It’s been a great week for everyone’s favorite wild-eyed Tea Party Caucus leader, Michele Bachmann.  First, the Minnesota representative gave a stunningly competent performance at Monday night’s GOP debate. Then news broke yesterday that she inked a deal with the Penguin Group to write a memoir, which—along with her not-at-all-ironic appointment to the House Intelligence Committee—is de rigeur for a serious White House hopeful. Now she’s tied for second with Ron Paul in the heavily libertarian early primary state of New Hampshire.

According to a Magellan poll, Republicans in the Granite State still favor Mitt Romney, giving him 42 percent of the vote, but both Bachmann and Paul received a non-trivial 10 percent. The margin narrowed dramatically for self-identified conservatives. When asked who had the strongest debate performance, 37 percent chose Romney and 33 percent chose Bachmann. And those are just the numbers among sensible, flinty New Hampshire Republicans. According to a national survey of GOP primary voters, Bachmann commands a whopping 19 percent of the vote. Romney received 33 percent and Herman Cain placed third with 10 percent.

Bachmann should enjoy this surge while it lasts. The Minnesota congresswoman has such a long history of batty remarks, it’s just a matter of time before she unintentionally blames gays and Satanists for our country’s record levels of unemployment. When you type her name into Google, the top suggested query is “Michele Bachmann quotes,” a reference to one of the many compilations of her “craziest” turns of phrase. Over the years she’s claimed that judges instruct children to try homosexuality, that Obama caused the swine flu outbreak, and, of course, that The Lion King is a form of gay propaganda. Just this week a report surfaced that Bachmann freaked out and called the cops on an ex-nun who was trying to speak with her about gay rights. There was also a highly unflattering Daily Beast profile of her husband and close adviser Marcus, a Christian “therapist” who lectures pastors on the evils of the “homosexual agenda” and has called gays “barbarians” who need to be “educated” and “disciplined.”

Bachmann may have emerged from Monday’s debate as the “nutty front-runner,” but given her past as the loosest of loose cannons, the congresswoman’s lead will likely fade once she has the opportunity to open her mouth outside the controlled setting of a sober CNN-sponsored debate.

Tags: election 2012, GOP women, Michele Bachmann, mitt romney, politics, Republicans

Hillary did it. So did Bill. John Boehner does it at least twice a day in front of the cameras. But should Obama do it—get weepy in public? According to lacrimation activists Lee Glickstein and Pete van Dyk, the answer is an emphatic, wailing, "yes." Glickstein and van Dyk run Men of Tears, a workshop aimed at teaching adult men the art and science of sobbing. For two hours every week, a group of about 10 men of varying ages and occupations—from sheet-metal worker to former karate champion—gather in an empty office, form a "tear circle," and relearn how to bawl their eyes out. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Glickstein and van Dyk founded Men of Tears "to provide men with a safe space to tap into emotions they may have dissociated from since childhood, so the next time tears well up, they can well over." Interestingly, the workshop is an all-male offshoot of a larger Glickstein-backed organization known as WaterWorkers, which "promotes crying as a therapeutic practice." Proponents of the man-tear movement believe they are "addressing a societal problem," if not one of public health.

Scientists are mostly in agreement that repressing negative emotion amps up cardiovascular stress and produces anxiety, and long-term stress has been shown to kill brain cells and impair memory function. For men, who learn at a young age that stoicism is tantamount to masculinity, such emotional repression is common, according to Jonathan Bowman, associate professor of communication at the University of San Diego.

I don't typically take medical advice from doctors of communication, but that sounds plausible enough. While it's doubtful, as Libby noted last month, that the tears of infamous male weepers like John Boehner represent an earnest outpouring of emotion, the Lacrimists remain big fans of Boehner and other misty-eyed politicians:

[Glickstein] and van Dyk are thinking bigger, calling it a "primary mission" to get President Obama to admit that he cries. After seeing Obama pause for 51 seconds—presumably collecting himself and holding back tears—during a speech Jan. 12 about the Arizona shooting victims, Glickstein wrote a blog entry asking the president to cry openly ... "I know he is a compassionate man," Glickstein says, "and we assume he cries at home. If he admits at a press conference that he cries, that would be a huge step in (ending) the cycle of violence."

As analysts obsess over this year's State of the Union address, there's been a lot of talk of tone, but none of emotion. There's a chance that some well-timed tears could help the president finally shake off his image as a detached intellectual. But it could just as easily backfire and feed into the lazy stereoytpe of Democrats as effete bleeding hearts who don't have the stomach for tough decisions.

