She pauses just once for a query that seems to catch her by surprise: What’s the public’s biggest misconception about her?
“Oh, that’s a good question,’’ she says, the brassiness in her voice softening as she looks to a pair of campaign aides.
“One thing people will say to me at these town hall conventions … they’ll say `the media doesn’t tell the story of who you are. They make you two-dimensional, a caricature.’’’
Bachmann has a point. The choreographed repetition of modern presidential campaigns can turn the most personable candidate into an endless loop of talking points. But any close observer of Bachmann’s political career would be hard-pressed to dismiss her as two-dimensional.
At a time when voters accuse politicians of being difficult to pin down on issues, Bachmann proudly draws herself with hard lines and sharp edges. First in Minnesota and later in Washington, Bachmann has alienated some members of her own party nearly as much as Democrats.
On this trip through a conservative corner Bachmann must win to resuscitate her candidacy in Iowa’s January caucus, she has another chance to make her case and offer voters a window into a political life that, now clouded by time and rhetoric, remains a singular story.
Bachmann calls herself an accidental politician. But both supporters and critics say that’s selling her short.
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Campaigning across Iowa, Bachmann frequently reminds voters she is a native.
But that does not explain the route she has traveled: from Waterloo, a manufacturing city of 68,000 where she was born 55 years ago in a Democratic-voting family with union roots, to congresswoman from St. Paul’s exurbs whose personal and political life have been shaped by her embrace of evangelical Christianity and later, a highly combative brand of conservatism.
