Rep. Jim Ramstad Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke

GOP Congressman Jim Ramstad has asked President-elect Barack Obama’s advisors to consider naming him to lead the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) — and he’s enlisted top Democrats to help with his bid.

Ramstad, a Republican who is retiring this year after nine terms in Congress, approached Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) before Thanksgiving to discuss an appointment in the Obama administration. He would need support from Kennedy, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, if Obama were to choose Ramstad to lead the $3.3 billion agency.

“Sen. Kennedy thinks very highly of Congressman Ramstad and feels that he is uniquely qualified to serve the country in this position,” a Kennedy spokesman said.

But Ramstad has also gotten support from allies in the House: Kennedy’s son, Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy, and Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) have encouraged Obama’s senior advisers to make the appointment.

A Rhode Island Democrat, Kennedy has had two conversations about Ramstad with Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), Obama’s incoming chief of staff, and John Podesta, who is leading the transition team, a Congressional Democratic official familiar with the conversation said.

At an event last month at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., Kennedy introduced Ramstad to former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who Obama likely will appoint to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy jokingly introduced Ramstad to Daschle as the “next SAMHSA administrator,” a Congressional Democratic official said.

Although Ramstad’s name has been floated as the next “drug czar,” or head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Ramstad’s congressional allies believe that SAMHSA is a better fit and a more realistic possibility for the nine-term congressman.

The Kennedys and Ramstad have developed a close bond during the past few years borne from their experiences with addiction (Ramstad is Rep. Kennedy’s AA sponsor) and their work on legislation requiring insurance companies to provide the same coverage for mental illnesses as they do for physical illnesses. Ramstad and Kennedy  are chairmen of the House’s bipartisan Addiction, Treatment and Recovery Caucus.

In October, Congress approved Ramstad and Kennedy’s so-called mental health parity bill, which Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) initially championed before his untimely death in 2002. The bill was used as the vehicle to pass the $700 billion financial rescue package.

Ramstad may see less opposition as SAMHSA head than he would if named “drug czar.” While several interest groups oppose Ramstad as “drug czar,” sending a letter to Obama criticizing his opposition to needle exchange programs and medical marijuana, mental health and addiction advocates praised him.

“Appointing Jim Ramstad as SAMHSA director would raise the profile of addiction disorders within the agency,” Lizbet Boroughs, the deputy director of governmental relations at the American Psychiatric Association, said. “The past two administrators have been more mental health experts than addiction disorders.”

SAMHSA had not been decimated by budget cuts during the past decade or politicized. The biggest challenge is coordinating federal policy at the local level, Boroughs said.

Andrew Sperling, the director of legislative affairs at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said Ramstad would be a “fantastic addition” to the agency.

Other advocates, however, had a more tepid reaction.

“It’s a mixed bag at best,” Bill Piper, the director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, said. “On the one hand, heading SAMHSA would put him in a good position within the Administration to champion the cause of implementing ‘parity’ fully. And he would no doubt fight for higher overall levels of drug treatment spending and be able to build Republican support in Congress.”

“But at the end of the day the most important issue isn’t funding for treatment per se, but funding for quality treatment. For years Rep. Ramstad’s parity bills excluded methadone and other Opioid treatments proven by decades of research to be the most effective treatment for heroin addiction,” Nadelmann said. “This was a subject of dispute between him and Senator [Paul] Wellstone (who was the lead sponsor of the Senate version).”

Despite the buzz over Ramstad, his supporters acknowledged there are other candidates and that Obama is getting advice from other sources, including Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick, an early supporter of Obama’s. Patrick has worked to increase spending on programs to help children coping with mental illness.

“Ultimately people have this is the president’s pick, at the end of the day,” the Congressional source said. “A lot of people are advising Barack and he will take a lot of suggestions from a lot of people and make up his own mind.”

A spokesman for Ramstad did not return phone calls for comment.

Related: Up in smoke: Will Ramstad’s faith-based earmark hurt his chances to win drug czar post?

Jonathan E. Kaplan is the Center for Independent Media’s Washington correspondent.

Jim Ramstad. Photo: WDCpix

Although Republican Rep. Jim Ramstad’s name has been floated to become the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in President-Elect Obama’s White House, Ramstad’s congressional allies have approached senior members of Obama’s transition team on Ramstad’s behalf to become the next  Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration administrator.

