Top Bachmann Strategist: Sarah Palin “Not Serious”
Ed Rollins isn’t wasting time getting settled in his new role at Michele Bachmann’s as-yet-unannounced Presidential campaign:
Michelle Bachmann’s new top consultant, Ed Rollins, began his tenure with scathing criticism of potential Bachmann rival Sarah Palin.
“Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years,” Rollins told Brian Kilmeade on his radio show, Kilmeade and Friends. “She got the Vice Presidential thing handed to her, she didn’t go to work in the sense of trying to gain more substance, she gave up her governorship.”
He suggested that the contrast would favor Bachmann.
“Michele Bachmann and others [have] worked hard, she has been a leader of the Tea Party which is a very important element here, she has been an attorney, she has done important things with family values.”
“She is probably the best communicator [in the GOP field] now that Mike Huckabee’s not in there,” he said.
Admittedly Rollins has been critical of Palin in the past, but now that he works for Bachmann it takes on a different tone. It is also, perhaps, a signal to Palin that if she runs the Congresswoman from Minnesota isn’t simply going to roll over and let Sarah be coronated as the Tea Party candidate.
Although many of us think of Bachmann and Palin as virtual clones of each other, they are not necessarily allies. A case in point: Bachmann refused to attend the 2010 Tea Party Convention at which Palin was the keynote speaker. The controversy was part of an intra-Tea Party dispute, where many tea-partiers felt the convention was overpriced and commercialized. Judson Phillips, the convention’s organizer, called the tea-partiers who raised those objections “socialists.”
Apparently the tea pot doesn’t think much of the kettle.
It’s kinda like a cage match between Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
They’re nothing like Palin…
…Hilton and Spears keep getting in trouble because they won’t quit.
It takes a rare sort of stupidity to immediately alienate the exact demographic your candidate is trying to attract, but Ed Rollins managed to pull it off.
In investigating how someone could be so wrong, could so misread a voter segment and could make such a boneheaded mistake, I found the answer.
Ed Rollins graduated with a degree in political science.
Rollins must be assuming Palin is going to run. If Palin doesn’t run, there’s little reason to alienate her base. If she does, then Bachmann will have to differentiate herself as something other than “that other crazy woman”.
The funny thing is that if Palin run, Bachmann has no chance. So that makes Rollins’ motives even harder to discern.