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Titanium spine: Michele Bachmann one point behind Romney in Iowa poll

06/26/2011 Wintery Knight 4 Comments

Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann

The Des Moines Register reports that Michele Bachmann trails Romney by one point in the latest poll from Iowa.

Excerpt:

Two-time candidate Mitt Romney and tea party upstart Michele Bachmann are neck and neck leading the pack, and retired pizza chief Herman Cain is in third place in a new Des Moines Register Iowa Poll of likely participants in the state’s Republican presidential caucuses.

The results are bad news for the earnest Tim Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor who is in single digits despite a full-throttle campaign.

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and business executive, claims 23 percent, and Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman and evangelical conservative, garners 22 percent. Neither has done heavy lifting in Iowa.

The rest of the Republican field is at least 12 points behind them.

Cain, a retired Georgia business executive, is the top choice for 10 percent of potential caucusgoers.

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose entire Iowa campaign team resigned in frustration two weeks ago over its perception that his efforts are half-hearted, is tied in fourth place at 7 percent with the libertarian-leaning Ron Paul, a longtime Texas congressman.

Pawlenty is at 6 percent; Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, 4 percent; and Jon Huntsman, a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, 2 percent.

“The surprise here is how quickly Michele Bachmann is catching on,” said Jennifer Duffy, a political analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report of Washington, D.C. “To me, she’s the one to watch, not Romney.”

The poll has a 4.9 point margin of error, so it’s not the greatest poll.

Titanium spine

Bachmann was also interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, where Wallace went out of his way to ask her the tough questions that she will be getting more of as a Republican female candidate. Bob Shieffer also interviewed her on CBS’ Face the Nation show on Sunday.

National Review reports:

On the eve of her presidential announcement in Waterloo, Iowa, a confident Michele Bachmann made the case that she was a serious candidate, attacking President Obama’s record and parrying tough questions in interviews with CBS’s Bob Schieffer and Fox News’s Chris Wallace.

“Since the debate, people have paid attention and they recognize that I am very serious about what I want to do,” Bachmann said on Fox.

She didn’t shy away from outlining clear differences between herself and Mitt Romney, who is statistically tied with her for the lead among Iowa voters according to a Des Moines Register poll released yesterday.

“What people know about me is I do what I say and I say what I mean. I am a fighter for the cause … People recognize that I’m very sincere in what I say,” Bachmann told Wallace. She later criticized Romney for his “disappointing” decision to not sign the pro-life pledge by the Susan B. Anthony List.

“Mitt Romney has to say what he is, but I will say, if he is saying now that he is pro-life, this was a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate that by signing … the pledge,” Bachmann said.

On CBS, Bachmann hit Romney on his health-care program, calling individual mandates at both the state and federal level “unconstitutional,” and arguing that reliance on free market forces, rather than efforts by state or federal government, was how health-care costs should be brought down.

Asked by Wallace about New York’s legislature’s decision to legalize gay marriage, Bachmann said she acknowledged the state’s tenth amendment right to do so, but said she would continue to push for a federal marriage amendment that would outlaw same-sex marriage. She said her position was “entirely consistent,” noting that the issue of gay marriage was likely to be dealt with at a federal level in either the courts or the legislature.

In response to Schieffer’s question about whether she believed homosexuality was a choice or not, Bachmann said she was running for president, not “to be anyone’s judge.”

She also defended herself against charges that she was a gaffe-prone politician who had made erroneous statements in the past. Wallace directly asked, “Are you a flake?” a term that Bachmann called “insulting,” noting her extensive career as a tax lawyer and politician. In response to Shieffer’s remarks about her history of “misleading” statements, Bachmann said, “I haven’t mislead people at all.”

“I think the question should be asked of President Obama,” she added, noting that he pushed for nearly $1 trillion dollar stimulus by saying it would prevent unemployment rates from going above 8 percent. “That is what’s serious. Did he mislead the American people? Not only did he mislead the American people, he caused our economy to go down to depths we haven’t seen,” Bachmann pointed out.

Bachmann, who has criticized Obamacare for taking $500 billion away from Medicare, told Wallace that she did not see Paul Ryan’s budget, a budget which Bachmann voted for and which would also cut Medicare, as impacting seniors the same way Obamacare would.

“Let’s be clear: the Ryan budget is really the 55 and under plan. People need to recognize no one under 55 will be touched,” she said, calling Ryan’s plan a “starting point” for a budget discussion.

“My commitment is to make sure government keeps its promises to senior citizens both on Medicare and on Social Security,” Bachmann said of the 55-year-old and older crowd, but noted that those younger would have to face “adjustments.”

