The most dramatic moment of last night’s Republican debate in Ames, Iowa, was Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty’s scrap over their records in Minnesota. (I wrote about Bachmann’s rise for The New Yorker this week.) During an attack that probably baffled most viewers, Pawlenty accused Bachmann of misrepresenting her record in the state legislature and of being less than fully committed to the anti-tax position.
The back-and-forth centered around Minnesota’s 2005 budget standoff. A new tax on cigarettes had been proposed, and, in order to lure conservative support for the bill, a pro-life provision was added. Bachmann led a vote to remove the cigarette tax from the bill, but it failed.
When asked by the debate moderator about why she voted for the increase, Bachmann took the defense:
Bachmann’s answer was garbled syntactically; the bill, of course, contained no tenets that would “take away protections”; it added protections. (She corrected herself later in the debate.) But Bachmann, who has always been staunchly opposed to abortion, was indeed faced with a choice between that and her anti-tax stance, and chose to give in on taxes. Pawlenty’s response was as convoluted as it was harsh:
Bachmann and Pawlenty have a long and tangled history in their home state. Pawlenty’s rise there started earlier, when he won election to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 1992, the year Bachmann gave up her short-lived career as an I.R.S. lawyer to become a stay-at-home mom and take care of foster children. In 1993, Bachmann co-founded a charter school and served on its board, which she was forced out of months later when she and other board members were accused of violating a state law that prohibited publicly funded schools from teaching a sectarian religious agenda. Throughout the nineties her interest in education policy grew, and she became increasingly radicalized on the subject of federal and state education standards. She ran and lost a school-board race in 1999. In 2000, she showed up at her local nominating convention to oust a moderate state senator, Gary Laidig, who had served for nearly three decades.
Meanwhile, Pawlenty spent the nineties climbing the leadership ladder in the Minnesota State House, and by 1999 he was the Majority Leader. History brought the two politicians together in 2000 at Minnesota’s Mahtomedi public school, site of the nominating convention that would start Bachmann’s legislative career.
Bachmann and fellow activists from the Maple River Education Coalition, a group with a fairly conspiratorial view of the government—former governor Jesse Ventura once compared the group to people who believe aliens are about to land—packed the convention and targeted moderate incumbent Republican who had failed to vote to repeal a state education law known as Profile of Learning. Republicans in Minnesota who were at the convention told me that Pawlenty was unnerved by the hijacking of what is usually a routine event, and he personally rounded up votes to save a G.O.P. member named Mark Holsten. Laidig was not so lucky, and Bachmann, who later said she had been preparing to challenge him for over a year, easily defeated him.
In the State House, Bachmann crusaded against Profile of Learning and gay marriage. She and Pawlenty served together in the legislature, though in different chambers, for two years before he became governor in 2003. Bachmann, known much more for being outside with a bullhorn rather than inside working on the details of policy, galvanized forces that became impossible for Pawlenty to ignore. Indeed, Governor Pawlenty supported Bachmann’s state constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman. She warned that “immediately … all schools will begin teaching homosexuality” if they delayed passage of the amendment. In 2004, when the legislation got held up in the Senate, rather than working the cloakroom Bachmann organized a large rally of some three thousand people at the state capitol. Pawlenty, not wanting to miss a good political opportunity, made an appearance and briefly addressed the crowd.
Though Bachmann’s amendment eventually failed, she had made a big enough impact that the G.O.P. Senate leadership brought her into its club, bestowing on her the title of Assistant Minority Leader in charge of policy. The position did not last long. Her falling out with the Republican establishment was over the aforementioned 2005 bill that got tangled up in the politics of taxes and abortion. It was Bachmann’s vote for this bill that Pawlenty referenced last night.
After voting for the legislation Bachmann was, in her words, “purged” from the Senate leadership. By then, Bachmann was running for Congress, and she seemed to relish the fact that she was stripped of her Assistant Minority Leader title. In July, 2005, she sent out a press release with the headline “Bachmann’s Anti-Tax, Pro-Life Stance Leads to Ouster from Senate Leadership.” She said, “My philosophical differences with the minority leader were just too deep for him to allow me to continue in a leadership position. Today the fallout was finalized—I was stripped of my leadership position.”
Presumably, Bachmann’s ouster actually stemmed from her attempt to derail the tax-increase/pro-life-provision compromise. The “philosophical differences” excuse was a fudged means of glorifying her exit.
She won her race for the U.S. Congress the following year, 2006, and Pawlenty continued to serve as governor until January of this year. Then they both started running for President. Some moderate Republicans in Minnesota are experiencing schadenfreude as they watch Bachmann undermine Pawlenty’s long-planned campaign. They blame him for helping unleash the extremist elements in the state G.O.P. as he climbed to the governor’s mansion.
Gary Laidig told me, “A lot of people are delighting in what Bachmann is doing to Pawlenty because he enabled this strain of conservatism to infect the party, and he promoted it.”
Photograph: Bachmann and Pawlenty campaigning in 2006. AP Photo/Jim Mione.
