Stars collide: Bachmann vs. Palin
By: Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman
June 8, 2011 04:51 AM EDT

Rep. Michele Bachmann’s prospective 2012 campaign appears increasingly set on a collision course with former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

The coming confrontation is being driven by a belief in Bachmann’s camp that the same grassroots, conservative primary voters and caucus-goers may have to choose between the two women—and that they will choose Bachmann if she presents herself as a more seasoned, reliable, and serious conservative than her high-profile rival. The apparent effort to draw distinctions broke into the open Tuesday when her new top strategist, Ed Rollins, dismissed Palin as “not serious” in a radio interview.

He suggested in an interview with POLITICO that Bachmann would profit from the contrast.

Bachmann will “be so much more substantive,” Rollins said. “People are going to say, ‘I gotta make a choice and go with the intelligent woman who’s every bit as attractive.’” (See also: Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann size each other up)

“I’m not afraid of Palin,” he said, adding the strategy would have been the same for Mike Huckabee. (See also: Ed Rollins hops on Michele Bachmann bandwagon)

Bachmann has been laying the groundwork for this argument for months, stepping away from some of the more dramatic rhetoric that brought her to prominence in the heady, early days of the Tea Party movement, and making a case more focused on the nuts and bolts of policy and on the unabashed social conservatism that has served many candidates well in they key early state of Iowa. She has been tightening her focus as Palin offers herself as an increasingly high-profile, if unfocused, cultural celebrity with an East Coast bus tour last week and a laudatory new movie set for release. (See also: Michele Bachmann touts tangible conservative record)

Aides to Palin didn’t respond to inquiries about Rollins’ comments, but a writer on the blog that serves as her supporters’ main voice, Conservatives4Palin, demanded that the Minnesota congresswoman “either affirm her support for the long-time beltway fossil’s idiotic comments…or refudiate them.”

While Bachmann may find some advantages in a contrast with Palin, it’s an approach that could easily backfire. Palin remains broadly popular with the conservative voters who will decide the Republican nomination, and her endorsement will be avidly sought if she doesn’t run.

“I think it is ill advised,” said Republican strategist Curt Anderson, who wondered if Rollins’ repeated jabs were more improvisation than strategy. “Why would you attack a barracuda?”

But Rollins isn’t the only Bachmann ally spoiling for a fight with Palin. A second top Bachmann ally — who spoke on the condition of anonymity — said Bachmann is well-positioned to take on Palin in the Iowa caucuses.

“The view in Iowa is that she’s unstable,” said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “When she resigned her position as governor that whole event seemed odd, and people in Iowa saw that.”

Palin and Bachmann remain public allies, a relationship cemented when the Alaskan stumped for the congresswoman in her Minnesota district during her hard-fought, expensive, and polarizing 2010 re-election. But sources in both camps said there are signs that the private relationship is also fraying. (See also: Michele Bachmann: Sarah Palin is not a competitor)

Though the Minnesota event was a public and fundraising success, it ended, a Republican source said, with tensions over logistics. And since then, a Palin associate said, Palin has expressed “disdain” for the congresswoman, whom many of her supporters see as merely riding Palin’s wake.

Palin’s PAC treasurer, Tim Crawford, said the the notion Palin dislikes Bachmann “not true whatsoever” and noted that “Michele was the first person Sarah campaigned for in the 2010 cycle.”

Bachmann doesn’t have any personal animus toward the former governor – two people close to her said she has the same warm words for Palin in private as in public – but has never suggested that the two are close. Asked by CBS last month if she’d talked to Palin about her decision to run for president, Bachmann quipped that she’d love to, but “I don’t have her cell phone number.”

And Rollins, in his appearance Tuesday on Fox News Radio’s “Kilmeade and Friends,” seemed to telegraph the direction of her campaign.

“Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years,” he said. “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.”

“Michele Bachmann and others [have] worked hard,” he said. “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.”

Here are other posts about Michele Bachmann:

Candidate #8 Michele Bachmann , Republican Presidential Hopefuls (“Obama…a betrayal of our friend Israel.″ ,Part 3)

Candidate #8 Michele Bachmann , Republican Presidential Hopefuls (“America has stood with Israel since 1948″ ,Part 2)

Candidate #8 Michele Bachmann , Republican Presidential Hopefuls (“We will do well to…support ..Israel..”,Part 1)

A note about partisanship: Since Democrats figure prominently in the vast majority of examples of election fraud described in this book, some readers will jump to the conclusion that this is a one-sided attack on a single party.  I do not believe Republicans are inherently more virtuous or honest than anyone else in politics, and I myself often vote Libertarian or independent.