Ramstad’s allies told Obama’s aides that the nine-term congressman is better suited to be the head of the government’s chief addiction and mental health agency rather than the “drug czar,” according to a congressional aide familiar with the discussions.

Ramstad, a recovering alcoholic, helped write the legislation requiring insurance companies to treat physical and mental health costs that Congress approved as part of the bailout package earlier this year. Addiction and substance abuse advocates have praised Ramstad for his work.

Dean Peterson, Ramstad’s spokesman, did not return a phone call for comment.

The agency is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. It has a staff of 528 and a $3.3 billion budget. The acting administrator is Rear Admiral Eric B. Broderick, a 34-year veteran of the U.S. Public Health Service.

Jonathan E. Kaplan is the Center for Independent Media’s Washington correspondent.

Photo: WDCpix.com

As Republican charges of “fraud” and Democratic claims of “voter suppression” have escalated in the home stretch of the presidential campaign, liberal activists have started blasting Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign’s “voter protection effort” for not doing enough to ensure that all Democratic votes will get counted on Election Day.

Liberal bloggers want Obama to do more to publicize voting problems, such as technical glitches in voting machines and GOP efforts to hold down turnout in the same way it has countered Republican-generated smears and robocalls.

“I remain not just exceedingly skeptical, but downright furious at the party’s brazen willingness to allow millions of votes to go either uncounted, incorrectly recorded, or recorded in such a way that is 100% unverifiable by any human being,” voter protection blogger Brad Friedman wrote in his blog last week.

“They need to get over their tortured thinking that discussing these issues somehow depresses turnout. There is zero evidence for that thinking,” Friedman, author of Bradblog, wrote in an email.

Obama’s chief election law attorney Bob Bauer downplays the criticism, saying evidence from the 2004 election shows that highlight problems with voting machinery and voter suppression turns off Democratic voters.

“It’s never helpful if the environment is filled with hyperbole about false claims. Voters don’t want to hear it,” Bauer said in a phone interview on Thursday. “We’re not going to fall for [the Republicans’] public relations bait. But if they take a concrete action we will respond to it.”

Bauer maintained that the Obama campaign has moved quickly to respond to technical problems with voting equipment and to quell efforts to deceive voters.

In northern Nevada, he said, Hispanic voters received calls telling them that they could vote by phone. The Obama campaign responded to set the record straight. When voting machines started flipping votes for Obama to McCain, lawyers from the campaign’s Machine Task Force were dispatched to West Virginia recently to make sure the machines will be recalibrated.

The campaign, however, has not held a single press conference to highlight such problems.

Bauer and other lawyers close to the campaign said that the campaign’s voter protection effort is more aggressive, more robust and started earlier than it did four years ago.

The campaign has hired more than 100 paid staffers and full-time volunteers to work on voter protection issues, according to a memorandum sent to members of Congress last week from the DNC’s staff attorney, Justin Levitt.

Underscoring the campaign’s view that voter protection is as much about winning a public relations battle as it is a legal one, Bauer and the DNC’s outside counsel, Joseph Sandler, have hired Jenny Backus, a Democratic strategist, as a spokeswoman.

“[Sen. John] Kerry had amassed a pretty large operation himself in terms of having lawyers out there ready to pounce,” said Kenneth Gross, a campaign finance and election law attorney in the Washington, D.C. office of the firm Skadden, Arps.

“Whatever Kerry had is that much more sophisticated and that much more vibrant. [Obama] has both depth and breadth. They are poised to bring action if there are irregularities on Election Day.”

Like Kerry’s campaign four years ago, the Obama campaign has hired a “voter protection coordinator.” The staffer, usually a lawyer, has worked with the campaign’s field organizers to help register and educate voters, consulted with local and state officials to identify potential problem, and implemented a massive lawyer recruitment program to get volunteers to the polls on Election Day.

In Michigan, the campaign and the state party share the same attorney,

Mary Ellen Gurewitz, an election law specialist with the Detroit firm of Sachs Waldman. Renee Paradis, who had served as an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, is the campaign’s voter protection coordinator.

