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Illustration by Victor Juhasz, from Matt Taibbi's story "Michele Bachmann's Holy War", in Rolling Stone magazine.
Matt Taibbi's profile of Michele Bachmann in Rolling Stone should be required reading for anyone who intends to vote in the 2012 GOP primary and then general election, if she wins the Republican nomination. Such profiles by skilled journalists should be mandatory for every presidential candidate in every election, for that matter. The things you can learn – even if you're just short of a closed minded fanatic – should change your views of a candidate considerably, whether you're a fanboy or a hater. These profiles are some of the most illustrative guides to the decisions a candidate will make once they are freed from the brief and superficial accountability constraints of an election, because they look at the events that shaped the person and their way of thinking.
In the case of Bachmann, what you'll learn from Taibbi's profile ought to keep you up at night, wondering who might really be running this country during a potential Bachmann administration. I haven't finished reading the story myself, but I felt strongly compelled to stop and think long and hard about the consequences of electing a Christian fundamentalist to the White House.
According to Taibbi's profile, Bachmann attended the O.W. Coburn School of Law, an institution with a sordid history you can learn more about in the pages of Rolling Stone, that I won't dwell on here. Taibbi wrote that graduates of this "school" -- which teaches law from a biblical standpoint – fail their bar exams at a 60% clip (and that a stunning number of graduates went on to populate the Bush administration's politicized and corrupt Department of Justice.) After graduating and passing the bar, Bachmann did postgraduate work in tax law at the behest of her husband, Marcus, before joining the IRS as an attorney.
And by "behest", I mean he ordered her to do both of these things, and she did was she was told because as a fundamentalist, Bachmann believes wives should be submissive to their husbands as the head of the household – because that's the word of God.
I doubt such sentiments would sit well with most women of any political ideology, but I suppose that's a person's private business that doesn't concern anyone but that person and their family. Except it does concern every person in this country when Bachmann is asking us to elect her President of the United States.
I'm less concerned about her faith itself than I am her ability to make decisions on her own, without undue influence from others. It'd be easy to ask ridiculous rhetorical questions, such as would Bachmann start a war because her husband told her to. I'd propose that even Michele Bachmann wouldn't go quite that far to remain true to her creepy fundamentalist urges. But understanding where that line is drawn, and even just acknowledging that the line exists at all, is critical to understanding the consequences of putting someone like Bachamann in the White House.
Perhaps she wouldn't go to war on the orders of Marcus, the Shadow President. But whose to say that she may not go against her own better judgment in other policy areas? We know that Sarah Palin's husband hand an uncomfortable degree of control over his wife, and by way of his wife the Alaskan government. That's not to say that either Palin did anything illegal, corrupt, or immoral. Nor am I arguing that a presidential spouse of any gender shouldn't have influence over their partner.
But we're not talking about receiving counsel from a life-long partner that holds your ultimate trust, where you ultimately make the decisions. Whatever influence over the Alaskan government that Todd Palin had, he had it because his wife wished it so. The problem with Bachmann is her biblical subservience to her husband being so extreme that his agenda of governance would consume and make irrelevant her own, with absolutely no accountability to be had for the American people.
It's not enough that Bachmann would reserve decisions of war for herself. Other decisions can have far greater consequences for the American people, especially now on the issue of the economy. If Michele Bachmann was willing to study an area of law she wants to scrap, and then take a job for a federal agency she wants to destroy – for years – what other lines are she willing to cross because she's told to?
For most candidates these questions would border on professional trolling, but with Bachmann, they should be dominating the nightly news after this profile was published.
It is not unreasonable to question how far a person would go as President of the United States to carry out the wishes of another person, given how far Michele Bachmann has demonstrated that she is willing to go to do things she hates, simply because her husband ordered her to.
The President of the United States is supposed to take their lead from the American people, yet make decisions on our behalf. It isn't to take orders from someone else that hasn't been vetted and elected by the public.
Sadly, this is one of dozens of questions that Bachmann's profile should raise for the American people that won't make so much as a ripple in the media. And it's quite likely that questions like these that we might not otherwise even know to ask lurk in the background of every political candidate in history, with no forthcoming answers until nothing can be done until the next election. Had the public known that George W. Bush lied during his 2000 campaign about opposing nation building and American interventionism – something that was perhaps easily predictable had the public known more about who Bush was and the events that shaped his beliefs – this country and reality as we know it today might be substantially different.
It's dumbfounding that our political system works as well as it does considering how dysfunctional it is – by design in most cases – and based on how little we actually know about the people we elect to lead us. It's profoundly disappointing that the media, which exists to do nothing but ask the questions that we cannot, actually works tirelessly to shield prospective leaders and elected politicians from having to answer any substantive questions, like the ones raised in Taibbi's profile.
But hey, who cares about stuff like this when we can spend two weeks talking about Antony Weiner's dick?
