ECM, Hot Air and Muddling alerted me this story in Runner’s World featuring Sarah Palin. I think Sarah Palin is getting a lot of interest from this article, and most because of the photos. But there is more to a political candidate than looks.

Introducing Michele Bachmann

Allow me to introduce you to someone who is even better than Sarah Palin: Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.

About Michele Bachmann:

Congresswoman Bachmann is a leading advocate for tax reform, a staunch opponent of wasteful government spending, and a strong proponent of adherence to the Constitution, as intended by the Founding Fathers. She believes government has grown exponentially, with ObamaCare being the most recent example of its uninhibited growth. Congresswoman Bachmann wants government to make the kind of serious spending decisions that many families and small businesses have been forced to make. She is a champion of free markets and she believes in the vitality of the family as the first unit of government. She is also a defender of the unborn and staunchly stands for religious liberties.

Prior to serving in the U.S. Congress, Bachmann served in the Minnesota State Senate. She was elected to the Minnesota State Senate in 2000 where she championed the Taxpayers Bill of Rights. Before that, she spent five years as a federal tax litigation attorney, working on hundreds of civil and criminal cases. That experience solidified her strong support for efforts to simplify the Tax Code and reduce tax burdens on family and small business budgets. Congresswoman Bachmann also led the charge on education issues in Minnesota calling for the abolishment of Goals 2000 and the Profiles of Learning in its school. She recognized the need for quality schools and subsequently started a charter school for at-risk kids in Minnesota.

Congresswoman Bachmann sits on the Financial Services Committee (FSC) and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The FSC is tasked with oversight of numerous financial sectors including housing, real estate and banking. This gave the Congresswoman keen insight into the housing crisis and credit crunch, leading her to be a staunch opponent of the taxpayer-funded bailout of Wall Street and the Dodd-Frank legislation. Serving on the Intelligence Committee was a welcomed opportunity for Congresswoman Bachmann as she has consistently advocated peace through strength to ensure America’s national security. As a mother of five children and 23 foster children, she has a deep appreciation for that portion of the Oath of Office in which members of Congress vow to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

In July 2010 Congresswoman Bachmann hosted the first Tea Party Caucus meeting because she saw the need for Tea Partiers to have a listening ear in Congress. She is seen as a champion of Tea Party values including the call for lower taxes, renewed focus on the Constitution and the need to shrink the size of government.

Let’s learn a bit more about her from this profile article.

Excerpt:

Michele Bachmann was a self-styled “education researcher” making a run for a Minnesota school board seat in 1999 when the question came up at a candidate forum: If elected, would she serve all four years?

Maybe not, she said.

Bachmann, now a three-term congresswoman and tea party favorite who may run for president in 2012, opened up about a confrontation she’d had with a state senator over Minnesota’s new school standards.

“I told him that if he’s not willing to be more responsive to the citizens, that I may have to run for his seat or find someone else who would do so,” she said, according to a newspaper account of the meeting.

Bachmann lost the school board race, but then knocked off the senator, a fellow Republican, just months later using the standards as her primary issue.

It was an early indicator of a recurring theme: Bachmann often wins by losing.

[…]The race would test her resilience because she would start far back. But as a little-known House member only a few years ago, Bachmann became hero of the conservative tea party movement in part by fighting losing battles with the GOP establishment. Her path to Congress was paved by failed efforts to pass a ban on gay marriage in the Minnesota Legislature.

“She is very good at turning lemons into lemonade all the time,” said Sal Russo, a California political consultant who came to know Bachmann through the tea party.

[…]From her first involvement in politics, the 55-year-old Bachmann has shown a determination to keep pressing forward and find opportunities, even when the way seemed blocked.

In the late 1990s, Bachmann was a stay-at-home mother of five in Stillwater, a scenic St. Croix River town east of St. Paul. Then she was drawn into a revolt over education standards.

[…]”People had been predicting her demise since Day One: ‘Oh, she’s a radical, she’s too far right, she’s too outspoken, she’s too inflammatory,'” Pulkrabek said. “The fact of the matter is, with the exception of the first race, she wins.”

Parlaying her school board defeat into a victorious legislative campaign, she moved to the state Senate and seized on a new issue.

Around Thanksgiving 2003, justices in Massachusetts ruled the commonwealth couldn’t prevent same-sex marriage. Bachmann hit the phones, reaching out to fellow conservatives about making sure gay marriage would stay illegal in Minnesota.

[…]Jeff Davis heard her public appeal through his car radio. Not politically involved at the time, Davis came to the Capitol and pledged to help Bachmann.

[…]”She’s an energizer. She influences people around her,” Davis said. The drive instantly elevated Bachmann’s political profile, he said. “It was a launch point.”

[…]Bachmann’s victory in that race brought her to the national stage and prompted a new focus on fiscal issues. She harnessed the outrage of the tea party, a fledgling political force inflamed by debates over government bailouts and a far-reaching health law pursued by President Barack Obama.

Her outspoken opposition did not stop the health law, but it got her much more television exposure and helped make her a face of the new resistance. In one Fox News interview, Bachmann urged viewers to flood Washington and “go up and down through the halls, find members of Congress, look at the whites of their eyes and say, ‘Don’t take away my health care.'”