Obama’s attorneys, in Michigan and elsewhere, have operated under the premise that more votes are lost to incompetence than fraud or suppression, although they are keeping tabs on proactive suppression efforts.

Friedman disputes that premise, saying one of the most serious issues is with electronic voting machines that are prone to error, because there is no way to know whether a vote has been lost.

“They are making no effort to remove these machines,” Friedman said. “It’s exceedingly troubling … The answer is to get them the hell out service.”

Lawyers in Michigan said they have identified trouble spots from previous elections, made sure that towns and cities are prepared to handle what is expected to be record turnout, and helped prepare local officials to make the process as efficient as possible.

That means handing out sample ballots to those standing in line, dividing long lines alphabetically, posting easy to read signs, and combing the lines to make sure people are standing in the right place if a polling station includes more than one precinct.

In New Mexico, Ann Marie Puente, an official with the Travis County Democratic Party in Texas, is the Obama campaign’s voter protection coordinator. She has one deputy. Neither are lawyers but they are both building a network of more than 600 out-of-state lawyers to help on Election Day.

In Colorado, the Obama campaign has set up a similar structure with Tim Karpoff, a University of Chicago trained lawyer who worked for Kerry in Wisconsin in 2004, heading up the voter protection effort.

In October, Obama campaign aides sent an email to volunteers looking for Spanish-speaking poll workers and watchers. As of Oct. 22, only a small portion of Denver’s polling stations had the requisite number of Spanish speaking staffers as required by state law.

The campaign also asked for volunteers to head to Adams, Conejos, Costilla, Otero, Pueblo, Rio Grande, Saguache, Weld, Alamosa, Archuleta, Bent, and Las Animas counties, all of which have sizable Spanish-speaking communities.

An attorney volunteering for the campaign and the DNC Latino Voting Task Force also asked for “Spanish-speaking assistance in testing the counties’ compliance with language accessibility laws.”

As for litigation, Bauer has settled on a strategy of surgical legal strikes rather than carpet-bombing the country with lawsuits, while relying on liberal advocacy and civil rights groups to stop efforts to disenfranchise eligible voters.

Although not a hard and fast rule, Democrats normally will take legal action in states where Republicans control the election and voting processes and Republicans will do the opposite.

“If your party is in control in that battleground state, the national campaign will leave it to the local officials,” Gross said. “If you’re person is not in power they start to get very anxious and paranoid.”

Bauer has won suits in Michigan and Montana while the Republican Party has lost suits in Ohio and Indiana. Interest groups have sued Republicans in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Colorado and forced Republican officials to settle the disputes on terms favorable to Democrats.

“No question that the Republicans have put [up] a good bit of activity and tried at a very high level to run a challenge program at a very high level. If you take a look at [their] record of success, it is dismal,” Bauer said. “They have lost in every state where we have engaged with them.”

Friedman says the Obama campaign still needs to be more aggressive.

“They need to bring lawsuits loudly and immediately, dozens of them, wherever necessary,” he wrote in an email.

Bauer says he has made a conscious effort to fight the legal battles on his terms rather than McCain’s. He held several conference calls with reporters after Republicans accused ACORN and the Obama campaign of working together to register fraudulent voters.

But rather than engaging McCain’s “Honest and Open Election Committee,” led by former GOP Sens. John Danforth (Mo.) and Warren Rudman (N.H.), Bauer turned the tables on McCain’s campaign by calling on the U.S. attorney general to investigate links between McCain’s campaign and federal law enforcement officials.

In a letter sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Oct. 20, Bauer asked that DOJ’s special prosecutor investigate “an emerging pattern of apparent unlawful coordination” between the McCain campaign, DOJ and Republican officials at the state level.

Four days later, Bauer sent Mukasey a letter asking him not to follow up on a White House request to intervene in Ohio and elsewhere to set up a system to challenge voters’ eligibility. Mukasey subsequently said he would not intervene.

In focusing on Mukasey, Bauer tied GOP efforts at encouraging state and federal officials to investigate voter registration fraud back to the Bush administration’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys for political reasons, including their unwillingness to pursue voter fraud cases. A special prosecutor is examining whether DOJ officials violated federal criminal law.

