Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) (19 page)

Meanwhile, even after the bailout, the economy continued to decline—an indicator, of course, that government spending binges simply don't work. And so as September slid into October, the McCain-Palin ticket drifted behind in the polls. The leadership of both parties had united around TARP, and yet the economic tumble had occurred, unfortunately, on Republican-appointed Hank Paulson's watch. So the American people were thinking:
Why not throw Paulson and his party out of the Treasury Department—and out of the White House?
I believe that had McCain opposed the bailout—if he had made a clean break, opposing Paulson and standing for principle at that crucial moment—he could have changed the 2008 election.

Disappointed as I was by the bailout fiasco, I hoped that somehow the GOP could pull it off. My desire to pitch in and help their campaign increased. Little did I know that I would soon be getting much the same media treatment myself.

I did work as a Team McCain “surrogate speaker”; I was delighted to do my part. I had much to say about the stark choice that Americans were facing in 2008. Yet in speaking out I nearly lost my own seat.

In the House, of course, we have to run for election every two years, and so my name was on the ballot that year, too. My Democratic opponent was a former mayor and state transportation commissioner. He was an experienced politician, and 2008 was shaping up nationwide to be another good Democratic year. Yet I had worked hard for my district, and I figured I was in good shape to win reelection.

But my campaign optimism took a sharp detour just three weeks before the election, on October 17, 2008. I was at home in Minnesota when the McCain-Palin communications office called and asked if I would appear on MSNBC's
Hardball
, a program hosted in Washington by Chris Matthews. Even though I had already done three shows that day, I was pleased to help out. I said yes, even though I had never appeared on MSNBC before, nor had I ever watched the Matthews show. I was heading back to my district when I got the call; it meant I would turn around and go back to a local TV studio in St. Paul. Yet there's one thing I've learned over the years: It's always challenging to do television by “remote.” That is, if you're sitting in one studio and the host is sitting in another studio, it's hard to gauge exactly what's going on. For example, if I was a guest, the host could see me, but I couldn't see the host; there's no two-way camera in such a situation—just me staring into the dark eye of a one-way camera. In addition, depending on the quality of the audio connection, there's usually a bit of delay in the sound, so when the host asks a question, I have to wait for a moment, staring into dark glass, before I can hear the question and respond to it. Television is a marvelous medium. But that evening, as I sat down in St. Paul to do the segment with Matthews a thousand miles to the east, my own campaign was about to change.

The topic that night was Barack Obama and his long associations with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant sixties radical, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the black nationalist America basher. I would have preferred to be talking about policy issues, such as economics and energy, but the options for conversation belonged to the host, not to me. And in this instance, my task as a surrogate was to bolster the argument that Obama had a curious, even suspicious, relationship with both Ayers and Wright.

During the interview, I made the point that Obama did indeed have a strange and lengthy relationship with Ayers—a man who had set off bombs as a radical “Weatherman” in the sixties, who had then gone on the lam for many years, and who had finally taken up a new life as a far-left education activist in Chicago. And it was there, in the Windy City, that he had come to know, and even mentor, a young up-and-comer named Barack Obama. Yet through the decades, Ayers had clung to his radical views. In 2001 he published a book in which he took credit for setting off bombs—in the New York City police headquarters in 1970, in the U.S. Capitol in 1971, and at the Pentagon in 1972. He was quoted in the
New York Times
as saying, “I don't regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn't do enough.” And just to make his present-day politics clear, Ayers was happy to pose for
Chicago
magazine, smirking as he stood on top of a crumpled American flag. So why was Obama friends with this man?

Obama's association with Wright was even closer. Wright was a prominent pastor on Chicago's South Side, and one of his parishioners for nearly two decades was Barack Obama. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, Wright had declared from his pulpit, “America's chickens are coming home to roost”—that is, the United States fully deserved what it got; the quote, of course, came from Malcolm X, speaking in an equally mean spirit about the John F. Kennedy assassination. What a horrible thing to say! And then, in case he had not made himself clear, Wright shouted, “Not God bless America. God
#@!*%
America.” Wright has made many other derogatory statements about the United States as well. How do we know? His church sold his nasty, sometimes anti-Semitic rants in books and on cassettes. And this man was Obama's mentor for two decades? Wright had officiated too at Obama's marriage to Michelle, and he had baptized their two children. In other words, as with Ayers, many Americans found it simply inconceivable that Obama didn't know about Wright's statements over the years. And for their part, all the media sycophants could do was yawn.