What do you guys think? Should Obama let himself choke up during tonight's speech?

Tags: boehner, crying, john boehner cries, masculinity, Obama, politics, State of the Union

Dahlia and Amanda, you’re totally right that Republican excuses about morale and saving lives were just wispy smoke screens for something more sinister and irrational. Fortunately, despite facing stiff opposition from prominent Republican senators, all the lobbying, cajoling, and deal-making paid off in the end. Every single Democratic senator chose to stand on the right side of history and voted for repeal, along with eight of their GOP colleagues. What’s most striking about the Republican pols who reversed course and refused to toe their party’s paleolithic line is not the paltry number, but how overwhelmingly young and female they were.

Of the four Republican women in the Senate, three voted for repeal. With the exception of Dem-friendly George Voinovich of Ohio, the GOP men were all in their early-to-mid 50s, relative infancy for the geriatric upper chamber of Congress. This high level of support for gay rights among the women and younger generation of legislators jibes with national surveys of attitudes toward homosexuality and should confirm, once and for all, that the military’s continued ban on gays was never about discipline, battle readiness, or unit cohesion. It was about ickiness.

Studies have repeatedly shown that the emotion of disgust can be a powerful player in human decision-making and moral judgment. In spite of our best rational selves, we are beholden to our primal, gut reactions to sights, smells, and behaviors that we find foreign or repugnant. And so are government officials, even when making important legislative or legal determinations that seem to have a sound basis in logic. Researchers have found that one’s sensitivity to disgust accurately predicts negative attitudes toward homosexuality. Moral disgust, which is heavily influenced by prevailing cultural norms overlaps extensively with the more familiar sense of physical disgust that we feel when exposed to dirt and disease and which subtly guides our lives. In fact, the connection is so deep that washing your hands can actually bolster feelings of moral purity. For women, who often have less rigid ideas about manly conduct, and for younger men, who grew up in an era of greater sexual freedom, the idea of an openly gay soldier sleeping in the next bunk is no longer viscerally or morally offensive. So congratulations, Congress, for overcoming immaturity and catching up with the rest of us.

Photograph of Sen. Susan Collins by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images.

Tags: congress, DADT, disgust, military, politics, psychology

Jess, reading your post on Nancy Pelosi's successful (if fraught) bid to remain the leader of House Democrats, I was struck by the difference between Pelosi and Sarah Palin, the most powerful woman on the other side of the aisle. Oh, wait, no - Sarah Palin isn't on the other side of the aisle. She's not on any side of any aisle, or behind any executive desk, because when the position she was elected to got tough, she bailed.

Pelosi, on the other hand, has been vilified by the right and lambasted by the left. When Republicans aren't calling her the Wicked Witch of the West, it's Cruella De Vil. House Democrats are saying she's a White House-enabler who destroyed the Democratic majority and deserves to be punished. Yet, faced with withering criticism from all sides, Pelosi fought for a leadership position that she knows will expose her to even more slings and arrows.

Last year, when Palin decided it was time to "pass the ball - for victory," her greatest travails consisted of hostility from the "lamestream media" and accusations of ethics violations that she said were cramping her style. But that was enough to send Palin fleeing from the Alaska governor's mansion, straight into the arms of Fox News.

Now she tells Robert Draper that she's in "internal deliberations" about a presidential run. Why someone who found the governorship of a resource-rich state too much trouble thinks she would enjoy four years in the Oval Office is beyond me. What, I wonder, would Palin's reaction be when she finished her first year in office and found that her approval ratings had slipped, the newspapers (not to mention the blogs!) were saying mean things, and there were rumblings of discontent within her own party? Would we be treated to the sight of an impromptu press conference on the front lawn of the White House, where President Palin would announce that she was leaving things in Vice President Bachmann's capable hands because the media was just being so damn distracting? Maybe! But you know who we can be certain wouldn't subject us to that kind of spectacle? President Pelosi.