Jonathan E. Kaplan is the Center for Independent Media’s Washington correspondent.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.), Majority Whip James Clyburn (S.C.), and House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) have contributed thousands of dollars, held countless fundraisers and traveled across the country for Democratic candidates.

In Minnesota, Democratic leaders are campaigning hard for Ashwin Madia, as he vies for the open seat held by Rep. Jim Ramstad, who is retiring at year’s end.

Pelosi has contributed $14,000 from her campaign war chest and her political action committee to Madia’s effort, according to the latest FEC reports.

Hoyer has campaigned for Madia and has contributed $12,000; Clyburn has given $12,000; and Emanuel has campaigned, contributed $7,500, and raised money for Madia, too.

A recent poll conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has spent more than $1.3 million to help Madia win, showed him leading by five points.

Stuart Rothenberg, the author of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Report, wrote that the race “now leans toward Madia … the race is still close, but the political environment is awful for Republicans and the DCCC is in big time for their nominee.”

Despite the communal effort by party leadership to increase the size of the Democratic majority, self-interest is at stake, too.

Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn and Emanuel are all campaigning hard to curry favor with future colleagues who will have a say in whether they remain Democratic leaders.

In the weeks after the election, Democrats will meet in Washington, D.C., and hold internal party elections (Republicans will hold their own elections, too). When Congress meets in early January, House members will vote to determine who will be Speaker of the House. The vote normally is split along party lines, so Pelosi will be reelected easily if all Democrats support her.

But leadership races are often contentious, revealing a party’s inner turmoil as well as a lawmaker’s political skills. So the allegiance of incoming freshmen can be crucial.

Perhaps no recent Congressional leader was better at the care and feeding of future members of Congress than former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who campaigned tirelessly in 1994 for Republican candidates who eventually won.

He not only raised and contributed money to them, but also sent them care packages full of office supplies, toiletries and snacks. The loyalty he won from GOP candidates helped propel DeLay past then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s favored candidate to become the majority whip.

In the case of today’s Democrats, the current leadership has worked well together during the past two years and the leadership team will remain in place during the 111th Congress. But leaders will face a big test in 2010, when Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the Democratic Caucus chairman and fourth ranking member of leadership, reaches his two-term limit as caucus chair. It’s either up or out for Emanuel at that point.

Emanuel, a former senior aide to President Clinton before winning a seat in Congress in 2002, led the Democrats to victory in the 2006 mid-term elections as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

What Emanuel chooses to do after the 2010 midterm elections, as well as how he manages his relationship with a President Obama, could have far-reaching consequences for the party’s leadership. He normally chooses the most aggressive and ambitious course of action and has let reporters know that he wants to be the first Jewish Speaker of the House.

“Both Pelosi and Hoyer are same age, both love their jobs, and both could be there for another six years,” a Democratic lobbyist with close ties to House leaders said. “No question that if [Emanuel] stays he will be speaker. The question is whether he can wait.”

“He’s on a path to someday be speaker,” another Democratic lobbyist said. “It’s a question of what are the stepping stones along the way and how long will it take?”

With days to go before the 2008 election, speculation about the 2010 midterms and future party leadership might appear pointless given how much can change.

But leadership races determine who sets the party’s message and agenda in Washington, as well as who advises the Speaker and majority leader. So until the moment comes when Emanuel has to give up his post as Democratic Caucus chairman, he and the other House leaders are busy collecting chits and building new relationships with possible newcomers like Madia.

Jonathan E. Kaplan is the Center for Independent Media’s Washington correspondent.

John McCain’s attempt to magnify allegations of voter registration fraud could mitigate the impact of a Barack Obama victory and deter black Democrats from turning out to vote in future elections.

Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) and his allies have seized on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN, which has worked to register more than 100,000 lower-income and minority voters. Some of the registrations have been faked and investigations are underway in some key states.

Even though Republicans have leveled the same attack against Democrats in recent election cycles, accusing Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) of stealing the election could preemptively undermine the legitimacy of his presidency.

It’s part of the Republican DNA to accuse Democrats of stealing elections just as Democrats accuse Republicans of intimidating minorities. It has been ingrained in the GOP’s neurons since John F. Kennedy eclipsed Richard Nixon in 1960 when there were allegations of cheating in Illinois and Texas.