So to me, Wright and Ayers met the test of being dangerously anti-American. Why was Obama so linked to them? Did he agree with any part of what they were saying? Or did he just quietly accept their support? As I said to Matthews, “If we look at the collection of friends that Barack Obama has had in his life, it calls into question what Barack Obama's true beliefs and values and thoughts are.” I asked again, “What it is that Barack Obama really believes?”

Obama was perfectly free to be friendly with anybody he wanted, of course, and he was equally free to believe anything he wanted. But it seemed that the media had a startling lack of curiosity about both Obama's background and the individuals he looked to as mentors.

As I said to Matthews on the show, if John McCain had entertained such sinister associations in his past, the media would have been all over them—and him. But because it was Obama, the liberal-leaning media kept quiet. All you could hear were crickets, as my kids would say. That was the Main Stream Media double standard, no news flash there.

Clearly, the MSNBC host Matthews was an unabashed Obama fan; earlier in the 2008 campaign, he had said that when he heard Obama speak, “I felt this thrill going up my leg . . . and that is an objective assessment.” Matthews then moved from Obama to members of Congress. He wanted to know if I thought members of Congress were anti-American. I responded, “It isn't for me to say whether members of Congress are pro-America or anti-America.” Instead, I argued, “the news media should do a penetrating exposé and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think the American people would love to see an exposé like that.” Matthews knew that he had caught me in something potentially exploitable, and so he brought the interview to a quick conclusion. And that was it.

Walking out of the studio in St. Paul, I was concerned about the segment. But I didn't know how much trouble I was in until I was at home with Marcus and our son Lucas called to tell us that a firestorm was breaking. He added, the MSNBC liberal lineup was in a feeding frenzy—as was seemingly every other liberal commentator in the country. I was used to being attacked by liberals, that was nothing new, but our son was now warning me: This time it would be different. And he was right.

The rest of the liberal media went into a rage. A headline in
the Huffington Post
was typical: “
MICHELE BACHMANN CHANNELS MCCARTHY: OBAMA ‘VERY ANTI-AMERICAN,' CONGRESSIONAL WITCH HUNT NEEDED
.” That was Friday night.

A few days later, House Speaker Pelosi flew into Minneapolis, held a press conference and announced that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would be allocating an additional one million dollars to my opponent's campaign. Donors from Manhattan to Santa Monica were writing big checks to the Democrat in the 6th in order to beat me! And for a while, their efforts were working: My poll numbers went from being up by thirteen points to being down by four points—a dizzying seventeen-point drop in less than a week, fueled by a tidal wave of pro-Obama support.

Supportive calls and campaign funds came in from colleagues, including Roy Blunt, Virginia Foxx, Jeb Hensarling, Steve King, Jack Kingston, and Marilyn Musgrave.

Then, just in the nick of time, the cavalry came over the hill. Conservatives in the media began sticking up for me, especially the Talk Radio Brigade. The first hero was the Great One, Mark Levin, followed by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Then Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Roger Hedgecock, Laura Ingraham, Jason Lewis, Michael Medved, and Michael Reagan. So at least I still had some airspeed at the national level.

Back in my own district, my campaign advisers said I had to do a
mea culpa
TV spot to deal with the serious damage. I agreed. But when I arrived at the house where the commercial would be taped, I looked at the script they'd written for me. It was, “I'm sorry, I was wrong, I promise I'll never do it again.” I thought, I may not have used the right phrasing on
Hardball
—but how could I honestly say I was wrong for a) expressing concerns about Obama's views, and b) that it's not for me to say who has pro-America or anti-America views—that's the media's job? So I went upstairs, sat in an empty bedroom, prayed, and thought about what I wanted to say. Then I pulled out a BIC pen, wrote my script, and then went back downstairs. “Here's what I want to say,” I told my aides. They started to argue, but I was firm. So here are my words as they appeared on TV:

 

Once again, our nation is at a crossroads, and it's a time for choosing. We could embrace government as the answer to our problems or we can choose freedom and liberty. I may not always get my words right, but I know that my heart is right. Because my heart is for you, for your children, and for the blessings of liberty to remain for our great country.