Tags: Nancy Pelosi, politics, Sarah Palin, sarah palin resigns as governor of alaska

KJ, Hanna, I share your amusement over Todd Palin's e-mail to Joe Miller, though I do wish that he'd included at least one all-caps sentence.  As it stands, he only gets a B- in the art of writing semi-literate wingnutty e-mails.  Of course, all of this is why Meghan McCain is playing the role of Cassandra to the Republicans, mounting a one-woman campaign to stop the invading army of Palin acolytes and return control of the Republican Party to people who know well enough to install spell check on their Web browsers.  I suspect that McCain will follow Cassandra's footsteps to utter failure on this front.  Getting people to stop paying attention to Sarah Palin is like getting people to stop staring at a dude riding a recumbent bike around the park wearing nothing but a clown hat and a pair of thong underwear. Look at this very blog post that you are reading at this very moment.  Even as I sympathize with McCain, the urge to metaphorically point at the Palin circus with my keyboard has got the better of me.

It's all about the liberal fascist elitism that has got the Tea Party hopped up on inchoate anger.  Sarah Palin and her crew feed both parties in this cultural tug-of-war.  We the bloggers and journalists get to play the role of the elitists with our fancy spell checking doohickeys written no doubt in computer languages that sound like French, and Tea Partiers get to play the defenders of the salt of the earth Real Americans, who are too busy caring about God and country to busy themselves with girly-man occupations like learning proper capitalization.  Everyone benefits, particularly Sarah Palin, to the tune of $12 million and counting.

Oh, except the traditional leadership of the Republican Party.  Of course, it's hard to weep for them, since they brought this on themselves, and there's also the little matter of the two wars and ruined economy they saddled us with.  Then there's the chance that all this is undermining American democracy, which traditionally relied on some semblance of rationality in decision-making in order to function.  I guess on that latter point, we'll find out more in November.

Tags: Meghan McCain, Sarah Palin, tea party

When Sharron Angle had the audacity to denounce mandates for autism testing--putting the word autism in finger quotes, as if she thinks there is no such thing--I wondered if the Democrats would be smart enough to pick up that ball and run with it. Attacking early testing for autism goes right into the bin with "advocating puppy kicking" in terms of highly unpopular political ideas. Now it looks like the Democrats are going to ride this story for all it's worth; Kathleen Sebelius jumped in and denounced Angle for her stance against mandated coverage for autism testing.

It almost seems as if Angle couldn't stand that Christine O'Donnell was sucking up the headlines for most far-out thing of the day said, and knew that it was time to whip out the finger quotes to regain lost ground in that contest. Hey, if you can't win your respective elections, then "Biggest Wingnut of the 2010 Elections" might be a consolation prize.

You can see why using your fingers to make air quotes is such an attractive gesture for conservatives, because it's a way to hat tip the roiling paranoid theories that motivate the right-wing base, and the base needs lots and lots of hat tips to keep them energized. John McCain used finger quotes around the phrase "health of the mother" during the 2008 debates to hat tip the anti-choice claims that women who get therapeutic abortions are just lying about their health problems to get their hands on the unparalleled pleasures of outpatient surgery. Now we have Sharron Angle using the finger quotes in a way that, in the typical fashion of the 1990s, when air quotes were popular, would indicate she thinks "autism" is a fake disease made up by a bunch of lying liberals so they can squeeze insurance companies of money to pay for the no-doubt blissful joys of having to put your child through a bunch of testing, medical care, and remedial education that children with autism get.

Of course, the fact that air quotes are about as hip a gesture as putting a Toad the Wet Sprocket album on at a party is yet another sign that the Republicans have abandoned all hope of attracting many voters under the age of 50. Sharron Angle didn't just single out autism testing as an outrageous thing that insurance companies shouldn't have to pay for. She also singled out maternity leave, saying, "I'm not going to have any more babies, but I sure get to pay for it on my insurance. Those are the kinds of things we want to get rid of." The common theme of things they want to get rid of? Anything that might be a more pressing concern for the under-50 set. Maternity leave and testing small children for autism are just two examples of concerns of young parents, mostly people in their 20s through their early 40s. At the heart of much of the conservative movement bellyaching over health care reform has been this generational warfare--older people who think it's fine and dandy to demand that the younger generations pay for their heart medications and hip surgeries, but who flip out if they have to help pay for the medical concerns of younger people, such as reproductive care and pediatric care. If I were to sum up the Tea Party with one issue, I'd say that it's a whole lot of people on Medicare and disability throwing a fit because they don't want people who aren't to have easier access to health care.

Photograph of Sharron Angle by Ethan Miller for Getty Images.