He then notes that Republicans have had less chance to commit vote fraud because they controlled fewer “local and administrative offices”.  (Though Republicans have, as recently as the 1980s, sometimes used intimidation tactics that are certainly unethical, though perhaps not illegal.)   Fund then makes a more general argument:

In their book, Dirty Little Secrets, Larry Sabato and co-author Glenn Simpson of the Wall Street Journal noted another factor in why Republican election fraud is less common.   Republican base voters are middle-class and not easily induced to commit fraud, while “the pool of people who appear to be available and more vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean Democratic.”  Some liberal activists that Sabato and Simpson interviewed even partly justified fraudulent electoral behavior on the grounds that because the poor and dispossessed have so little political clout, “extraordinary measures (for example, stretching the absentee ballot or registration rules) are required to compensate.”  Paul Herrnson, director of the Center for American Politics at the University of Maryland, agrees that “most incidents of wide-scale vote fraud reportedly occur in inner cities, which are largely populated by minority groups.”

Democrats are far more skilled at encouraging poor people — who need money — to participate in shady vote-buying schemes.  “I had no choice.  I was hungry that day,” Thomas Felder told the Miami Herald in explaining why he illegally voted in the Suarez-Carollo mayoral election.  “You wanted money, you were told who to vote for.”  A former Democratic congressman gave me this explanation of why voting irregularities more often crop up in his party’s back yard.  “When many Republicans lose an election, they go back into what they call the private sector.  When many Democrats lose an election, they lose power and money.  They need to eat, and people will do an awful lot in order to eat.”

(Sabato is a Democrat; I don’t know about Simpson or Herrnson.)

So Democrats are more likely to commit vote fraud because more of their adherents are poor enough to be bribable, because some activists will cross the line to help the poor, and because many Democratic politicians have no good alternative to public office.

These points are, as I said at the beginning, not something most informed observers would quarrel with.  But I think, before going farther, that I should make it clear how far my argument goes.  That more Democrats commit vote fraud than Republicans does not mean that most Democrats commit vote fraud.  I am sure that very few Democrats commit vote fraud in fact — but even fewer Republicans.

Some readers will prefer direct evidence to the conclusions of experts, however well informed.  I have that, too.  I do not know of a single major Republican vote fraud scandal in the last ten years.  But it is easy to find major Democratic scandals in such cities as Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Milwaukee, and New Orleans.  You may recall one example from Milwaukee; in 2000, a Democratic socialite was caught exchanging cigarettes for the votes of the homeless.  (She’s still an honored member of the Democratic party, by the way.)

(The 1998 Miami vote fraud scandal during the mayoralty race between Xavier Suarez and Joe Carollo is hard to classify by party.  Carrollo is and was a Republican.  At that time Suarez, who received many fraudulent votes, was an independent, though he has belonged to both parties.)

Democrats are the guilty in most of the smaller vote scandals, too.  I have started collecting these as they are reported.  Here are examples of vote fraud, or charges of vote fraud in San Francisco, East Chicago, Passaic, New Jersey, Orlando, Florida, South Dakota, New York and Florida, Cleveland, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania., Nevada, New Mexico, Orange County, California, and Kentucky.  Of these cases, only the Nevada case was purely Republican.  (A former employee of a Republican firm charged that some Democratic registrations collected by the firm had been discarded.  I don’t know whether the case has gone to trial.)  The Kentucky case appears to have been bipartisan, though I did not make that clear in my post.

When vote fraud is detected, those caught are nearly always Democrats.  Either Democrats are much less skillful at fraud, which seems implausible to me, or they commit far more of it, just as the experts say.

Some Democratic leaders have tolerated vote fraud fairly openly, including Bill Clinton, when he was governor of Arkansas.   (Some believe that the rush by the Clinton administration to get new citizens in 2000 was part of an effort to stuff the ballot box, something I did not mention in the post.  It was certainly true that, under pressure for Clinton and Al Gore, the INS skipped many checks on would-be citizens in 2000.)

Finally, Democratic leaders behave as if they believe more Democrats commit vote fraud.   Nearly always, when the two parties split on election rules, the Republicans want more checks on fraud and the Democrats want fewer.  The infamous 1993 “Motor Voter” Act, which did so much to make fraud easier was opposed almost entirely by Republicans and had been vetoed by the first President Bush.  I don’t say that all supporters of the legislation (including Washington’s Maria Cantwell) even knew that it would make vote fraud easier, but some of them did.  Like the anonymous liberal activists, they see some fraud as a reasonable price for getting more representation for the victim groups they identify with.

It is telling, I think, that there is one group, military voters, for whom Democrats tend to prefer tougher rules and the Republicans easier rules.  Military voters generally back Republicans, at least in recent years.  That Democratic leaders prefer rules that make cheating easier (for everyone except military voters) is understandable if they think they gain from the cheating, but hard to explain otherwise.

(This is the promised follow-up to an earlier post outlining distributed vote fraud.   In that earlier post, I left for another time this explanation for my belief that Democrats are more likely to commit vote fraud.)

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics. Posted by Jim Miller at January 12, 2005 12:59 PM |

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Sarah Palin’s Movie Makeover in The Undefeated