And then I gave the disclaimer, “I'm Michele Bachmann, and I approved this message.” I wanted to express that I understood there was a firestorm of controversy, and yet I wanted to express my concern that Obama would take the country down the wrong path. As Ronald Reagan so famously said once, this is a time for choosing. Well, this, too, was a time for choosing. Also, I realized that the national mood had changed; it was clear by then that the Obama-Biden ticket was going to win the White House. I needed to reassure my supporters that I would remain the congresswoman with core principles in opposing the coming reign of liberalism in Washington. Minnesota voters now knew one thing for sure: If they reelected Bachmann, they would have a fighter in Washington, a determined warrior who would always stand firmly and decisively against the Obama agenda.

The year 2008, of course, turned out to be another bad year for Republicans. Not only did the McCain-Palin ticket lose, but the Republicans lost a net twenty-one seats in the House. And my friend Norm Coleman, our state's Republican U.S. senator, would ultimately lose—in a much-contested, much-recounted election, complete with fishy ballots that reportedly came from someone's car trunk—to the ultraliberal Al Franken.

Yet in my own race, I ended up winning reelection by three points. Not a landslide, to be sure, but thanks to the people of my district, I was reelected. At our election-night party at a local hotel ballroom, my friend Barbara Harper—a key ally ever since she had gone to that counting room at Mahtomedi High School six years earlier—held up a sign proclaiming,
“
N
ICE TRY,
C
HRIS
M
ATTHEWS!”

From this close-call experience I learned some valuable lessons. As I have said, in politics I wanted to be able to disagree with opponents without being disagreeable or disrespectful. Yet in the stormy years to come, many more hardballs would come—they come with the territory of politics. But the 2008 campaign gave me an opportunity to learn to do better.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Gangster Government

SO Barack Obama was elected to be our forty-fourth president. He didn't have my vote, but he had my prayers. So much of what he said on the campaign trail was nonsensical platitudes—just meaningless phrases, seemingly produced in a focus-group factory. But he did make one very specific pledge that I took seriously; he called for universal health care—another euphemism for the government control of, and ultimate takeover of, our health-care system.

An early warning sign came in November 2008, right after the election, when Obama announced that Timothy Geithner was his choice for Treasury secretary. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Geithner had been a key player in the Bush-era bailouts, all of which I had opposed. I opposed them because I don't believe taxpayer money should bail out private businesses, period. I also believe government must not pick winners and losers. I don't vilify Wall Street; America needs a dynamic and thriving capital-markets system. But I also think that if Wall Street makes bad bets, well, that should be their problem, not the taxpayers'. Those bailouts had been shrouded in secrecy, and I had opposed the secrecy as well. Transparency is vital in any government operation other than one involving national security, and Geithner and the Fed had been anything but transparent. Behind the scenes, out of the public eye, they had been dishing out billions of dollars to favored banks here in the United States and around the world, and to private American companies as well.

As an aside, I can say that this problem is much bigger than just Geithner. It goes also to the leadership of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and to the nature of the Federal Reserve system itself. Interestingly, critics of the Fed across the political spectrum have agreed on the necessity of aboveboard accountability and transparency. On the libertarian right, it's been my House colleague Ron Paul of Texas, and on the self-declared socialist left, it's been Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. All of us might not agree on much, but we agree on this: Let's audit the entire Federal Reserve system and pull away the unnecessary veneer of secrecy.

But in fact, the huge bailouts and shocking lack of transparency were matters of official public policy. It was government policy to allow bailouts, and it was government policy to keep the bailouts secret—so as not to upset or panic the markets, for one reason. I believed, however, that the better public policy was no bailouts at all, as well as complete and total transparency. But my immediate problem with Geithner was more than just policy; it was the problem of integrity. We soon learned that Geithner—the man who would be leading the Treasury Department—hadn't paid his taxes, the taxes he legally owed to the same U.S. Treasury. And until he was named to the high post—as a successor to the great Alexander Hamilton—he had been perfectly happy to skate away from his personal financial obligations.

So I was disturbed to read that Geithner—during all the time he had been working in Washington for the International Monetary Fund—had failed to pay $35,000 in taxes for the years 2001–2004. The IRS finally caught up with him during a 2006 audit, assessing him for almost $15,000 in additional taxes for the years 2003 and 2004. But that was only part of his shortfall; for the years 2001 and 2002, the statute of limitations had expired, and so he chose not to pay those amounts also due. In other words, Geithner had gotten away with tax evasion; he had beaten the tax man—and that was fine with him.

