Michele Bachmann: Her rise to political stardom and now may be to White House

A mother-of-five from Iowa has emerged as one of the front-runners in the Republican race to take on Barack Obama in next year's US presidential election. So could Michele Bachmann end up in the White House?

All the momentum among Republicans dreaming of the Oval Office is currently with one woman.

Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party favourite and Minnesota congresswoman, is gathering a head of steam in her attempt to win her party's nomination next year.

One day after dominating the Sunday political shows, the former tax lawyer formally launched her campaign in her home state of Iowa, which hosts the first stage in the Republican contest in February next year.

An Iowa poll published in the Des Moines Register on Saturday places her alongside Mitt Romney at the head of the Republican field, well ahead of the rest. That's encouraging for her supporters -but the same poll in 2007 proved to be wildly inaccurate.

More compelling evidence of her chances was provided by her impressive performance at a televised debate two weeks ago.

Selling her own attributes on Fox News at the weekend, Ms Bachmann said: "I'm 55 years old. I've been married 33 years. I'm not only a lawyer, I have a post-doctorate degree in federal tax law from William and Mary."

She added: "My husband and I have raised five kids, we've raised 23 foster children. We've applied ourselves to education reform.

"We started a charter school for at-risk kids. I've also been a state senator and member of the United States Congress for five years."

To match her experience, Ms Bachmann has a rags-to-riches story.

Michele Amble was born in Waterloo, Iowa, to Democrat parents of Norwegian descent, but she was brought up by her mother in Anoka, Minnesota, with three brothers, after her mother's divorce.

Aged 16, Michele Bachmann discovered God when, in her own words, "people were coming to the Lord left and right." After graduating from law school in Oklahoma, she studied for a degree in tax law in Virginia.

She worked for the Inland Revenue Service for five years and then left her job to become a full-time mother when she had her fourth child, before pursuing a political career.

"I think Michele Bachmann is the total package ," says Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

"She's articulate, telegenic and has a depth of policy in every level of government - local, school board, state legislature, Congress.

"And she offers that unique combination that really captures the zeitgeist, which is a marriage of the social conservative and Tea Party activist."

This broad constituency of self-identified Christian evangelists and their social conservative allies makes up about 41% of Republican primary voters, says Mr Reed, but it's too early and too simplistic to say any one candidate has their bloc vote.

Ms Bachmann has got herself into trouble with past remarks, to the extent that on Sunday, Fox News presenter Chris Wallace bluntly asked her: "Are you a flake?" He later apologised.

There have been several gaffes, like declaring while in New Hampshire that it was the birthplace of the American Revolution, and that the founding fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery.

And there have been some strong views, such as the time she accused liberals like Barack Obama, then a senator for Illinois, of having anti-American views.

But her consummate performance in a prime-time televised debate two weeks ago marked the emergence of a more disciplined operator, says Larry Jacobs, a professor in political science at the University of Minnesota.

Mr Jacobs, who has met Ms Bachmann about a dozen times, describes her as very engaging in person and smarter than the media portrayals depict her.

"Her brand of conservative populism speaks to the resentments, frustrations and anxieties of voters. She also has a clear identity. Some of the other candidates, like Mitt Romney, it's hard to say what he believes in."

Being the only woman in the race will be an advantage, Mr Jacobs believes, because she can present a different face of the Republican party, one that does not belong to a white male southerner.

However, being a conservative mother with strong opinions and a native of a northern, snowy state has a familiar ring to it.

Comparisons with Sarah Palin are obvious, and the choreography of their schedules brings this into sharper focus this week.

The former Alaska governor, yet to say whether she is running for president, is due in Iowa on Tuesday for the screening of a new documentary about her life called The Undefeated.

Yet these kinds of commercial ventures have lost Mrs Palin credibility and support among conservative populists, says Mr Jacobs, while Ms Bachmann has earned both.

Fundraising is always a crucial factor but Michele Bachmann - with a very experienced campaign team - has proved adept at mining a wide network of donors at grassroots level, each giving small sums.

She also has a more intangible gift - to electrify a crowd - says Arne Carlson, who served as Republican governor in Minnesota when Ms Bachmann was in the state legislature.

Bachmann launched her campaign in the town where she was born, Waterloo, Iowa

"She has the ability to instantly feel an audience and to relate to that audience. And she represents a strain in American thought that Washington and New York don't understand.

"In the Mid West, there's a very deep suspicion of Wall Street and she plays to that."

But the best candidates don't make the most suitable people for governance, Arne Carlson says. Michele Bachmann sees America in very nostalgic terms, he notes - everyone goes to church, everybody has a job and everybody shares the same civic and religious values.

This plays to a narrow base, while the urban, racial or religious diversity of America is not acknowledged, Mr Carlson says. He contends that beneath the surface of her politics, there are some clear flaws.

"The utilisation of the Bible to tell you what's constitutional and what isn't. That's very disturbing," he says, describing her ideology as a no-compromise approach to the debt ceiling, taxes and social issues.

So how far could Michele Bachmann go? There is concern, says Larry Jacobs, that the Minnesotan lawyer could do well in the primaries among conservative voters but then struggle in a general election.

"It's increasingly plausible that she could win against Mitt Romney," he says.