“Republicans tend to believe that Democrats tend to cheat. The belief is nothing new,” John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College, said.

But the allegations are more ferocious because the Obama campaign has registered millions of new voters. In Minnesota, ACORN claims to have registered 42,581 voters, which could give Obama a one or two point edge in a close race.

While Obama’s voter registration effort is a part of his presidential campaign and entirely separate from ACORN’s, the McCain campaign and its surrogates have continued to falsely link Obama to ACORN.

“The reason that it is [more intense] is because Obama is black, that’s the difference,” former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.), said, adding that the attacks have longer-term implications. “This is a good way of raising the race card without raising it.”

“If [Obama] loses, two things happen. [Republicans] still have the race issue and then the black community becomes turned off” to electoral politics, Coelho said.

“I think they are doing that to build a case against Obama if the left tries to steal this election, which clearly they are trying to do,” John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said in an email.

McCain has created a campaign committee to examine allegations of voter registration fraud. On Monday, GOP volunteers handed out flyers at a McCain rally in Virginia urging reporters to link ACORN to the $700 million rescue package (something that McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis also said last week).

McCain has continued the line of attack even after being reminded that he attended an ACORN rally in favor of an immigration bill he was working on in 2006.

The McCain and Obama campaigns held dueling press conferences on Tuesday to accuse the other of acting in bad faith.

“If left uncorrected, these numerous investigations and accusations of voter fraud with ACORN could produce a nightmare scenario on Election Day,” Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said in a statement.

David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, said McCain’s tactic was “a strategic and cynical ploy to sow confusion and a deliberate attempt to decrease turnout. It is a smokescreen to challenge people inappropriately. Throwing anything they can at the wall to create a diversion.”

The GOP’s outrage erupted last Friday when the McCain campaign released a web-only advertisement insinuating that Obama worked for ACORN in the early 1990s (he did not) and argued that McCain killed the initial bailout package because ACORN’s partners would have been able to apply for government money to invest in low income housing. In fact, House Republicans objected to such a provision and it was dropped before McCain took a position on the bill.

Top GOP lawmakers also believe that Democrats are trying to steal the election. Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) told reporters on Friday that a Democratic lawmaker – who he would not name – told him jokingly that, “We got the votes, we’re just looking for the bodies.”

“We could lose, I suppose, if they cheat us out of it. I think the only way we lose a state like North Carolina or Indiana is to get cheated out of it,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette last week.

And there are multiple ongoing investigations into voter registration fraud in several swing states.

ACORN, not surprisingly, has a different take on the situation. “Not only is this a preemptive strike to try to attack Obama, it’s a strategy to try to justify challenging the basis of the election,” Brian Kettenring, an ACORN spokesman, said in a phone interview.

Moreover, there is no evidence that a falsely registered voter have cast actual ballots. To Democrats and independent analysts, the entire story is contrived.

“In almost every case where you’ve heard about fraud by Acorn, it’s because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that’s been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers,” Brad Friedman, the author of the blog, BradBlog.com, which reports on voting rights issues, wrote recently in The Guardian. “None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it’s voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.”

Robert Bauer, Obama’s election law attorney, said on Tuesday that Republicans had put “enormous amounts of pressure on criminal justice system” to ferret out voter fraud and reminded reporters that the U.S. attorneys firing scandal started because some U.S. attorneys did not prosecute voter registration fraud to the Bush administration’s liking.

“The only fraud that has affected the governmental process is the one that has been launched on the other side looking to establish a fact that does not exist,” Bauer said.
Despite the torrent of accusations, Democrats remain confident that the accusations will disappear by the wayside if Obama wins.

“Post election, all of this will be swept away,” Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic strategist and speechwriter, said. “Having gone through 2000, where Republicans did steal the election, everybody moves on.”

“Obama is on his way to such a huge electoral win, at least as things look today, that this will not work after the election,” Joe Trippi, a Democratic political strategist, said. “And there will not be fraudulent voting that is provable in any case.”

Beyond the political calculus of winning or losing, the next president will confront larger and more complex issues.

“Obama will have much bigger problems than that—because he’s a liberal Democrat, because he’s black, and because he faces challenges far more vexing than those that confronted most of his predecessors,” G. Calvin Mackenzie, a political scientist at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, said.