But then President Obama nominated him for the Treasury post. It was then, only then, that he figured he needed to fix the “optics” of his nonpayment, and he finally, belatedly, paid in full. And now this man was going to oversee the Treasury? And the IRS? A proven tax scofflaw?

Some will say, of course, that an ethics-challenged cabinet secretary is a small thing. What about a
big
thing—the 2009 “stimulus” package, which ultimately totaled $787 billion, before adding interest costs. If interest costs are included, the total cost to the taxpayers rises to well over $1 trillion. We all remember the stimulus. Its premise was simple: Because we had spent so much money and run the economy off a cliff, we should spend even
more
money. It was perfectly straightforward—and perfectly wrong. Just what would this spending do? What would it accomplish? In January 2009, the chairwoman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, made a bold and optimistic prediction: If the near-trillion-dollar stimulus bill was enacted, she declared, unemployment would never reach as high as 8 percent. At the time, the rate was 7.8 percent. So Romer's prediction sounded soothing. But then the stimulus bill passed—and the unemployment rate went up. It went up
above
8 percent, and it stayed that way. In fact, it went as high as 10.1 percent. As of this writing, the unemployment rate has been above 8 percent for more than two and a half years, the longest such period since the 1930s.

Meanwhile, during the debate over stimulus legislation, I gained some insight into the president's thought process. Early in 2009 Obama came to Capitol Hill to try to persuade Republicans to vote for the stimulus. He is a good speechmaker, less a persuader. Still, during our brief question-and-answer session, he shocked me with one of his responses. When asked how important winning the stimulus vote was to him—how it might rank in comparison to other priorities—he gave a revealing answer. He said he would prefer to pass his agenda and be a one-term president, rather than
not
pass his agenda and enjoy two terms.
Well, if he means it,
I told myself,
and it sure sounds as if he means it, I know he is firmly committed to his ideology.
He's a genuine left-wing true believer, and so conservatives had better fight to defend his agenda while we have the chance.

I was against the stimulus all along, of course. Or I should say, I was against Obama's kind of stimulus. I would gladly have voted for a package of incentive-improving tax cuts, along with a program of deregulation and expanded energy production. But Obama and the liberals had their own ideas. And they had the votes: In late January 2009, Speaker Pelosi rammed the stimulus package through the House. I'm proud to say that this misbegotten pile of pork didn't win the vote of a single one of my House Republican colleagues. It was one of our finest hours; we Republicans were fighting back.

Meanwhile, the whole nation was coming to learn that the “stimulus” was even more bogus than people had thought. Let me recall now this bit of stimulus folly: In March 2009 President Obama “deputized” Vice President Biden with a new responsibility: overseeing the proper spending of that $787 billion package. Obama announced, “To you, he's Mr. Vice President, but around the White House, we call him the Sheriff, because if you're misusing taxpayer money, you'll have to answer to him.” Then, evidently believing his own bravado, Obama went even further: “I'm also deputizing every single American to visit a new website called recovery.gov so you can see where your tax dollars are going and hold us accountable for results.” All that sounded great—and yet when Americans went to the recovery.gov site, they discovered, to their bewilderment, that billions were listed as having been spent in places that did not in fact exist. For example, recovery.gov listed a “15th congressional district” of Arizona, giving the good news that thirty jobs had been saved or created in that district, thanks to $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. But there was just one catch: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona. The Grand Canyon State at the time had only eight congressional districts. And, by the way, what is a “saved” job and how does the government define a “saved” job? Answer: the same way they computed that Arizona had fifteen districts. Similarly, the recovery.gov site bragged that in Connecticut's “42nd congressional district,” the stimulus had created twenty-five jobs. And once again, there is no 42nd congressional district in Connecticut.

So what were the Obama people thinking? How could they make mistakes like this—and then publish them? I can think of two possible answers: First, the Obama administration was so addled by Keynesian theorizing—that is, the notion that you can spend yourself rich—that the ideologues really didn't care where the money was being spent, just as long as it was being spent. Billions, trillions, the more the merrier. As I have often said, nobody should dare tell the president what number comes after “trillion.” The second possible answer is a more cynical version of the first: Those in the Obama administration didn't care where the stimulus money was going, geographically, because what really mattered was spreading money to their friends and political allies—the big-city liberal mayors, the Saul Alinsky nostalgists, the ACORN activists, the taxpayer-subsidy-dependent green-jobs propagandists, and all the other moochers, hustlers, and rent seekers demanding “a place at the table” when liberals control the White House.

