.

But Taft really represented the same kind of conservatism embraced by Bachmann and her Tea Party supporters. So the location was apropos, the audience was friendly and the mood was just right for one of Bachmann's trademark contradictions to get ample applause and the odd whistle. And it also illustrates just how much she wants to run against Obama, or at least "Obamacare."

She promised to vote against any budget proposal that doesn't defund the healthcare reform law, a vote which in effect is a vote in favor of a government shutdown, and then warned the crowd that if government were to grind to a halt over the budget, the Democrats would try to blame the Tea Party for causing it. She's playing "a cynical game," hoping for a shutdown and then blaming the other side, while preemptively accusing the other side of doing the same. And the crowd loved her for it.

"They want to shut the government down and they want to turn you into their scapegoat and say it's the Tea Party's fault for shutting the government down.... They're afraid of you because you're powerful," she said.

The eight minute video of Bachmann's speech is posted below. Most of the good stuff is in the last minute and a half, so I encourage you to listen to at least that much of it.