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Mitt Romney, the presidential frontrunner, topped in debate by the congresswoman who also poses threat to Sarah Palin No sooner had Michele Bachmann hijacked the Republican presidential contenders’ debate to declare she is indeed a candidate for the White House than her newly minted campaign website said she is on her way to “reclaim America”. Americans may know far less about the first congresswoman from Minnesota than they do of that other darling of the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin. But they are about to learn fast. Her performance in Monday night’s Republican candidates’ debate marked her out as a serious threat, not only to Palin’s ambitions but by having the potential to force issues onto the agenda – even if she faces an uphill struggle to build enough support to win the nomination. Politico rated her as runner-up in the debate to the favourite in the early stages of the long race for the nomination, Mitt Romney , in part because “she did not say anything embarrassing or scary”. Others thought she did better than Romney, using her ascribed twin weapons of bluntness and charm to make the men in the debate look hesitant. Bachmann, 55, believes her country needs to be reclaimed from a socialist president, a gay mafia, and treasonous liberals, responsible for, among other things, robbing Americans of the freedom to choose their light bulbs. It’s a far cry from Bachmann’s first dabble in politics as a student in Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign for president. She said at the time she was attracted by Carter’s deep religious convictions, a constant in her life, but was ultimately disillusioned by his support for abortion rights and his economic policies. Four years later, Bachmann campaigned for Ronald Reagan. From then on, she was on her way to becoming a Tea Partier avant la lettre, rising through the Minnesota state legislature and into the US Congress in 2007 with an increasingly strident conservatism built around the belief that big government flies in the face of the America imagined by its founding fathers. She did not shy from making clear she was driven by her Lutheran beliefs including her decision to bear five children and foster 23 more. Neither did she hide her belief that those who disagreed with her were somehow disloyal to the country, once calling the then presidential candidate Barack Obama anti-American. Questioned on the issue, she went on to suggest that some of her fellow members of Congress might be similarly flawed: “Are they pro-America or anti-America?” No issue appears to rile Bachmann more than gay marriage, and homosexual rights in general, which she sees as a vast and spreading conspiracy to change the sexuality of the nation’s children. She has accused the courts of rulings intended to indoctrinate the young. “What a bizarre time we’re in, when a judge will say to little children that you can’t say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it,” she said on one occasion. (The words “under God” were added to the US oath of loyalty in 1954, and in 2005 a California judge said he would if asked stop teachers making children in their charge repeat the oath.) On another occasion, Bachmann said that teaching children the achievements of gay men was a means of promoting homosexuality. “Very effective way to do this with a bunch of second graders is take The Lion King for instance, and a teacher might say, ‘Do you know the music for this movie was written by a gay man?’ The message is: ‘I’m better at what I do, because I’m gay’,” she said. Bachmann is also famed for getting her history wrong, truncating the fight to abolish slavery by a century. “We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents [the constitution] worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the US,” she said. Her legislative initiatives include the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act in an attempt to overturn the phasing-out of incandescent bulbs, She has also dismissed global warming as a hoax. She has even gone so far as to suggest that recent swine flu scare may have been the fault of the Obama administration by noting that a similar outbreak occurred “under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter”. “I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence,” she said. It is those kind of statements that have left Bachmann with a long way to go to win over the independents and mainstream Republicans who are crucial to taking the White House. But Monday’s performance did her no harm. “Bachmann all but stole the show at the Republican presidential debate,” said Howard Kurtz of the Daily Beast. “She offered a passionate and inclusive defence of the Tea Party, saying that unlike the distorted picture painted by the media, the movement includes ‘disaffected Democrats’, ‘independents’, ‘libertarians’ and ‘people who’ve never been political a day in their lives’. Not bad for a rookie who kept smiling as she reeled off her best lines.” The most crucial endorsement came from the senator regarded as godfather of the movement, Jim DeMint, who said: “Bachmann does impress. She should not be underestimated.” Not what Palin wants to hear. Michele Bachmann Republican presidential nomination 2012 Tea Party movement Mitt Romney Sarah Palin Gay rights Chris McGreal guardian.co.uk