That tells you something important about the battle for the Republican presidential nomination and the box in which Pawlenty now finds himself. Two months ago, he believed he was in a strong position to break out and become the principal alternative to front-runner Romney. Today he is trying to figure out how to prevent Bachmann from blocking his path.
[…]The calculus for Romney was the opposite, but not necessarily more difficult. Neither winning Iowa nor becoming the favored candidate of social and religious conservatives is part of his strategy for capturing the nomination or the presidency. He wants support from those values voters, but, as with others who have won the GOP nomination, he is not willing to pay any price to get it.
Naturally, Michele Bachmann was the first to sign it – because she is actually a social conservative.
Is Mitt Romney a social conservative?
Here’s a video of Mitt Romney expressing his social conservative credentials: (H/T Robb)
Just to refresh you, Mitt Romney also refused to sign the pro-life pledge authored by the Susan B. Anthony List. Michele Bachmann signed it, of course. Because Michele Bachmann is solid on social issues, and is a pro-life and pro-marriage activist. She doesn’t just make speeches – she has acted. It’s in her public record.
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 MoinesRegisterpoll 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.
I PLEDGE that I will only support candidates for President who are committed to protecting Life. I demand that any candidate I support commit to these positions:
FIRST, to nominate to the U.S. federal bench judges who are committed to restraint and applying the original meaning of the Constitution, not legislating from the bench;
SECOND, to select only pro-life appointees for relevant Cabinet and Executive Branch positions, in particular the head of National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health & Human Services;
THIRD, to advance pro-life legislation to permanently end all taxpayer funding of abortion in all domestic and international spending programs, and defund Planned Parenthood and all other contractors and recipients of federal funds with affiliates that perform or fund abortions;
FOURTH, advance and sign into law a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.
Notice how moderate it is. These are all incremental measures that a pro-life candidate can easily accept.
But Mitt Romney wouldn’t sign it at all. That means that he either doesn’t want to nominate strict constructionists, or doesn’t want to select pro-life appointees for certain relevant positions, or doesn’t want to cut funding for abortion, or doesn’t want to sign a bill to ban late-term abortions.
Take a look at this video of Mitt Romney from 1994 claiming that he is not pro-life.
And more pro-abortion Mitt Romney as recently as 2002:
And Mitt Romney again embracing abortion, as recently as 2005:
Bachmann also talked about other issues she fought for while in the Minnesota State Senate. She supported a number of pro-life pieces of legislations, like a woman’s right to know law and a statistical reporting law. She was also the lead sponsor of the Minnesota marriage amendment.
That’s what a social conservative looks like. Not like Mitt Romney in those videos. When you take a look at his state-run health care plan in Massachusetts, it turns out that he isn’t a fiscal conservative either. Let’s not make another mistake like with Obama and elect someone who has no resume just because of his appearance. Mitt Romney is to the left of many Democrats on the issues.
WINTERY KNIGHT 