Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571)
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Authors: Michele Bachmann
CORE OF
CONVICTION
MY STORY
MICHELE BACHMANN
Sentinel
SENTINEL
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2011 by Sentinel,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Michele Bachmann, 2011
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Bachmann, Michele.
Core of conviction : my story / Michele Bachmann.
p. cm.
ISBN 9781101563571
1. Bachmann, Michele. 2. Women legislatorsâUnited StatesâBiography. 3. LegislatorsâUnited StatesâBiography. 4. LegislatorsâMinnesotaBiography. 5. United States. Congress. HouseâBiography. I. Title.
E901.1.B33A3 2011
328.73'092âdc23
[B]
2011035631
Designed by Spring Hoteling
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Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author's alone.
To the loves of my life: Marcus, Lucas, Harrison, Elisa, Caroline, Sophia, twenty-three wonderful foster children, our parents.
CHAPTER ONE
A Middle-American Mom
IT was April Fools' Day 2000. I started out that morning thinking that I was headed for a joyful wedding. Then, instead, I found myself embroiled in a pitched political battle. So rather than witnessing a young couple start their new life together, I ended up finding a new political career. Yes, it was April Fools' Day, but it was no joke.
April 1, 2000, was the date of the Republican convention for the 56th Minnesota state senate district. The gathering was held in the beautiful little town of Mahtomedi, just east of St. Paul. The Bachmannsâmy husband Marcus, our children, and Iâwere residents of that district, living in the nearby town of Stillwater.
It was also the day the Bachmann family was planning to attend a wedding in Brainerd, a town in the northern part of the state, a two- or three-hour drive away. My own wedding, back in 1978, has always been precious to meâa covenant that Marcus and I treasure for eternity. And I just love weddings. I love the ceremony, the music, the exchange of vows, the sense of a new joint destiny for the newlyweds, even the cake and the celebration afterward.
But on this one morning, I had second thoughts about going. I said to my husband, “Honey, do you mind if I don't go with you this time?” I had woken up thinking I really ought to go instead to the Republican district convention. Someone, I thought, should send a message to those entrenched insiders, reminding them that we didn't like what they were doing in the capital, St. Paulâthat we didn't like what they were doing to us and our children.
Marcus knew I was especially concerned about a new left-leaning, state-mandated education curriculum. That new initiative, short on academic excellence, was the so-called Profile of Learningâa federal government program that our state legislators, following orders from Washington, D.C., had begun imposing on children across the state.
Indeed, Marcus shared my concerns about these and other top-down liberal policies. In his Christian counseling practice, he was constantly seeing, up close, the damage done to young people by wrongheaded ideasâideas that led to poor educational experiences and poor outcomes. Yet at the same time, Marcus had to concern himself with the practicalities of running our ongoing business and being a father. I was the political activist, not my husband.
Marcus was serious about his work and his mission, and yet he was always loving and understanding. “Okay,” he said. And so the Bachmann family changed its plans. He and our younger kids drove off to Brainerd for the wedding, and I made my way to the local GOP convention.
Poor Marcus; he had no idea what would happen next. And frankly, neither did I.
Because this was a last-minute decision and I was worried about being late, I simply flew out the door. Only when I was in the car did I realize what a mess I was. I had on jeansâand I never wear jeans if I can help it. I also wore some white moccasins worn to a dingy gray beige; my sweatshirt had a hole in it. I had no makeup onâand every woman knows what that means. And my hair was a fright.
But it was too late to turn back. I had to get to the convention before the registration table closed. Arriving in a flurry, I paid my twenty-dollar party registration fee, and I was in, along with some two hundred other Republicans. We were gathered in an auditorium at Mahtomedi High School, just west of Stillwater, and we were engaging in grassroots politics at its rootsiest.
It seemed likely that the convention would, without a hitch, endorse the incumbent senator yet again.
Or maybe there would be a hitch. Some of us began talking about why we were there. Why had we pulled ourselves away from other responsibilities on this Saturday morning? Was it just to sit and listen to political speeches? Was it simply to rubber-stamp our state senator?
