Michele Bachmann slated her big rollout in Iowa but at the last minute she couldn’t attend and delivered a satellite speech — and her rollout is now judged to have been a disastrous blow out.
The issue here isn’t ideology. It’s whether a candidate is ready for Prime Time. Politicians have to adjust to quickly changing conditions and most of them do all the time and they minimize hurt feelings. Bachmann came out of this looking like an amateur. That should give some GOPers pause since whoever gets the nomination will get tons of Republican money and help or hurt candidates down the line on the ticket.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.