Others argued it was unlikely that the McCain campaign, like most campaigns, is incapable of thinking so far ahead.

“That notion assumes way too much long-term thinking on the part of McCain and the Republicans. Their time horizon goes no farther than Election Day,” Pitney said.

Unless McCain – assuming he comes up short on Election Day – raises questions or contests the vote, the issue likely will disappear. Even in previous elections where there was no clear winner, the loser has often helped establish the winner’s legitimacy.

“That Al Gore did not cry foul about the way the election was decided probably contributed to Bush’s legitimacy,” Mackenzie said, “in the same way that Nixon’s refusal to cry foul in 1960 when there was genuine cheating in Illinois and Texas helped Kennedy.”

Jonathan E. Kaplan is the Center for Independent Media’s Washington correspondent.

“We are not babies who suck our thumbs. We have principled reasons for voting no,” she told reporters.

Bachmann, a 52-year-old Minnesota Republican, is a rising star among conservatives and a regular guest on the Fox News Channel. She delivered a prime time speech to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September.

Earlier in the summer, Bachmann made a high-profile visit with other GOP lawmakers to Alaska where she met Gov. Sarah Palin and discovered that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was the answer to the energy crisis. She became the public face of a group of conservative lawmakers who remained in the House chamber in August to protest the Democrats’ opposition to offshore drilling even though the House was not in session.

“You don’t have to wonder when she sits down what Michele Bachmann really thought,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the National Republican Congressional Committee chairman, said.

Her bluntly honest take on the vote is the latest public performance that has endeared her to the media. Even Keith Olbermann, the liberal host of MSNBC’s Countdown, forced himself to praise her remarks on why the bailout failed. (A surprise, since Olbermann has included Bachmann on his “Worst Person in the World” lists numerous times, including Oct. 2006, Jan. 2008, June 2008, Oct. 2008).

Like Palin, Bachmann is a pro-life mother of five children and an NRA member who has become a conservative darling. But rather than being plucked from obscurity like Palin, Bachmann has risen through a combination of a sunny personality and winning smile, an ability to passionately articulate conservative policies, and being at the right place at the right time — she’s a former tax attorney who serves on the House Financial Services Committee at the height of the greatest financial crisis in two generations.

Bachmann isn’t afraid to mix it up with her opponents and throw rabble-rousing red meat to the GOP base. Until six weeks ago, she was best known for displays of curious behavior and odd comments. While her ascent in Minnesota politics mirrored the rise of other like-minded George W. Bush Republicans, what’s surprising is that she is prospering while so many of her fellow travelers have lost credibility and popularity.

Facing a potentially tough reelection, letting Bachmann be Bachmann is politically risky. She could end up as a punch line for late night comedians because of her penchant for cloaking half-truths in language that inflames her opponents.

“I’m not embarrassed by anything I’ve said,” Bachmann said in a phone interview on Thursday shortly after she returned to Washington from Minnesota to vote one more time on the financial package.

“The attitude is she is definitely learning the ropes around Congress,” Rep. Mary Fallin (R-Okla.), a close friend of Bachmann’s, said.

When the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on Secretary Henry Paulson’s original three-page plan to rescue the credit markets, Bachmann read from a portion of an Investor’s Business Daily op-ed alleging that home loans to minorities caused the housing meltdown.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) sent Bachmann a letter criticizing her view and when he confronted her on the House floor, she took offense to Ellison’s charge.

When Ellison and Bachmann, the state’s first Republican woman to win a seat in Congress, left Washington to fly to Minnesota earlier this week, they sat next to each other on the airplane. They did not discuss the letter, she said.

Earlier this summer Bachmann invoked Jesus when she criticized Pelosi’s reluctance to allow a vote on offshore oil drilling.

“[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said she has even said she is trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that 2,000 years ago.”

She once told the St. Cloud Times that Iran had a plan to partition Iraq into a terrorist state. But the plan was secret. Only she knew about it and she would not divulge her source.

Bachmann first captured national attention when she grabbed President Bush’s shoulder for an uncomfortable 30 seconds as Bush departed the House chamber after delivering his State of the Union in 2007. He signed an autograph, posed for a photograph and Bachmann planted a kiss a bit too close to his lips. The video clip made the rounds on YouTube and national cable news shows.