Actually, we wanted to do more than thatâwe wanted to be heard. We all asked:
Why are we Republicans nominating this guy once again, when we can't trust him to represent us when he goes to St. Paul?
This senator had fought for his country as a Marine in Vietnam; I will always honor him for that service. And because so many others honored him too, he had been elected to the Minnesota State House of Representatives in 1972; he had moved up to the state senate in 1982. By the time of the district 56 convention, he had been in the state legislature for nearly three decades. Yet during that time, his voting record had changed. And we, the people, his constituents, wanted now to make our voices heard. His twenty-eight years in power seemed long enough.
The problem was that the senator had come to embrace a “go-along, get-along” mentality in the legislature, and he took the same attitude toward the growth of our state government. The Democrats were large and in charge in St. Paul, and the senator seemed a little too willing to accept his lesser status as part of the Republican minority. Not only that, but he had also become known as a safe vote for crucial legislation that the Democrats wanted to push; by gaining his token Republican vote, they could say that their bill was bipartisan. That veneer of bipartisanship put a “Minnesota nice” front on the hard-edged leftism emanating from the Twin Cities. And St. Paul and Minneapolis were then happy, of course, to take their orders from the even more distant bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
Our senator supported the Profile of Learning curriculum, brushing aside repeated attempts by parents like me to speak to him about our concerns. We phoned; we wrote letters; we made personal visits. When he would agree to see us, we showed him example after example of the faulty curriculum, including the dumbed-down tests and the politically correct guideline documents produced in St. Paul. We told him that parents, teachers, and taxpayers in his district were concerned that our kids needed rigorous academicsânot liberal and secular values, attitudes, and beliefs imposed by the state.
In addition, the senator had changed his voting record on important social issues. He had once taken a pro-life stance, but not anymore. He had even proposed a bill to install a bust of former Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun in the state capitol; Blackmun was a famous Minnesotan, to be sure, but he was particularly beloved by liberals because he had authored the Supreme Court's infamous 1973
Roe v. Wade
decision, trampling state laws and legalizing abortion nationwide. And that was an unprecedented decree lacking constitutional substance. Blackmun absurdly declared that the basis for the
Roe v. Wade
decision could be found in the “penumbras,” or shadows, of the Constitution. In other words, Blackmun's justification for legalizing abortion was made out of thin air. So why was the senator supporting a special honor for Blackmun? Why was he lionizing the champion of abortion on demand? Indeed, on all the big issues that my friends and I cared about, the senator was 100 percent wrong.
In the meantime, being the Democrats' favorite Republican, the senator had a cushy deal in the state legislature. In fact, there was just one possible obstacle to this symbiotic relationship's going on forever: He had to win reelection in his Republican district, and that meant he had to survive Republican nominating conventions, such as this one in Mahtomedi, every election year. So that had been his challenge: how to vote reliably “left” in St. Paul to keep his power-broker friends there happy, and then how to double-talk “right” back home to win the votes of local citizens.
As my friends and I caucused in the back of the auditorium, we thought:
Well, let's figure out a way to let the senator know we're not happy with his voting record. We need to make him realize he has to pay more attention to the folks back home, and to their views, than to the wishes of his liberal Democratic overlords in St. Paul. We need to ask him some tough questions, get him on record, and make him commit to some conservative stances. We need to turn up the heat, as they say, and hope that he sees the light.
But then a friend pointed out that the only sure way to capture his attentionâto convince him we weren't just a small speed bump on his path to another termâwas actually to run against him. We'd have to put up a candidate to challenge him on the floor of the district convention; we'd have to present an alternative candidate to the Republican conventioneers. After all, most of the folks in the auditorium were far more conservative than the senator.
But who would step up? Who would send that signal? Eyes turned to me. I had been vocal on issues, including the Profile of Learning, for years. “Michele, will you do it? Will you put your name out there?” Folks were insistent: Someone had to do it. And apparently, that someone should be me.
I was thinking to myself:
Oh my, I look like a mess. I wasn't prepared for this. I'll look like a fool.
And I thought too that if I had any political ambitions for the futureâwhich, at the time, I didn'tâsurely a sudden, last-minute move such as this would end them. Plus, I didn't know many people in the room; why would I want to introduce myself to them and look foolish at the same time?
