President Barak Obama delivered the annual State of the Union Address on Tuesday night. The official Republican response was issued by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. And then in the name of the Tea Party movement, Republican Representative from Minnesota Michelle Bachmann issued yet another response.
As someone who has never voted for a major party presidential candidate, I am eager to see viable alternatives arise. I do believe that the Republican-Democrat duopoly is, at the end of the day, a detriment to American society and a corrosive force in politics. The parties in and of themselves are capable of great good, but a lack of competition has led to a highly partisan political atmosphere in the federal realm, where genuinely fresh ideas are few and far between. What’s worse, in many states and localities there is essentially one-party rule. For example, in my own fair 
city of Baltimore, Democrats govern without external competition; Abraham Lincoln himself couldn’t get elected to a municipal office here. And of course Democrats face the same intractable obstacles in Republican dominated areas. In such circumstances, loggerhead bickering and ineffectiveness are replaced by calcified political operations rife with cronyism and corruption.
So while I don’t support many of the Tea Party ideas, on some level I do want to see them succeed. At this point, almost any viable alternative sounds good. However, I want and even expect new political movements, either from the right or the left, to do better than the status quo. I did not see that last night from Bachmann. Instead I saw more of the same.
Bachmann critiqued Obama on unemployment and the federal debt, and she very briefly and mildly critiqued George Bush for the debt. Along the way, she did her darndest 
to hang the current unemployment rate on Obama, bearing charts that supposedly indict the 44th president.
But an honest look at the Bureau of Labor statistics shows that the U.S. unemployment rate had already been soaring for a nearly a year when Obama took office, shooting from 4.7% in February of 2008 to 7.6% in January of 2010. In other words, by the time Obama assumed office, the race was already on.
Unemployment continued to rise during the first three months of the Obama presidency, hitting its current levels in April of 2010. The rate has consistently remained between 9 -10% for the nearly two years since. Considering that the stabilization of unemployment coincides with the effects of the Obama stimulus package beginning to take shape (Obama signed the bill in mid-February 2010), it is utterly disingenuous to blame Obama or the stimulus, as Bachmann did, for the current unemployment rate. It clearly results from the economic collapse that occurred before he was elected.
Bachmann’s interpretation is that, “within three months, the national jobless rate spiked to 9.4%. It hasn’t been lower for twenty straight months.” But of course the 
spike in question was not a three month phenomenon, it was more a than year-long process that dates back to April of 2008, a fact Bachmann obfuscated with her blue and red biennial charts, which conveniently highlighted only the odd years.
Keynesians such as Paul Krugman maintain that the Democrats’ stimulus package was far too small. Conservative economists like Martin Feldstein see it as misguided or inefficient. But an honest assessment of it, positive or negative, cannot blame the stimulus for an increase in unemployment when the stabilization of our current rate, which is of course far too high, coincides with the stimulus bill beginning to take effect.
On the federal debt, Bachmann called the combination of the stimulus and the bailout package (which she did not attribute to President Bush or the Republican Congress) an “unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt. It was unlike anything we’d ever seen before in the history of country.”
As an American historian I almost choked. World War II, anyone? Lord only knows how Bachmann would react to the news that WWII, which effectively ended the Great Depression, was primarily funded by tax increases and deficit spending. Thus, it was ironic when, near the end of her speech, she showed the famous picture of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Her only purpose it seems was to bang the patriotic drum.
Finally, Bachmann tried to hang the growth of annual deficits squarely on Obama. Not once did she mention the Bush tax breaks.
My take on her speech is this. The Tea Party (or more accurately, certain elements from that disparate movement) invited a Republican to speak on their behalf. And that’s exactly what they got. Bachmann employed standard political rhetorical devices to issue a basic Republican speech, tailored only slightly to the Tea Party agenda. And if they had invited a Democrat, they would have gotten a standard Democrat speech, also tweaked only slightly.
Many have predicted that the Republican Party will use its money and muscle to 
absorb and coopt the Tea Party movement. Tuesday night, however, it looked as if the Tea Party was doing the dirty work for the Republicans by inviting the Lady from Minnesota to represent them. If this movement is going to remain an independent alternative to the major parties, it is going to have to do a lot better than Michelle Bachmann.