ON THE ROAD TO ESTHERVILLE, Iowa – The cornfields edging two-lane Iowa Highway 9 fade to a sunbaked blur as Rep. Michele Bachmann’s blue-and-white campaign coach rolls on, bound for a “town hall” meeting with voters in the basement of a public library 25 minutes down the road.
Inside the bus — which four years ago was chartered by John McCain and whose odometer now has 460,000 miles to show for it — the candidate folds her feet underneath her on a blue velour bench, answering questions with variations of the sound bites she’s repeated for months across this critical first-to-vote state.
She pauses just once for a query that seems to catch her by surprise: What’s the public’s biggest misconception about her?
“Oh, that’s a good question,” she says, the brassiness in her voice softening as she looks to a pair of campaign aides.
“One thing people will say to me at these town hall conventions … they’ll say `the media doesn’t tell the story of who you are. They make you two-dimensional, a caricature.’”
Bachmann has a point. The choreographed repetition of modern presidential campaigns can turn the most personable candidate into an endless loop of talking points. But any close observer of
Read More from the Article Source: Full Article