But then I told myself:
Michele, sometimes you have to risk it. After all, others have taken far bigger risks for what they believed in. Now your turn has come.
And one issue in particularâinsisting on academic excellence rather than dumbing down the curriculum and imposing a liberal scholastic agendaâwas simply too important to ignore. And other issues too needed to be addressed, including the right to life, high taxes, excess spending, and improving the overall business climate of Minnesota.
For all those reasons, I agreed to go for it. I would make the challenge. At least we would get the senator's attention. Maybe he would even actually listen to us for a change.
The consensus among my friends was clear: The person to take on the senator was Michele. And when your friends ask you to do somethingâand you know it's a good idea and the right thing to doâwell, you have to pay heed. In Christianity, it's called servant leadership. This was my moment to serve.
“So what do I do?” I asked. The answer came back: “You write your name on a sheet of paper, and you go up and tell them that you want to run for the Republican endorsementâeasy!”
Oh, okay,
I thought to myself,
that doesn't sound too hard.
So being encouraged by my friends yet having no idea what to expect next, I walked up to the table at the front of the room. I approached the chairman and handed him that fateful slip of paper. He looked down at the writing, and his jaw dropped: “You're challenging his endorsement?” Yes, I was. Technically, I was saying that this party convention should not endorse the incumbent senator for renomination.
I paused and asked: “So what do I do now?” That's how naive I was about what I was getting into.
He stared me up and down. He obviously didn't like what I was doingâthat is, trying to block the senator's bandwagon. Yet I had a right to do it. Indeed, anyone in the room could have done the same thing. But I was the one who stepped up. “Well,” he sighed, pointing to the podium, “you have to go up there and give a five-minute speech.”
“Okay.” Yikes. An actual campaign speech. And not just speaking about the issues but also taking on an entrenched incumbent.
Over the years, I'd done a lot of speakingâbut never as a political challenger. I'd spoken to small groups, mostly concerning the obnoxious Profile of Learning. But in those instances I'd had plenty of time to prepare, to put myself together. Indeed, going back to my days of arguing tax cases, I'd known I always wanted to be the best-prepared person in the courtroom. But today, when I really needed some preparation, I didn't have it. In my old jeans and torn sweatshirt, I looked as if I were dressed for a garage sale. The April Fools' Day joke was on me.
Yet I knew what I wanted to say. I was nothing more than a concerned parentâone of many in the roomâbut I was fully aware of what was right and what was wrong. I wanted to speak from my heart, and yet my head was also ready.
So a calm and a confidence passing all understanding came over me. I thought of my sweet husband, Marcus, our five biological children, and the twenty-three foster children to whom we had also opened our home and our hearts. I was proud of the values we had been able to instill in them. It hadn't always been easy. And the liberal meddlers in the state education bureaucracy hadn't made it any easier. So we were fighting for our kids and our values, and we needed one fighter out front. That was my job. I had accepted the mission, and now I had to fulfill it. It was as simple as that.
I was just doing my duty as a citizen, speaking out. It was like that wonderful Norman Rockwell painting from the forties,
Freedom of Speech
, in which an earnest man speaks out at the town meeting, politely but firmly.
Finally, I thought of Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me,” and I said a prayer. Now I was ready.
I got up to the stage and delivered a speech that came straight from the heart. It was about freedom, and what freedom means in the hearts of Minnesotans and of all Americans. I declared that freedom is connected to the issues we should care about: life, taxes, education. That is, the issues on which the state senator had once stood with us but now stood against us.
And when I saw the faces of all those folks listening to me, following with warm attention, I felt confident enough to speak truthfully and forcefully. I was among people who shared the same vision, and they gave me strength and confidence. My neighbors and fellow Republicans were happy to hear someone speak clear words, words that expressed their own faith and beliefs. I had entered the room as just a name to most of those folks, but after a few minutes we had all become friends. They could look into my heart as I spoke, and even as I was speaking, I could look into their hearts. That's a sacred feeling. So it was their supportâand maybe their quiet prayersâthat helped to sustain me in my partisan-politics debut.