Bachmann’s Reading List Gives Her ‘Pause’

Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann is reportedly reading Game Change in preparation for her anticipated candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Authored by veteran political reporter Mark Halperin and New York magazine’s John Heilemann, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, is a bestselling account of the 2008 presidential election published early last year.

The Minnesota congresswoman, who also read The Politician — a tell-all book written by a disgruntled John Edwards staffer detailing the lengths to which the former North Carolina senator went to cover up an extramarital affair — told MinnPost in an interview that she found Game Change almost impossible to put down.

“Game Change is a book that is very difficult to put down, at least I found it difficult to put down, and it gives a person pause,” said Bachmann. “But the other thing that it does, I think, is it informed me of what I don’t want to do.

“I’m still a human being, and I still have the values that I stand for, and it tells me that the pursuit of a brass ring, the pursuit of an office, is not worth losing your health, losing your marriage, losing your integrity. That I’m not willing to do,” she said.

It’s little wonder the book has given Bachmann pause. It allegedly convinced Kimberly Thune, wife of South Dakota Sen. John Thune, that she wanted no part of a presidential campaign, fearing — as the Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins wrote at the time— that she would be reduced to some sort of “sexist caricature.”

Thune, who had been seriously contemplating a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, unexpectedly took his name out of the running in late February. He said the Heilemann and Halperin book wasn’t particularly helpful in his decision.

Salon’s Joan Walsh, moreover, found the breathtakingly salacious book absolutely appalling, seriously flawed not only because of its lack of sourcing, but also by the way women in general were depicted by the authors.

“Funny how the worst villains of the book are all women – Mrs. Clinton, Mrs. Edwards and Mrs. McCain (did you know she’s alleged to have had an affair?) – along with, of course, Sarah Palin,” wrote Walsh.  “Game Change might have been titled ‘Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse’ so badly do those four females, two of them not candidates but wives, come off in what is supposed to be the definitive book about Campaign ’08. Boy we’ve cracked that old glass ceiling!”