Tags: autism, health care, mama grizzlies, sharron angle

Lisa Miller's entertaining profile of the "mama grizzly" candidates touches on their incoherence, their extremism, and their marketing-over-substance strategy, all aspects that as you noted, Jessica, may only be manageable through comedy. But above all, Miller kicks off with the question more in the media should be asking: For all the talk about mama grizzlies protecting "cubs" from harm, why is the exact nature of the harm never really explained? This is far from a mama-grizzly-only problem, but endemic to movement conservatives as of late, no matter what cutesy nickname they have. Mama grizzlies want to protect their cubs ... from what? Tea Partiers want to take their country back ... from who? Call it the right-wing sentence object problem. I suppose they figure those in the know can finish the sentences in their heads, and the rest of us don't get to be privy to this information.

The closest we've gotten to a solid understanding of the threat that is being so angrily rejected is Christine O'Donnell's speech at the Values Voters Summit, where she said, "There's more of us than there are of them." "Them": the amorphous threat to cubs. "Them": the group of people who've taken over the country from the rightful owners, who have to take it back. "Them": the violent threat that caused such a right-wing panic after the Obama election that there was a run on guns and ammunition that blew the prices sky high. This right-wing fear of "them" is hardly something new, of course. After spending time running around with and documenting mostly right-wing conspiracy-theorist paranoids, Jon Ronson simply titled his book about the experience Them, because "them" neatly sums up what all these paranoids are so afraid of. If the threat you organize behind resisting is so vague to begin with, it makes sense to simply drop the word altogether. Mama grizzlies protect their cubs ... fill in the "from them" for yourself.

What's great about a battle pitched between Real Americans and "them" is this very lack of specificity. Whoever you, disgruntled tea bagger, want to think of as "them," go for it. Maybe it's Mexican immigrants, mosque-building Muslims, gay people, smarty-pants college professors, or willful feminism-empowered ex-wives and female colleagues. Maybe one of these groups bothers you less than others. Maybe you're a Log Cabin Republican who hates the idea of community centers with real-live Muslims taking knitting classes in them. You can still convince yourself that you're on the side of Real Americans versus "them." "Them" is a shifting storm cloud of threat. Whatever you believe it is, Glenn Beck will assure you that the Founders didn't like it. And neither did Jesus.

The most significant trait of "them," besides the vagueness of who "them" is, is that the threat of "them" has very little relationship to actual material threats to real people in the real world. As Lisa Miller notes, mama grizzlies talk up the vague threat the unnamed objects present to cubs, but they're not very interested in the threats actual cubs in the real world face: lack of health care, lack of decent education, lack of good food and physical activity, lack of opportunities when they grow up. The problem with specificity is that it's hard to market, of course. The more you try to pin down actual threats, the fewer people you get who just want a vague and scary cloud to project all their scattered fears upon.

Tags: child welfare, mama grizzlies, tea parties

Jessica, I totally agree with you that Christine O'Donnell's facing something that's going to become the norm in politics. It's the let-it-all-hang-out era in a way that even the biggest hippies in the '60s couldn't have imagined. Still, even as someone who's been there in the worst way, I can say that I welcome the new social media era in politics. Once the learning curve is over, the benefits for the voters will be tremendous.

I predict two simultaneous trends: 1) People will find it harder to hide their true selves from the voting public, and 2) the standards for personal image of politicians will lighten up under all the pressure. In a decade, the hysteria over jokes Melissa McEwan and I made on blogs will seem completely ridiculous, but on the flip side, truly nutty folks like Christine O'Donnell won't be as able to put on a bland suit and a bland smile and hoodwink the public into thinking that they're not the kind of people who think Halloween is a Satanic conspiracy. In other words, I think that putting more information out there about everyone will adjust expectations until they're more realistic, both in terms of being more forgiving of minor slights (like doobies or dirty jokes) and more alarmed at the genuinely unsettling. The current unrealistic expectations are the product of a political system where candidates have way too much power to micromanage their image.  To quote the immortal words of MTV, it's time for people to "stop being polite, and start getting real."

Hey, and maybe at the end of the day all this honesty will mean that it's that much harder to build policies aimed at restricting ordinary vices, like smoking pot or screwing around. One of the major reasons that we have laws restricting drug use and reproductive rights is that the people who support these policies can count on the public not knowing about their own indiscretions. Once that's not an option anymore, hopefully it'll be that much harder for politicians to score points with moralistic grand-standing against widespread but closeted behavior.