But none of this concerns her. Asked whether she wishes she had said things differently, Bachmann said, “I’m not sure where this interview is going.”

As for the tension with Ellison, Bachmann said, “Comments are frequently taken out of context. That was a shock and not what I intended [to say].”

Her advisors also argued that Democrats and the media had distorted her comments.

“Rather than stand up and say what Michele Bachmann does believe, they’re trying to take it too far,” Ed Brookover, Bachmann’s political strategist, said. “They usually end up not getting very far,” he added, referring to Bachmann’s opponents. “If she’s sent back to Congress, people know who they’re going to get.”

Despite the financial meltdown in the housing, lending and stock markets, Bachmann has held fast to a conservative worldview. Even as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the leader of the Republican Party, has called for more regulation, Bachmann has argued that too much regulation and excessive capital gains and corporate taxes caused the crisis. She cheered on the House floor when lawmakers killed the $700 billion stimulus package.

Congressional leaders should “eviscerate what they have on the table,” and start over, Bachmann said. “I am mystified that the Federal Reserve chairman would embrace this option.”

She then launched into a technical discussion about allowing the SEC chairman to change mark-to-market accounting rules, erase short-selling rules, and give the FDIC the power to insure deposits of its member banks no matter how large the deposits are.

“Giving the Treasury Secretary $700 billion in walk around money to purchase bad debt,” she said, is like “paper toweling” the mess. It is “highly unlikely” that she will vote for the revised plan, she said a day before she opposed the second version of the bailout plan.

While Democrats and liberal bloggers have pounced on Bachmann’s missteps, her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, a Methodist minister turned mayor and state transportation commissioner, has focused on issues and criticized her opposition to a new GI Bill of Rights and universal children’s health care.
Tinklenberg’s internal polling in August showed he had a lot of ground to make up given that Republicans hold a natural five-point advantage in the district. The DCCC has not yet spent any money there, said campaign manager Anna Richie.

Bachmann won by eight points against a tough opponent in 2006. Winning a second term could be difficult, but she has raised more than $2 million and she has put together a well-oiled campaign organization.

Lawmakers with national profiles on Capitol Hill are often criticized for neglecting their districts, but it is unclear if Bachmann has fallen into that trap. Republican and Democratic sources said she had the usual difficulties of higher than normal staff turnover in the first few months of her tenure.

Democrats outnumber Republicans in the delegation, five to three. Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.), the delegation’s dean, convened its members at the beginning of the 110th Congress. While the Democrats meet every six weeks, the full delegation has not met since 2007. But aides said that Bachmann’s conservative politics have isolated her from the rest of the delegation.

Rep. Jim Ramstad, a centrist Republican who is retiring at year’s end, declined several requests for comment. Rep. John Kline, a Republican, said he helped get Bachmann find her “sea legs” on Capitol Hill. But when asked about Bachmann’s comments and whether she’s learned anything from them, he quickly steered questions to her female Republican colleagues.

“When I first met Michele, she seemed liked the type of person who would jump in with both feet and get involved and become an active player,” Fallin said. “And that’s what we are seeing of her now. She has picked out certain areas to be an expert in, such as tax policy and energy.”

Beyond being misquoted or misunderstood, Bachmann’s lessons from her first term in Congress are ideological and practical.

She said having made three trips to the Middle East that she makes a point to thank soldiers she sees in airports. She also believes that all members of Congress should have to start and run a business for three years before coming to Washington to teach them how hard it is to make money. Asked several times whether law firms are included, since so many members of Congress are lawyers, she said they could be as well as real estate agencies and farms. And the Capitol’s marble floors have taught her a lesson in fashion.

“On a personal level,” she said, “I’ve learned to give up high heels as much as possible and wear comfortable shoes.”

Jonathan E. Kaplan is the Center for Independent Media’s Washington correspondent.

But fewer of them did than in the days preceding the vote, and more of them encouraged lawmakers to support the package—or simply to do something.

On the political map there’s no pattern to what members of Congress are hearing from their constituents. While Congressional offices are calm in Iowa and Minnesota, Coloradans, Michiganders and New Mexicans still appear exercised over Monday’s vote and the prospect of a future vote.

