Bachmann bumps Palin as Tea Party Queen Capehart: Bachmann bumps Palin as Tea Party Queen By Jonathan Capehart Monday, March 7, 2011; 3:01 PM Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is pushing Sarah Palin off her throne as queen of the Tea Party. This considered opinion comes after watching Bachmann on "Meet the Press." I didn't agree with 99.9 percent of what she said, but in 12 minutes on MTP she demonstrated why she is a better leader of the angry wing of the Republican Party than Palin. Bachmann, who is in her third term in Congress, is relentlessly on message. Her main talking point was that "secretly, unbeknownst to members of Congress, over $105 billion was hidden in the Obamacare legislation to fund the implementation of Obamacare." No matter the question asked -- Will there be a government shutdown? Has Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) failed the Tea Party? -- she came back to that $105 billion. The other notable thing about Bachmann's answers is their economy of words. Unlike Palin, she doesn't lard them with extraneous information that fail to make her sound smarter than you think she is. Still, Bachmann's answers overflow with information. We've identified $100 billion in cuts off of the president's proposed budget, $60 billion if you compare it to the 2010 budget. So we have done our part to look for cuts. ... I am not in favor of raising the debt ceiling. In the last 10 years we have raised the debt ceiling 10 times. ... I think that it's been troubling the way that the president has responded. For instance, in Libya during the unrest, we had at least 600 Americans who were there. The Chinese were in the process of removing 12,000 Chinese, while Americans were waiting for an American response to be removed from Libya. ... The economy is simply not improving. Just consider, the day before the president took office gasoline was $1.83 a gallon. There are places today in the United States where it is over $4 a gallon. It didn't help that the president had the Interior secretary cancel 77 oil leases as soon as the president came into power. ... And Bachmann always has a prop. On MTP, it was a placard that read "$105,464,000,000." During her off-putting rebuttal to the State of the Union, in between inspirational images of the Constitution and the U.S. Capitol, there were charts on the unemployment rate and annual deficits. I don't recall Palin coming equipped with anything like that -- ever. Bachmann made it clear that she hopes President Obama holds the office for one term. She stood behind her specious charge that his administration is a "gangster government" that has taken actions that are "corrupt, thoroughly corrupt." Bachmann has also dabbled in the offensive Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim-and-noncitizen nonsense. Something Palin, to her credit, has refused to do. But Bachmann's harsh characterizations and pandering are devoid of the sarcasm Palin uses to lash out at critics and buttress her arguments. On the other hand, Bachmann has been known to buttress her Tea Party view of the world by sharing her selective knowledge of our nation's founding. Still, Bachmann does something that Palin has never done. She doesn't hide behind or filter her views through Twitter, Facebook and Fox News. She subjects herself to interviews with David Gregory, Chris Matthews and others who are not reliably friendly to her worldview. And as you see from her back-and-forth with Gregory, Bachmann is willing to be held accountable for her past statements and for not answering questions posed to her. So, if you're nestled in the angry wing of the Republican Party, Bachmann is the kind of leader you need. Sure, the Tea Party isn't as angry today as it was last fall. But Bachmann is showing time and again that she does a far better job of lending an authoritative voice to her followers' frustrations than Palin ever could.