"But whether she could win against Barack Obama is one of the big debates going on in the party behind the scenes."

Is the US in denial over its $14tn debt ?

Is America in denial about the extent of its financial problems, and therefore incapable of dealing with the gravest crisis the country has ever faced?

This is a story of debt, delusion and - potentially - disaster. For America and, if you happen to think that American influence is broadly a good thing, for the world.

The debt and the delusion are both all-American: $14 trillion (£8.75tn) of debt has been amassed and there is no cogent plan to reduce it.

The figure is impossible to comprehend: easier to focus on the fact that it grows at $40,000 (£25,000) a second. Getting out of Afghanistan will help but actually only at the margins. The problem is much bigger than any one area of expenditure.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is no rabid fiscal conservative but on the debt he is a hawk:

"I'm worried. The debt is large. It should be brought under control. The longer we wait, the longer we suffer this kind of paralysis; the more America boxes itself into a corner and the more America's constructive leadership in the world diminishes."

The author and economist Diane Coyle agrees. And she makes the rather alarming point that the acknowledged deficit is not the whole story.

The current $14tn debt is bad enough, she argues, but the future commitments to the baby boomers, commitments for health care and for pensions, suggest that the debt burden is part of the fabric of society:

"You have promises implicit in the structure of welfare states and aging populations that mean there is an unacknowledged debt that will have to be paid for by future taxpayers, and that could double the published figures."

Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations acknowledges that this structural commitment to future debt is not unique to the United States. All advanced democracies have more or less the same problem, he says, "but in the case of the States the figures are absolutely enormous".

Mr Haass, a former senior US diplomat, is leading an academic push for America's debt to be taken seriously by Americans and noticed as well by the rest of the world.

He uses the analogy of Suez and the pressure that was put on the UK by the US to withdraw from that adventure. The pressure was not, of course, military. It was economic.

Britain needed US economic help. In the future, if China chooses to flex its muscles abroad, it may not be Chinese admirals who pose the real threat, Mr Haass tells us. "Chinese bankers could do the job."

Because of course Chinese bankers, if they withdrew their support for the US economy and their willingness to finance America's spending, could have an almost overnight impact on every American life, forcing interest rates to sky high levels and torpedoing the world's largest economy.

Not everyone accepts the debt-as-disaster thesis.

David Frum is a Republican intellectual and a former speech writer to President George W Bush.

He told me the problem, and the solution, were actually rather simple: "If I tell you you have a disease that will absolutely prostrate you and it could be prevented by taking a couple of aspirin and going for a walk, well I guess the situation isn't apocalyptic is it?

"The things that America has to do to put its fiscal house in order are not anywhere near as extreme as what Europe has to do. The debt is not a financial problem, it is a political problem."

Mr Frum believes that a future agreement to cut spending - he thinks America spends much too big a proportion of its GDP on health - and raise taxes, could very quickly bring the debt problem down to the level of quotidian normality.

'Organised hypocrisy'

I am not so sure. What is the root cause of America's failure to get to grips with its debt? It can be argued that the problem is not really economic or even political; it is a cultural inability to face up to hard choices, even to acknowledge that the choices are there.

I should make it clear that my reporting of the United States, in the years I was based there for the BBC, was governed by a sense that too much foreign media coverage of America is negative and jaundiced.

The nation is staggeringly successful and gloriously attractive. But it is also deeply dysfunctional in some respects.

Take Alaska. The author and serious student of America, Anne Applebaum makes the point that, as she puts it, "Alaska is a myth!"

People who live in Alaska - and people who aspire to live in Alaska - imagine it is the last frontier, she says, "the place where rugged individuals go out and dig for oil and shoot caribou, and make money the way people did 100 years ago".

But in reality, Alaska is the most heavily subsidised state in the union. There is more social spending in Alaska than anywhere else.

To make it a place where decent lives can be lived, there is a huge transfer of money to Alaska from the US federal government which means of course from taxpayers in New York and Los Angeles and other places where less rugged folk live. Alaska is an organised hypocrisy.

Too many Americans behave like the Alaskans: they think of themselves as rugged individualists in no need of state help, but they take the money anyway in health care and pensions and all the other areas of American life where the federal government spends its cash.

The Tea Party movement talks of cuts in spending but when it comes to it, Americans always seem to be talking about cuts in spending that affect someone else, not them - and taxes that are levied on others too.

And nobody talks about raising taxes. Jeffrey Sachs has a theory about why this is.

America's two main political parties are so desperate to raise money for the nation's constant elections - remember the House of Representatives is elected every two years - that they can do nothing that upsets wealthy people and wealthy companies.

So they cannot touch taxes.

In all honesty, I am torn about the conclusions to be drawn. I find it difficult to believe that a nation historically so nimble and clever and open could succumb to disaster in this way.

But America, as well as being a place of hard work and ingenuity, is also no stranger to eating competitions in which gluttony is celebrated, and wilful ignorance, for instance regarding (as many Americans do) evolution as controversial.

The debt crisis is a fascinating crisis because it is about so much more than money. It is a test of a culture.

It is about waking up, as the Americans say, and smelling the coffee. And - I am thinking Texas here - saddling up too, and riding out with purpose.

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