Image via WikipediaMinnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann won the (admittedly meaningless) Iowa straw poll Saturday, eking out a 200-vote victory over Texas congressman Ron Paul in a race to see which Republican presidential candidate could buy the most votes to make their campaigns more viable when the Iowa Caucus is held in a few months.Tim Pawlenty, former Minnesota governor, finished a distant third in the poll. Now he's also a former presidential candidate, having announced on ABC's "This Week" Sunday that he's dropping out of the race. Pawlenty never could get past a mediagenic candidate from his own state, and the fact that he was just plain vanilla.
But the straw poll was upstaged by two men who didn't participate in the first place. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the presumed front-runner, stopped by long enough to appear in a Fox News-televised debate in which he said basically nothing, then turned up at the Iowa State Fair and told his audience that corporations are people, too. (Yes they are, Governor. People with more money than God.)
Speaking of which, Texas Governor Rick Perry chose this moment to throw his hat into the ring. He's the latest GOP candidate who thinks God is on his side, and wants everyone to know it. As a selling point, Perry likes to brag about the favorable business climate (read: low to no taxes) that enables his state to have a lower unemployment rate than the rest of the country, usually at the expense of other states. One thing Perry doesn't brag about, however, is how much debt Texas has taken on. Isn't he also the guy who threatened to pull Texas out of the United States?
As for Bachmann, she's had an interesting week. First, there was the Newsweek cover of her looking like a wide-eyed lunatic (which, to some people, is not far from the truth). The uproar over that picture was such that even the National Organization for Women--no fans of Bachmann--objected. Then at the debate, she held her own in a war of words against a desperate Pawlenty, and successfully deflected a question concerning a comment she made in a video years ago about being submissive to her husband.
Both Perry and Bachmann will be competing for the same evangelical Christian voters in the upcoming primaries. But Bachmann may have created concerns among those voters and others that, once she gets into the White House, her husband Marcus will really be calling the shots.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama has work to do to get back in the good graces of his supporters and the electorate. Obama's recent poll numbers are the lowest of his presidency, because he failed to rein in the Tea Party-backed Republicans in Congress who threatened to take the country's economy down with them. The economy tanked anyway, with the stock market on a roller coaster, and the country's credit rating taken down a notch. So this week, the President is traveling on a bus through southern Minnesota and Iowa to promote his economic policies. For Obama, it's time for him to start proving to the voters he wants to be more than (as Bachmann would put it) a ONE . . . TERM . . . PRESIDENT.
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