Michele Bachmann steals the show in IowaDES MOINES, Iowa — Michele Bachmann served up red meat to the crowd at the Iowa conservative principles conference Saturday, slamming President Barack Obama as a Jimmy Carter retread, dissing the Mitch Daniels "truce" call for social issues, and saying she wants a "waiver" from the last two years of White House leadership.
Talking loudly and waving her hands, a pumped Bachmann used a slide presentation of various numbers — the national debt, the cost of a gallon of gas two years ago the day before Obama took office, the corporate tax rate — to make her points and pull the crowd in.
Suggesting that Iowa caucus voters had the power to halt Obama, Bachmann wrapped up her speech by asking, "Are you in? are you in for 2012?"
"I agree with you!" she said as the crowd cheered, and added, "I'm in!"
The Minnesota firebrand gave the best-received speech of the potential 2012 hopefuls appearance at Rep. Steve King's conference [attended by Haley Barbour, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, John Bolton, and Michele Bachmann] and the crowd wildly applauded her brand of populism. It was a reminder that while Bachmann has been criticized for miscues in her public statements, there is a space for her to fill in the Iowa caucuses should she decide to jump into the race for the White House.
She called for a "fair tax" and said that the "current United States tax code is a weapon of mass destruction."
She also made reference to her own Iowa ties, noting she was born in Waterloo. “Isn’t it exciting to be here? There is no place like Iowa," she said. "We love it and it is wonderful to be in a state where you have the king of conservatism, Steve King!"
She added, "We’re a cage team match. In Washington D.C. we like to get in the same arena, we like to fight the same fights."
She then started firing up the crowd, saying, ”Does anyone remember the trillion dollar stimulus bill? Did President Obama correctly diagnose the problem with job creation. ..what’s his level of credibility on job creation?"
The crowd replied, "No!"
"Not so much, that’s right!" Bachmann said. "Iowans are very intelligent people, despite being extremely good-looking and very well tempered."
After a few other similar exchanges with the crowd, Bachmann invoked the president's failed Final Four predictions and said, "Now he’s got us engaged in another third middle eastern war? Talk about March Madness, can anyone say Jimmy Carter"
She also made a joke about Chinese President Hu and the national debt, saying "So we know now that Hu is your daddy."
And she drew massive boos from the crowd when she mentioned New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, who recently said he is looking into a waiver from the health care reform bill for New York City. She noted he said last year, as first reported by POLITICO, that "the bill and I are one."
"This is I believe the greatest power grab that I have ever seen," she said, comparing "this movie" to the fiscal crisis in Greece and adding, "It's not a pretty picture."
"The Constitution holds the answer. … We the people," she said. "We are the answer to the problem today in the United States because you need to be pushed back in charge of your own health care. ... The federal govt doesn’t have a clue how to create jobs. You do."
Weiner quickly responded, "Perhaps the best thing of the week. The Iowa tea posse stops brushing their tooth long enough to boo me."
Bachmann also was the lone candidate of the event at the time she spoke to mention an issue that's certain to be hot in the GOP primary - immigration - in her speech. She talked about miles of unprotected borders as part of her slide-show presentation.
And she addressed calls for a GOP truce on social issues, saying, "We’ve been told we need a truce on social issues and I would highly disagree with that because social conservatism is fiscal conservatism."
Bachmann invoked Abraham Lincoln as she said, "The idea of liberty is so great and yet so precious…the founders recognized it could only be entrusted to the brain trust [of voters].”