She argued that if the nation was going to be serious about its fiscal situation, the debt ceiling could not be raised. Making clear that she was against defaulting, Bachmann said payments on the debt would have to be prioritized if a new, higher ceiling wasn’t authorized and that Congress would have to cut spending elsewhere. Speaking about how the number of federal limos had been increased by 73 percent in the past two years, Bachmann said it showed how Obama wasn’t “serious about cutting spending” now.

If she were president, matters would be different.

“I have a titanium spine to do what needs to be done to turn the economy around,” Bachmann said on Fox.

She will get the same treatment from the misogynists on the left. Can she take it? I think she can.

Learn more about Michele Bachmann

Speeches:

Reactions from her recent debate performance:

Profiles of Michele Bachmann:

Here is the latest comprehensive profile of Michele Bachmann from the Weekly Standard. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

News

Is the Euro aggravating the European debt crisis?

06/22/2011 Wintery Knight Leave a comment

ECM sent me this story from the liberal German newspaper “Der Spiegel”.

Here’s the thesis of the article:

In the past 14 months, politicians in the euro-zone nations have adopted one bailout package after the next, convening for hectic summit meetings, wrangling over lazy compromises and building up risks of gigantic dimensions.

For just as long, they have been avoiding an important conclusion, namely that things cannot continue this way. The old euro no longer exists in its intended form, and the European Monetary Union isn’t working. We need a Plan B.

Instead, those in responsible positions are getting bogged down in crisis management, as they seek to placate the public and sugarcoat the problems. They say that there is only a government debt crisis in a few euro countries but no euro crisis, citing as evidence the fact that the value of the European common currency has remained relatively stable against other currencies like the dollar.

But if it wasn’t for the euro, Greece’s debt crisis would be an isolated problem — one that was tough for the country, but easy for Europe to bear. It is only because Greece is part of the euro zone that Athens’ debts are a problem for all of its partners — and pose a threat to the common currency.

If the rest of Europe abandons Greece, the crisis could spin out of control, spreading from one weak euro-zone country to the next. Investors would have no guarantees that Europe would not withdraw its support from Portugal or Ireland, if push came to shove, and they would sell their government bonds. The prices of these bonds would fall and risk premiums would go up. Then these countries would only be able to drum up fresh capital by paying high interest rates, which would only augment their existing budget problems. It’s possible that they would no longer be able to raise any money at all, in which case they would become insolvent.

Well, the article talks about how economically productive counties like Germany are on the hook for the bailouts to underperforming countries like Greece and Portugal. That will happen unless Greece reverts to the drachma and stops dragging down the Euro. But the strong European countries are not the only source of bailout funds – there’s also the International Monetary Fund. And guess who funds them?

Consider this article by John Bolton in the New York Post.

Excerpt:

Most Americans had barely heard of the International Monetary Fund before the arrest of its managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for sexually assaulting a hotel housekeeper. Yet the race to replace him offers a chance to rethink everything about what the real American interest is in the IMF — including whether its continued existence is beneficial.

The top contenders for Strauss-Kahn’s job are French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde and Bank of Mexico Governor Agustin Carstens. Europeans have headed the IMF since its founding, as Americans have led the World Bank — prerogatives that Third World countries increasingly resent as vestiges of colonialism. Carstens’ candidacy is the most visible manifestation of this rising discontent.

[…]Europe is eager to keep the top IMF job not simply because of geographical chauvinism but because continued IMF assistance is critical to European Union efforts to bail out the fractured economic and fiscal system in Greece and several other EU countries. Lurking behind the bailout crisis is the EU’s growing panic over the viability of its currency, the euro. Having a sympathetic ear at the IMF’s pinnacle seems absolutely critical to protect Europe’s parochial interests.

What of America’s interests? We should have long ago resisted throwing our scarce resources, through the IMF or otherwise, into the sinkhole of defending the euro. The currency was always conceived to be as much a political statement as an economic policy: Its European proponents believed the euro would enhance Europe’s strength as an alternative and perhaps rival to America.

If the United States and a few other developed countries like Japan decide to break with Europe over this vote, the IMF’s voting system, based on world-wide economic strength, makes defeating Lagarde a real possibility.

Today’s IMF does little or nothing for US national interests, especially when we face enormous domestic economic challenges. Why should Washington not support Carstens, break the EU hold on the IMF and stop IMF support for the euro?

We can barely afford us, and yet we have to bailout these profligate European nations? Give me a break.