Rep. Michele Bachmann was in partial damage control mode when she appeared on CNN’s “The Situation Room” on Monday, but for the most part was in the groove where she is most comfortable: on the attack. Still, she refused to back away from her controversial story about a woman approaching her after last week’s CNN/Tea Party Express Debate in Florida and telling her that the HPV vaccine given the woman’s daughter had made the girl mentally retarded, a statement that brought instant ridicule and charges of irresponsibility for Bachmann. Instead, she maintained that people were being distracted from the more important point of her position during the debate.
“I wasn’t speaking as a doctor. I wasn’t speaking as a scientist,” she explained to CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer during the interview, taking much the same defense she had used with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” on Friday night. “I was merely passing on … what I had heard.”
What she alleged she heard — and repeated several times — was that the HPV vaccine, the same vaccine she had brought up during the debate as a sign of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s dictatorial mien, was dangerous. She had referred to Perry’s having signed an executive order in 2007 that mandated all middle school-aged girls be vaccinated against the Human papillomavirus, a known cause of cervical cancer.
“This is something that someone had said to me, a mother that’s very concerned,” she told CNN.
The three-term Minnesota congresswoman continued: “The point in the debate that I made is it’s up to the parents to make that decision about the HPV vaccine and this was clearly an abuse of the governor.”
But that wasn’t all she brought up in the debate and Bachmann argued that a larger point was being ignored. “A lot of people are missing the main point … crony capitalism and abuse of executive power,” she supplied.
Bachmann pointed out at the CNN/Tea Party Express presidential debate that Perry’s former chief of staff had worked as the head lobbyist for the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the vaccine, the only one of its kind.
That point was further reinforced by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin when she appeared on Fox News following the debate. While noting Bachmann would now have to be careful because she had assailed the “big guns,” Palin praised her for going after what she thought to be a wrong needing rectification and what appeared to be “crony capitalism” on the part of the Perry administration.
But that point was soon swallowed up in the media firestorm that ensued when Rep. Bachmann told her HPV vaccine story. That Perry would have benefited and friends and associates of Perry stood to benefit from their relationship with the governor of Texas and his vaccination mandate was soon lost in the flood of stories covering yet another Michele Bachmann exaggeration — something the congresswoman has had a history of providing.
But Bachmann will need to get that message — and others — across if she hopes to remain a serious contender in the 2012 Republican presidential race and chip away at Perry’s lead in the national polls. Since winning the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa in mid-August, Bachmann has watched her poll numbers diminish from good enough for second place to good enough to be barely being counted.
And part of her slide has undoubtedly been due to her ability to say just the wrong thing and her inability to brush it off, admit that she was mistaken, or apologize for an error or misstatement.
But Bachmann’s biggest problem seems to be her complete inability to keep her attacks and talking points the center of media attention. Instead, her reputation for misstatements, falsehoods, and outlandish comments often deny her more important positions or attack points — such as Rick Perry’s alleged abuse of gubernatorial power — the media coverage they might well deserve.
And in the end, it looks as if not being able to make her point the point of conversation might ultimately cost her a true chance at the GOP presidential nomination without doing too much harm to her political opposition.