bachmann carlsonImagine this notice tacked up in Anoka, circa 1970: “Wanted: Future Member of Congress to babysit future Miss America and Fox News host.” That’s just one of the rabbit-holes your mind can wander down if you ponder this fact, that culminates George Will’s column about U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann: she was once Gretchen Carlson’s nanny.

Will got credit (and teasing) from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann for his revelation, but back in 2007 the Star Tribune’s Kim Ode included it as a fun fact at the end of her own fawning profile of Bachmann.

A year ago Bachmann got this greeting from Carlson when she appeared on “Fox & Friends”:

Congresswoman Bachmann joins us live now from St. Paul. Good morning to you! I feel like I can call you Michele, because — as people may or may not remember — you were my babysitter growing up! Good to see you again. And look at where you are now!

The two women are 10 years apart in age, if Wikipedia is to be believed. Will has Bachmann as a Humphrey Democrat in those days, while Carlson has waxed nostalgic about a pre-politically correct childhood.

Whatever their differences then, Bachmann and Carlson have by now converged on a kind of kooky, just-say-it conservatism that seems to work like catnip on cable-TV viewers of either political camp.

But what people can’t see is the sometimes fraught, sometimes idolatrous relationship of babysitter and babysat, as perhaps best expressed in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comics, and folksinger Dar Williams tear-jerker, “The Babysitter’s Here.”

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