I’m wont to laugh at liberal women who love to talk up our Founding Mothers, and how those evil, spotlight-hogging white men sliced and diced all the patriot women right out of our history books. Liberal women love to take this tack when shoring up their own spotlight-hogging contributions to our current politics.
But just let a conservative woman try to get her head in the discussion arena? Liberal women pull out their rhetorical guillotines before our conservative sisters can get in a single word. Yet these liberal women don’t seem to see their own hypocrisy as they hog the modern spotlight themselves.
Such has been the state of “feminism” in America for the past four decades — right up until the moment Sarah Palin burst through the liberal-feminist barricades with Mama Grizzly ferocity.
Now, Michele Bachmann picks up the torch with a genuine presidential candidacy.
And I must say — without equivocation — that Michele Bachmann does our Founding Mothers — and all the rest of us — darned proud.
If Ed Rollins doesn’t alienate the female voters Bachmann sorely needs to win, then I can see how Michele Bachmann might actually carry the day in 2012. Bachmann could close the gender gap, to great Republican benefit, for decades to come. That’s something to think about seriously.
Considering the women’s vote — and we women do now make up a majority of the electorate — I would have to say that Michele Bachmann became every mother’s heroine when she valiantly parried an ObamaCare heckler at her health care townhall in August 2009. Mrs. Bachmann, proud mother of five and foster mother to 23 youths, was conducting a townhall in her district with a local medical doctor. She highlighted, from a wealth of her very own experience, the vast disparity between the excellent maternal care she had received in a Minnesota hospital and the grisly accounts of maternity wards in the UK.
Rattling off recent headlines about UK women giving birth in hospital corridors for lack of bed space and adequate facilities, Bachmann fiercely denounced the Democrats’ intention to force the same benighted level of care onto American women. Then a male pro-ObamaCare heckler spoke up in defense of the socialized medicine model, only to be summarily brought to childlike humility by Bachmann’s brilliant scold: “I’ve probably given birth here (in America) more times than you, sir.”
Yes, Bachmann’s quick-on-her-feet response to her heckler’s arrogant ignorance on the matter of childbirth was simply impossible to refute. Said male heckler went straight to the corner in ignominious disgrace. And all of us mothers — both liberal and conservative — could hold our heads up just a little bit more respectably.
Americans once understood that mothering large families, side-by-side with fathers, was one of the most difficult, respect-earning vocations imaginable, and that doing this job successfully was one of the most necessary tasks in ensuring a continuing free society. Good citizens don’t just happen. Good citizens, capable of self-support and law-abiding respect for the rights of others, are, in fact, the only thing that can keep social costs down and civilization on the forward track.
So, as I consider Michele Bachmann’s candidacy, her motherhood cred is uppermost in my mind. Skills learned the hard way through the treacherous terrain of molding great kids — especially in a society seemingly determined to produce as many reprobates and public-purse dependants as possible — are some of the most valuable resume boosters a candidate could have, aren’t they?
But Bachmann has scored big in her political career as well.
For one thing, she has gone in a very short time from being bashed by Obamaphile Chris Matthews as a “balloon head” to being strangely touted as Matthews tries to take credit for launching her career. That Michele Bachmann is the beneficiary of the left’s backfiring Palin polarization should go without saying; it’s patently obvious (to all but Ed Rollins, apparently). But Bachmann has earned her own turn in the spotlight, too.
Rising in Congress as a perfect, genuinely feminist antidote to Nancy Pelosi’s disgusting spoiled-princess reign in the People’s House, Bachmann took the stage again and again to have common American voices heard in the ObamaCare battle. And just this month, in the New Hampshire debate, Bachmann stood front and center, declaring: “I will not rest until ObamaCare is repealed […]. It’s a promise — take it to the bank, cash the check.”
Spoken like a real woman who means business.
Bachmann’s political career was launched in Minnesota from a citizen activist’s platform. Hollywood could have made a movie out of it, guaranteed to top the box office receipts of Norma Rae. The little homemaking mother of five marched into Minnesota politics on what is still one of her most passionate issues — abortion. Speaking at a local board meeting, convened to discuss taxpayer funding for a regional hospital that performed many abortions yearly, Mrs. Bachmann summed up her opposition with a political aplomb rarely seen — even on the national stage — stating boldly, “in effect, since 1973, I have been a landlord of an abortion clinic, and I don’t like that distinction.” Now, liberal women love to claim that they represent all women. But Michele Bachmann reveals that claim as a lie nearly every time she opens her lovely mouth to speak on behalf of the hordes of other American women.
Bachmann served as a tax attorney for the IRS (her only negative, it seems) before taking the homemaker helm full-time for the benefit of her children. After her citizen activism brought a voice to traditional Minnesota families, she entered formal politics, serving six years in her state’s legislature before taking on the beltway. Michele Bachmann has only been in Congress since 2006, but has blazed a leadership trail that has made her an undeniable stand-out.
As an early-bird supporter of the Tea Party, Michele Bachmann was chosen to give a special common-voters’ response to Obama’s last State of the Union address, which she carried off well despite vociferous attacks from elitists in both parties. Bachmann carries love for America in her bosom, which more than equals the “fire in the belly” espoused by Palin. Bachmann has 10 years’ maturity on Palin; that’s a positive in my book.
So, from where I’m sitting — one woman carefully watching — Michele Bachmann grows daily in my respect. She carries on her motherly shoulders quite a lot of genuine feminist hopes.
And I’m not ashamed to say that I do think it’s high time we saw what a capable woman could do with the American presidency.
Godspeed, Mrs. Bachmann. Give ‘em hell for all of us.
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