Tags: christine o'donnell, new media, social media

Congratulations to the Delaware Republican Party for introducing a candidate for Senate so wingnutty she might actually make Sharron "Second Amendment Remedies" Angle look moderate. Christine O'Donnell upset party-backed favorite, Mike Castle, to gain the Republican nomination, despite being a really bad candidate by any reality-based measure. She's plagued with a history of lying about her education, dishonesty about her finances, and a sea of angry former supporters who hate her for being financially irresponsible, among other things. But I think what's really going to stick to her like hair on a cat lady is going to be her history of being upfront about her extreme anti-sex views.

O'Donnell has the usual wingnut slate of gay-hating, Mel Gibson-worshipping, abstinence-only blather going on. But what's really grabbing the headlines is her firm belief that any kind of sexual expression outside of marriage is evil, including masturbation. For those of us who are longtime anti-choice movement watchers, this sort of stance is hardly as surprising as it probably sounds to outsiders. Prominent proponets of abortion bans and abstinence-only education frequently hold the position that masturbation or any kind of nonintercourse experimentation is the first step to becoming some kind of orgasm junkie who has to crawl the streets looking for a harder fix. (Indeed, 44 percent of Americans assume abstinence includes abstaining from masturbation, with the numbers much higher for self-identified evangelical Christians.) For many of us in the "liberal media," it's surprising that even the Republican base would vote for someone who took special delight in running around on television decrying any sexual pleasure outside of strictly regulated, contraception-free, marital intercourse.

But that's because we have an enthusiasm for linking stated beliefs and lived beliefs that isn't shared by movement conservatives. We do live in a country where 38 percent of Americans condemn premarital sex but 95 percent of Americans have done it. The overlap between those groups is why outspoken wingnuts can win primaries. There are just a lot of people who get wild for bold proclamations of moral absolutes they have zero interest in actually living by. That, or they think the rules are for other, less worthy people.

In fact, this conundrum goes a long way toward explaining the Tea Party beyond just the occasional election of women who claim you're cheating on your future spouse if you take a little time for yourself. If there's one principle that defines the conservative movement, it's this tendency to spout big principles they personally have no interest in living by. That's why you have Tea Partiers denouncing "socialized medicine" and then spreading rumors that Obama is going to take away their Medicare, which is actually the closest thing to socialized medicine Americans have.  Or Michele Bachmann can go on at length about the evils of government handouts while taking $250,000 in farm subsidies for herself. Or Tea Party leaders who enjoy denouncing people who rely on social spending partaking of disability themselves. Or Newt Gingrich figuring that he's got a full right to set up his next wife while still married to the one who is beginning to bore him. The ability to make loud, absolutist proclamations excites movement conservatives; but actually living by the rules they write is for other people.

Photograph of Christine O'Donnell by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Tags: christine o'donnell delaware primary

Labor Day weekend is over, and your average voters are only starting to wake up and pay attention to the election. Which means that everyone's favorite parrot candidate, Sharron Angle, is hoping that by carefully repeating what her advisers tell her that her strategy should be, she can convince the voters of Nevada that she's not a hard-line right-winger.  Sadly for her, Angle hasn't learned how to put that neat little spin on what her advisers tell her that makes it sound like she thought of it herself.

For instance, Angle has taken to plainly stating that she's going to be a mainstream senator.  However, one could be forgiven for suspecting that Angle is a little confused about what the term "mainstream" might mean.  The Republican victory plan for Sharron Angle seems to go as folllows: Her advisers suggest she needs to come across as mainstream, she tells the press that she's mainstream, and I suppose the next step is to expect the press to take this evidence-free assertion on faith. The press seems unwilling to play along with this brilliant plan.  Instead, they keep reporting on the nutty stuff Angle says and does, such as agreeing with the contention that there are a bunch of "domestic enemies" and "homegrown enemies" sitting in Congress.

Given a candidate that is supposed to come across as mainstream but has no idea what mainstream is, the campaign advisers appear to have a back-up plan: claim that everyone's picking on Sharron by taking her words out of context.

"As you speak, as we're conversationally speaking, sometimes when you pick out words, they're not the best words you could have used," she told CNN in a rare one-on-one interview. "When taken out of context, you can make anybody look like they don't know what they're talking about," she said.

Again, it's hard to shake the feeling that complaints about being taken out of context are really complaints about not being able to say any fool thing you want on right-wing talk radio without it being covered in the mainstream press.  Maybe Sarah Palin should fly down and give Angle some pointers on fronting like your First Amendment rights are being violated if someone quotes you directly to criticize public statements you made.

Tags: nevada, Republicans, Sarah Palin, sharron angle, tea party