Republican Catfight?

A hint of summer wafts over the drab Southern New Hampshire University commons. Michelle Bachmann’s butterfly-yellow dress flatters her petite figure, with her three-strand pearl necklace adding a more serious counterpoint. The Republican, who intends to take on Obama in the coming election, warned that America needs to stop the government from “consuming the very sustenance of the generation not even born.”

Before a crowd of fiscally conservative Tea Party supporters, she emphasized her background as a tax attorney who had built up her own business. But then she resorted to the most crass of all comparisons. As a young girl, she asked how the world was able to ignore the gassing of six million Jews during the Holocaust. “I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action,” she said, referring to the Holocaust. “But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to.” In sober New Hampshire, such a statement might seem a bit strange, but Bachmann’s audience seemed nonetheless impressed by her charm. The conservative base in Iowa, scene of the first primary, has long been in Bachmann’s corner and seems to have almost forgotten America’s most famous populist, Sarah Palin, who has been the source of so much excitement in past years.

The ex-Governor of Alaska and former candidate as John McCain’s vice president now has competition on her own turf. While Palin visits Eastern seaboard historic sites and keeps the public guessing about her presidential intentions, Bachmann is systematically positioning herself to run for her party’s nomination. On Monday, she will take part in a televised debate in New Hampshire. At a later date, she intends to announce her candidacy in the city of her birth, Waterloo. Conveniently, Waterloo is located in Iowa.

Even More Children Than Sarah Palin

Should both women run, the U.S. media is looking forward to a first-class catfight. They got a preview this week when Bachmann’s advisor, Ed Rollins, said that Palin “has not been serious” as a candidate compared to Bachmann. Both candidates would be competing for the same voter segment: Tea Party followers, those who favor government spending cuts, those who oppose Obama’s healthcare reform plan and socially conservative Republican values voters who oppose abortion and gay marriage.

Palin’s greatest advantage is her celebrity status, but Bachmann has the advantage of credibility. She has had a presence in Washington as a Minnesota congressional representative who, as leader of a Tea Party faction in the House of Representatives, has already built up her own power base.

On the family values side, she trumps Sarah Palin with five of her own adorable children, but voters will be even more impressed to learn that she and her husband, a family therapist, have also raised 23 foster children.

Like Palin, the 55-year old Bachmann has undergone a fashion transformation. Her conservative long brown hair of two years ago has been shortened to a trendy shoulder length. Unlike Palin, she has also abandoned her previous strident manner, if not her penchant for crude comparisons.

When the 2009 swine flu epidemic broke out, she remarked, “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under Democrat President Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it is an interesting coincidence.”