Bachmann's Out / Perry's In

No reason for both of them to drop out all at once, and Perry doesn’t hold nearly as much baggage.

About Bachmann’s baggage, let’s drop this “crazy” nonsense. Michele Bachmann isn’t nuts — she’s a very sharp lady, an occasionally savage debater, and a solid (if over-rehearsed) talker. That’s not a bad combo.

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What did her in, was playing it fast and loose with the facts, allowing her critics to paint her as crazy and make it stick. There was the claim that NATO airstrikes — and this was fairly early in the Libya campaign — had killed 30,000 civilians. Another time, Bachmann claimed that President Obama had emptied the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, when he’d actually sold off 4% of it. And let’s not forget her outrageous claims about Gardasil causing autism.

And confusing John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy? Honey, please.

All these and more torpedoed her campaign. She then attempted to recover with a weird (and desperately obvious) appeal to housewives in one of her final debate performances.

She kept up the good fight in Iowa, on a shoestring budget, and deserves admiration for that. But her wounds were largely self-inflicted, so dropping out of the race this morning was the right thing to do.

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