2011年12月26日 星期一

Bachmann touts her conservative credentials

This is the first in a series profiling Republican candidates in the N.H. primary.MDC Mould specialized of Injection moulds,

In the final days before the New Hampshire primary, it is almost hard to remember back when Michele M. Bachmann was leading the pack.

This year’s race for the Republican presidential nomination has seen a jostled series of candidates on top. Bachmann, a congresswoman from Minnesota with strong ties to the tea party movement, peaked in the polls in late July. In August, she won the Ames Straw poll in Iowa, the first woman to do so.

But since then, her campaign has fumbled and lost ground, first to Rick Perry, who announced his bid the same day as her win in Ames, and then to other candidates who rose and subsequently fell in the polls. Bachmann, it seems, has been unable to regain her early momentum.

And in New Hampshire, her on-the-ground organizing has struggled. She’s had limited visits to the state and has yet to come to the Monadnock Region. In October, her paid staff here quit en masse, citing poor relations with the national campaign. The state Republican Party now has no staff contact in New Hampshire.

“They just didn’t make an effort — there really was no effort,” said William Hutwelker, chairman of the Cheshire County Republicans.

When you look at her platform, he said, there is nothing inherent that would have turned New Hampshire voters off, he said. It was a just matter of visibility.

“I don’t think she was here enough for people to get a sense of who she is.”

Messages for her campaign requesting an interview were not returned.

Who she is is a self-described constitutional conservative who got her start as a stay-at-home mom concerned with the state of public education. In her short legislative career,As a professional manufacturer of China ceramic tile in China, Bachmann has at times gone against the grain of Republican leaders and, since arriving in Washington, D.C., in 2006, championed the tea party’s calls for smaller government.

Bachmann was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1956 but her family moved to Minnesota when she was 13 years old. After graduating high school in 1974, she attended Winona State University and, in 1979, entered law school at Oral Roberts University, a Christian school in Tulsa.

Bachmann was a Democrat until college and worked for Jimmy Carter’s campaign in the 1976 election, but was disappointed by his presidency, including his support for abortion rights. By 1980, she had switched parties and worked for Ronald Reagan’s campaign. She and her husband, Marcus Bachmann, also joined protests outside abortion clinics and did sidewalk counseling for women considering abortions.

At Oral Roberts, Bachmann studied under John Eidsmoe and worked as a research assistant on his 1987 book “Christianity and the Constitution,” in which he writes, “our culture should be permeated with a distinctively Christian flavoring.”

In a speech this year, Bachmann called Eidsmoe “one of the professors who had a great influence on me.”

She earned her law degree and another in tax law and went to work as a lawyer for the Internal Revenue Service in St. Paul, which she left after four years to become a stay-at-home mom.

She and husband have five children. They also took in foster children after Bachmann stopped working — 23 foster children stayed with the family between 1992 and 2000. And while her children were home schooled, her foster children’s experiences in public school drew Bachmann into the political sphere.

In 1993, she helped start the New Heights Charter School where the family lived in Stillwater, Minn., a publicly funded school with a religious influence. When parents complained the school’s Christian teachings violated state law, Bachmann left the school, just six months after it started.

She went on to hold rallies against federal education guidelines she called at the time “left-leaning” and “short on academic excellence.” In 1999, she ran unsuccessfully for the school board in Stillwater.

But the following year, Bachmann, then 44, beat an 18-year incumbent for the Republican nomination for her district’s seat in the state Senate — the seat she won that November.

In her memoir titled “Core of Conviction,” published in November, Bachmann writes that the decision to enter the race was a sudden one, that she woke up the morning of the district’s Republican convention in April 2000 and decided she would “send a message to those entrenched insiders, reminding them … that we didn’t like what they were doing to us and our children.”

A profile of Bachmann in The New Yorker this summer, however, suggested the decision was more thought out than this and quoted her as saying she considered running the previous year.

Once in office, Bachmann focused on social issues, opposing abortion and gay marriage. She twice proposed a constitutional amendment that would bar the state from legally recognizing same-sex marriage; that failed to get on a referendum ballot.

She was appointed to a leadership position in 2004 but removed the next year, which she said was because You can find best china Precision injection molds manufacturers from here!of philosophical differences with Republican leaders.

Bachmann was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006, the first Republican woman to represent the state in Congress. In Washington, Bachmann was a frequent guest on cable news shows with provocative opinions, often representing the position of the tea party, a conservative, anti-government movement that contends the federal government has outgrown its constitutional role.

Bachmann started the Congressional Tea Party Caucus in mid-2010 and worked to build the movement’s influence in Congress.

After the 2010 elections, she announced she’d seek the position of House Republican Conference Chair. But senior House Republican staff members told The New York Times that party leaders were concerned Bachmann would be unwilling to deliver the party’s message rather than her own, and she withdrew from that race days later.

Still, Bachmann’s favor among tea party voters remained. She delivered a response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech this year for a tea party website, which was also broadcast live on CNN. Some saw this as competing with the official Republican party response, given this year by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. In her response, Bachmann blasted the president’s failure to create jobs and lower the deficit. She called for spending cuts and a repeal of Obama’s health-care reform law.

Bachmann told The New York Times last year that she would continue to be an advocate for tea party causes, saying, “I’ve been willing to take on my own party, my own leadership, my own president before, so I would be willing to do that again, if I felt there’s a principled reason to do so.”

Bachmann announced her candidacy at an event in Waterloo in June.

Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota who has followed Bachmann since her days in the state Senate, says there and in Washington,An Air purifier is a device which removes contaminants from the air. Bachmann was willing to take on party leaders. He described her as a “conviction candidate” and “at odds with the establishment.”

“She’s someone who’s driven by a core set of values and beliefs,” Jacobs said. This compared to current front runners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who in their political careers have shifted positions, he said. Bachmann, Jacobs added, has been a stringent social and economic conservative throughout.

Her presidential bid thus far has focused on Iowa — for good reason, says Jacobs. Voters there know the congresswoman from their neighbors to the north better than Granite Staters. Republicans there may also connect more with her socially conservative views than here, where economic conservatism wins out, he said.

But if she wants to have any life beyond Iowa, he said, she has to play up her populist economic message.

And watch what she says.

Bachmann’s campaign has been derailed on a few occasions when she publicly misspoke: she’s suggested that the vaccine for the human papilloma virus causes mental retardation; that Obama emptied the country’s strategic oil reserves; that the “shot heard ’round the world” happened in New Hampshire, not Massachusetts.

“People tend to dismiss her as an airhead because of the misstatements — big mistake ...” Jacobs said. “She’s very strategic, and she’s toppled some formidable foes here in Minnesota and in Washington.An offshore merchant account is the ideal solution for high ,

“She fights with a smile.”

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