So liberals raided the Treasury and spent money in early 2009, and the rest of us paid for it. They were almost giddy as they pushed money out the door by the bushel basketful. It was as though they didn't care where the money went: “Just spend more!” was the motto. This was more than foolish; it was darn near criminal. Moreover, one thing soon became apparent: Obama and the political types surrounding him had no idea how real jobs were actually created. Articles appeared in the media noting the lack of private-sector experience in the president's cabinet—and this was one time when I believed exactly what I was reading. And so, of course, the stimulus was a flop.

The reality of job creation is simple: It comes from hardworking human action, not from borrowing and printing money. The employer, or prospective employer, is convinced that it's better to use his or her capital to hire someone to do something than simply to leave that capital in the bank. The act of hiring is a matter of faith—faith in possibilities, faith in the future. Indeed, that's how Marcus and I started our business; we believed that if we opened our doors and hired people, clients would come, and we'd be able to cover our fixed costs, pay our employees, and, we hoped, even keep a little bit for ourselves. That's the profit motive, and it's a good thing.

Yet when regulators, litigators, and tax collectors come along, employers often end up
not
being employers after all. They are hamstrung, tied up, red taped, restricted, legislated against—and thus no longer able to hire people and keep the economy going. And once a business fears the hydra-headed modern American government, it tends
not
to stay in business. Over the past three years, hundreds of employers, big and small, have told me that it's fear of the government—specifically, fear of the Obama administration—that has killed millions of potential jobs. Or as Steve Wynn, the famous casino owner in Las Vegas, said not long ago, the Obama administration is “the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress, and job creation in my lifetime.”

But of course, jobs were being created in Washington—at least for limousine drivers. According to a 2011 report from the Center for Public Integrity, the number of limousines owned by the federal government rose by 73 percent during the first two years of President Obama's administration. What an amazing statistic! Just think: All those well-kept bureaucrats in their long black cars! Yet despite the increase in nicely uniformed chauffeurs, it was hardly an example of the administration looking out for the little guy. It was, rather, a symbol of Beltway arrogance, economic incompetence, and, of course, the self-indulgence of the ruling class.

And by the way, the same holds true for federal salaries. According to
USA Today
, in December 2007 precisely one employee at the Department of Transportation earned a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees enjoyed salaries above $170,000. In other words, good times at the DOT. It's possible to come up with diverging explanations for these huge increases in federal perks and pay. But it's impossible to deny that the gap between how Washington thinks and acts and how the rest of the country thinks and acts is growing wider.

Moreover, we can't say that all these excesses were the fault only of liberal Democrats; the imperializing of the capital city has often been bipartisan. All the clichés about Washington, D.C., readily apply to the bright young things in both parties: They come to Washington to do good, and they end up doing pretty well for themselves. Still, it was clear that the Obama administration all by itself was adding new layers of venality and corruption.

Back to cars. In the spring of 2009 the Obama administration seized control of the Chrysler bankruptcy, putting into this private company the sum of $4.5 billion of our money. Actually, we should note, 40 percent of the money was borrowed, so we taxpayers paid to borrow the money, only to “lend” it to private companies! If they were such a good credit risk or a worthy investment, why didn't they get their own loans? Why wouldn't the United Auto Workers lend them the money?

In the final settlement, the White House decreed that Chrysler bondholders, those holding secured debt—that is, those with the first legal claim on Chrysler assets—would receive only thirty-three cents on the dollar, while United Auto Workers retirees, holding unsecured debt, would receive fifty cents on the dollar. Yet it's a fact: Under the law, secured creditors are entitled to one hundred cents on the dollar, if the money is there; only then, if there is any money left, are the unsecured creditors entitled to anything.

In other words, the politically connected UAW muscled its way to the front of the payout line, barging ahead of the less well-connected bondholders. Bankruptcy, of course, is always a wrenching and painful procedure, but that's never an argument for breaking the rules of law. We might note that these shunted-aside bondholders included not only individual retirees but also the pension funds that are relied on by average Americans. So to all the financial victims whose private property interests were denied and then given to others, the Obama administration was saying, in effect, “That's it. Tough luck. What are you going to do about it?”