Michele Bachmann is starting to get some real blowback over her missteps around the HPV attack on Rick Perry. The New York Times reports:
In the pugilism of this week’s Republican presidential debate, Representative Michele Bachmann seemed to have landed a clean blow against Gov. Rick Perry over an order he issued requiring Texas schoolgirls to be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted virus.It's important to distinguish how a candidate plays with non-Republican primary voters and how they play with Republican primary voters. Clearly the DC media is swarming over Bachmann's mistakes and the HPV screw-up certainly doesn't make liberals like myself want her to do well. But her attacks in the debate were strong, direct, and put Rick Perry on the defensive. He looked off-balance and unable to adequately explain himself, beyond making clear that it costs more than $5,000 to buy him off. As a result, I have to wait and see how this affects her support among actual Republican primary voters to see how much it hurts her.
But then in follow-up interviews, Mrs. Bachmann suggested the vaccine was linked to “mental retardation.”
As experts quickly pointed out, there is no evidence whatsoever linking the vaccine to mental retardation — and Mrs. Bachmann ended up shifting the focus off Mr. Perry and on to her long-running penchant for exaggeration.
It is a pattern her current and former aides know well — her tendency to let her passion for an issue overwhelm a sober look at the facts, resulting in indefensible remarks that, in a presidential primary race, are raising questions about her judgment and maturity.
...Adding, obviously this stuff hurts Bachmann in the general election, but I think we are miles away from having to consider Bachmann in the context of general election outcomes.