COMMENTARY | In a speech replete with all the trappings of the Christianity mythos, Rep. Michele Bachmann spoke to a crowd gathered at Virginia's Liberty University, the nation's largest Christian higher learning institution. According to CNN, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate told them not to "settle." Continuing a theme adopted after her seemingly ascendant campaign began a downward spiral in mid-August to cast the front-runners in the 2012 GOP presidential race as part of the usual crowd that got elected to Washington, Bachmann told the 10,000 mostly Christian students that they didn't have to settle for the current candidates or the current president.
Was she telling them they had a choice? Was she, a Christian since the age of 16, that choice?
"Don't settle for anything less than what this great and almighty God has planned for you," she said. "I am not willing that we settle because you deserve better than a nation that settles."
If Bachmann was supposedly the Christian god's choice, was she not telling the Liberty students that settling for another candidate would be inappropriate for a Christian, that they would be somehow going against God's plan? If so, what about the other candidates that have claimed that they were called upon or had divine blessing to run for the Oval Office?
It is unclear whether or not Bachmann was referring to herself as what was "planned for you," but she has stated in the past that she was called on by her god to run for president. If so, it might be fair to ask if anyone else heard the call -- that Michele Bachmann, and not Mitt Romney or Rick Perry or Herman Cain or any of the other candidates -- should be president. If the Christian god communicated his wishes to others besides Bachmann, it might make her campaigning somewhat easier and her poll numbers quite a bit higher, considering that the population of the U. S. is nearly 90 percent Christian.
Bachmann spent much of her time talking about her life as a Christian. She mentioned none of her fellow Republican candidates by name, choosing to spend the little time she talked about politics on castigating President Obama and the health care reforms passed in 2010. She pinpointed that Obama had approved of health care coverage that included birth control pills and told the crowd to "stand up to government takeover" (although it is somewhat difficult to see how a contraceptives offered as a vehicle of good health maintenance and used by choice is "government takeover"). She also stated that the health care reforms sponsored federally sanctioned abortions (and omitted the part where those abortions only included instances of rape, incest, and the possibility of death for the child bearer).
"Usually when we settle, it's a short-term ease," Bachmann said. "But it's the long-term hard that the Lord often asks us to choose."
And the lord, it is said, works in mysterious ways. Perhaps Bachmann is being tested, her preordained ascendancy to the top only now mired in a polling trough created by her own gaffes and misstatements and inability to take advantage of her own likeability, only to later see the campaign resurrected. Perhaps.
But, then, perhaps she did not hear her Christian god calling her to run for president and there will be no resurrection in the polls. It might never have been preordination and always a matter of choice beyond Bachmann's control, save for the one she personally made when she decided to run for president. And likely as not, instead of her god, she most likely heard the overly loud echoes of her own wishful thinking.
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