Amy Kremer remembers seeing Bachmann’s television plea while on a Tea Party Express bus heading between rallies in Washington state. The next week, Kremer joined Bachmann in the nation’s capital for a big tea party protest.

“You can tell the ones who have the passion, the fire in the belly and are truly speaking from the heart. She’s one of those,” Kremer said. “That comes through.”

The article goes on to explain how Michele got to be a three-term Congresswoman in one of the most liberal states in the entire country.

Read this interview with World Magazine.

Excerpt:

As her politics changed, so did her faith. She attributes a turning point to watching Francis Schaeffer’s Christian worldview video series, How Should We Then Live? “In college I felt like in some ways my mind had been saved,” she said.

For Bachmann, who is a member of Salem Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minn., being a Christian and a politician means fighting for compassion—individual compassion. “People confuse compassion with government being compassionate with other people’s money versus people being compassionate with their own money,” she said.

For the Bachmanns, opening their family’s home to teenage girls was a way to express their Christian faith and live out good economics. That didn’t mean it wasn’t challenging. At one point, Bachmann was nursing a newborn, juggling two toddlers, homeschooling two children, and overseeing four foster teenage girls. “I was so tired, I could hardly pick my head up off the pillow,” she admitted. These days, all of her foster children have moved on, but she still makes time for her mostly grown children, who range in age from 26 to 14.

…Bachmann says for her one thread ties all the day’s obligations together: “radical abandonment to God’s call.”

Listen to this interview with Michele Bachmann, by Pamela Geller. (The linked post has an MP3)

Excerpt:

Bachmann: Right. We actually, this is a man-made, government-made disaster, this economic conundrum we’re in right now. We could see ourselves go forward next quarter already if we do a few things, if we would do this. If we would permanently zero out the capital gains tax for four years, so that we could let people know that for four years there would be zero capital gains tax. Take the business tax rate from the second highest in the world, 34%, and cut that down to 9% for a corporate tax rate, that would be bring in foreign investment and jobs back into the United States. Completely eliminate the death tax, completely eliminate the alternative minimum tax, and then I think that we need to bold on income tax. Scrap the income tax code, and put into place a tax system where everyone has to get in on the game.

Whether it’s through a national sales tax, or whether it’s through a flat tax, and my personal opinion, I’d love to see in our perfect world a flat tax rate that’s no more than 10% on any American on the federal level, and then that’s it. And then we would pull way back on our spending, including eliminating the federal department of education. We don’t need the federal department of education, that function needs to happen at the state level. And then we need to go through, dramatically change what government does, that we truly are a constitutional government acting under our enumerated powers, and then we do no more, because the number one duty of government is to protect the health and the safety of the American people, and we need to make sure that we focus on first things first.

And she is very pretty, just like Sarah Palin:

Let’s look at how she does in interviews.

First, Bret Baier spends some time with Michele going over her pluses and minuses as a candidate: (MP3 version here – 3 Mb)

Second, here is another interview with popular social conservative Mike Huckabee: (MP3 version here – 3 Mb)

You can learn more about Michele in the links below.

Campaign speeches, interviews and debates

Speeches:

• Michele Bachmann’s Republican Leadership Conference speech
• Michele Bachmann’s speech at the Right Online Conference

Reactions from her recent debate performance:

• Washington Post
• UK Telegraph

Profiles of Michele Bachmann:

• ABC News
• WORLD Magazine

And here are some of her media interviews and speeches in the House of Representatives.

You can contribute to her campaign right here. You can be her friend on Facebook here and also here.

Related posts

• What books does Michele Bachmann read on vacation?
• The Wintery Knight demands that Michele Bachmann run for President
• New Michele Bachmann interviews on the economy
• MUST-HEAR: Michele Bachmann gives the best speech ever
• Michele Bachmann beats RINO Mitt Romney in fundraising
• Michele Bachmann looking presidential against the liberal media
• Michele Bachmann courts homeschoolers in Iowa speech
• Michele Bachmann and Paul Ryan on the Wisconsin teacher union pensions
• Video and transcripts of response speeches by Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann
• What was the context of Michele Bachmann’s “armed and dangerous” comment?
• AT LAST: Michele Bachmann open to presidential run in 2012
• Megyn Kelly and Michele Bachmann on the Bush tax cut deal
• CNS News interviews Michele Bachmann
• Michele Bachmann requests the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder
• Michele Bachmann attacks government bailout of unions
• Michele Bachmann makes the case for limited government
• Why is the left so angry with Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin?
• Michele Bachmann on Fox News with Laura Ingraham
• Democrats kill Michele Bachmann’s attempt to freeze federal salaries
• Michele Bachmann on the US taxpayer-funded bailout of Greece
• Michele Bachmann explains the Obama’s Wall Street bailout bill
• Michele Bachmann promises to work to repeal Obamacare
• Video of Michele Bachmann defending unborn children
• Michele Bachmann’s passionate and inspiring speech at CPAC 2010
• Michele Bachmann talks about Obamacare and the stimulus package
• Michele Bachmann wants to cancel bonuses for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac CEOs
• Michele Bachmann analyzes Obama’s latest foreign policy blunders
• Congresswomen denounce Obamacare’s rationing of breast cancer exams
• Michele Bachmann video on the future of Obamacare
• Moderate George Will lauds the virtues of Michele Bachmann
• Michele Bachmann is Mrs November in new calendar (and her best video clips)