Bachmann For President? Fortunately, I Doubt It.

While it is still only early 2011, American politics is steadily gearing up for November 2012. The next presidential election. We already know that the Democratic candidate will be incumbent President Barack Obama - frankly any talk of a primary challenge from the left is ludicrous and if it were to be taken seriously would be a frankly suicidal strategy for the Democrats to pursue. So that only leaves the question of who will be the Republican candidate? How will they regroup after the fiasco that was the McCain/Palin 2008 campaign?

While the current front runner appears to be former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (and I find it amusing that when the party looks for a new face they seem to turn to the face of the party during the Clinton administration), it appears as though Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (head of the House Tea Party Caucus) is setting up for a run at the Republican nomination. I highly doubt that she will be successful in her attempt to clinch the nomination, but a part of me is willing her to do so.

During my time at the New Statesman, I wrote two articles about Sarah Palin, and how if she gets the Republican nod, there is no way she will be elected President. Admittedly without looking at the numbers, I would be even more confident that this will be the case for Bachmann.

Bachmann first drew national attention to herself in 2008 when she appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC proposing that members of the United States Congress should be investigated to find out which of them were "pro-America" and which were "anti-America". It did not stop there either. Since then she has also claimed that CO2 is "a harmless gas" because it is "naturally occurring", has very little grasp of American history and has even used violent rhetoric while speaking out against President Obama.

It is fine to disagree with a sitting President, but Bachmann routinely gets the facts wrong when complaining about the Democratic agenda. Facts are important. Bachmann either willfully lies to the public in order to serve her own political ends or she is too ignorant to realize that she is wrong a lot. Either way you look at it, that is not someone that should be elected to the highest office in the United States. Ignorance, willful or otherwise, is not an attribute the most powerful person in the world should possess.

Bachmann is representative of the Tea Party as a whole, which is frankly a desperate, misinformed and uneducated resistance to an imagined threat. All one has to do is look at the actions of the Republican governors of Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida to realize what the nation would be like under a Tea Party government. That is a genuinely worrying prospect unless you are fortunate enough to be super-rich already, in which case you'll do wonderfully out of it. Luckily I suspect that Bachmann's woeful ignorance and propensity to use violent rhetoric will prevent her from getting anywhere near the levers of power.