Goofball Candidates Become Mainstream With Exposure

Poor Michele Bachmann: she was just making an impromptu, offhand joke to her supporters at a political rally about how, maybe, the great power upstairs is sending a message to Washington by providing an earthquake and hurricane in rapid succession. Next thing I know, political pundits are ridiculing her comment by taking it literally...c'mon! There is enough about Michelle Bachmann for her political opponents to criticize without distorting the context of her words.

The way that presidential campaigns are currently set up, with the need for almost constant media exposure and a continuing source of funding, candidates tend to be forced into a position where they not only have to be continually on the stump making speeches, but also those speeches have to contain new material from time to time. And it's a certainty that, from time to time, a candidate will commit a gaffe and say something that their critics will jump on and lampoon. Like Bachmann's statement the other day commemorating Elvis Presley's birthday when it was actually the day he died. O.K., so she goofed; can't even her opponents get the fact that she was trying to honor the late great rock and roll star with her words?

Ironically, while goofy, inconsequential statements often get a lot of press, the process of constant coverage of some of the candidates who have really bad, controversial ideas for the country tends to make them more familiar and somehow less dangerous. So people like Bachmann and goofball Texas governor Rick Perry, who would like nothing better than to dismantle your Social Security and Medicare and leave you twisting in the wind in your old age while giving rich people bigger tax breaks, are becoming mainstream just by dint of their exposure on television. And that bothers me.

By the time that November 2012 rolls around, will the country be so jaded by the extremist agenda of those on the teabagger political right that it will simply give their candidate, presumably Perry, a free pass on their destructive policies and elect him anyway? Once the attention-span-challenged American public becomes accustomed to the goofiness of these candidates, they will begin to look for other things in them. And truth be told, take away their crappy ideology and I myself like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry! Well, maybe Michele...

But I'll never vote for either of them...