Michele Bachmann told a crowd Wednesday that she's going to be "the comeback kid." It was a surprising reference -- that's what Bill Clinton called himself after he came back from the Gennifer Flowers scandal to win second place in the 1992 New Hampshire primary -- made odder still by the location: Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian college in the country.
"We intend to be the comeback kid in this race," Bachmann said, according to Reuters' John Whitesides. "In races you have ups and downs, and we are on the upswing now... We have a very strong base of support in Iowa, we're going to continue to build on that base of support, and we've spent a lot of time in South Carolina too." The same day, American Research Group released its poll showing Mitt Romney -- no favorite of the social conservatives important in the state -- ahead in Iowa with 21 percent of likely caucus voters. Bachmann trailed him with 15 percent, with Rick Perry nipping at her heels with 14 percent. Bachmann had been leading the poll in July.
While Clinton called himself the "comeback kid" before he'd actually won a primary, Bachmann has yet to win any primary votes at all. And she's trying to win by appealing to evangelicals, like the ones who go to Liberty, a school founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. In 1992, Falwell said he'd seen a sex tape featuring Clinton; a couple years later, he sold videos titled "Bill and Hillary's Circle of Power." The tape featured all kinds of sexual allegations against Clinton, including that of Flowers.
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Elspeth Reeve
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