“It’s pretty quiet here,” Rick Jauert, a spokesman for Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), said. “It is nothing like it was yesterday.”

“There’s still a good deal of calls and emails and faxes,” Jameson Cunningham, a spokesman for Rep. Thad McCotter (R), said.

While most Congressional offices estimated the number of calls and emails they received, Rep. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), a candidate for Senate who opposed the bill, crunched the numbers.

Udall received 831 emails and roughly 400 calls to its Washington and New Mexico offices. Two-thirds to 75 percent opposed to the bill. Those calls were split between those who wanted no bailout and those who support a different proposal, according to spokesman Sam Simon.

Before Monday’s vote, Udall’s offices received roughly 1,800 emails and 1,000 phone calls. Most were opposed to the package.

His opponent in the Senate race, Republican Rep. Steve Pearce, received fewer calls on Tuesday, and the tone had changed, too, from opposition to the bill to a desire for lawmakers to just “do something,” said Brian Phillips, Pearce’s spokesman. Pearce voted against the bill.

McCotter’s office experienced a huge spike in calls when the vote on the House floor started and the stock market crashed, Jameson Cunningham, McCotter’s spokesman, said. The day after the vote, he received roughly 300 calls running 3 to 1 against the bailout, a dramatic drop from Monday and last week.

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) received hundreds of calls before the vote, but constituents now seem more supportive of a measure to stave off disaster in the credit markets, Kristofer Eisenlaw, DeGette’s spokesman, said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-Iowa) and Rep. Ellison, both of whom supported the bill, have not been inundated with angry calls.

Boswell’s Des Moines and Washington offices were flooded with phone calls in the days after Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson submitted his original proposal to Congress, but the calls slowed down.

“It’s fairly quiet,” Susan McAvoy, Boswell’s spokeswoman, said. “There have been some calls in the Des Moines office, but I think people are taking a pause and seeing where this is going.”

Even though voters’ anger has simmered down, the hiatus might not last very long.

The Senate is expected to be in session today, the House will return on Thursday, and the coalition of liberal and conservative lawmakers who banded together to kill the bill will be hard pressed by the White House and Congressional leadership to reverse their “no” votes.

Jonathan E. Kaplan is the Center for Independent Media’s Washington correspondent.

Kucinich, who ran losing presidential bids in 2004 and 2008 and faced a stiff primary challenge earlier this year, drafted the legislation following a report in the Michigan Messenger that a Macomb County Republican Party official said he planned to gather lists of foreclosed homeowners to challenge their eligibility.

The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee have since filed a lawsuit in federal court over the reported plans.

The tactic is a version of a practice known as “caging,” which allows political opponents to identify voters who might not meet the proper residency requirements. Democrats and voting-rights activists argue that
victims of foreclosure may still live in their homes, and that the tactic disproportionately affects poor and African-American voters. Republicans argue that the practice preserves the integrity of the ballot.

Kucinich’s bill is unlikely to get a hearing or consideration on the House floor, as Congress races to pass a $700 billion rescue package for Wall Street banks before recessing until after the election.

Jonathan E. Kaplan is Washington correspondent for the Center for Independent Media’s network of online news sites.

For Ramstad and Kennedy, the legislation is deeply personal.

Ramstad sought treatment for alcoholism early in his political career while Kennedy has struggled with bipolar disorder and drugs and alcohol. After Kennedy crashed his car into a police barrier at 2:45 a.m. in 2006, Ramstad befriended the son of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and encouraged him to seek treatment.

For Ramstad, a nine-term lawmaker who is retiring at year’s end, the bill’s passage cements his legacy. He labored for 12 years to pass the bill and, at times, he grew frustrated with the previous House Republican leadership for not acting on the bill.

“Our leadership refused to recognize the overwhelming empirical data. Ideology trumped personal pain and suffering,” Ramstad told The Hill newspaper in 2007.

President Bush promised in 2002 to sign a mental health parity bill at an event in New Mexico with Sen. Pete Domenici, a Republican, whose daughter suffers from schizophrenia.

“Our health insurance system must treat serious mental illness like any other disease,” Bush said at the time.

Jonathan E. Kaplan is Washington correspondent for the Center for Independent Media’s network of online news sites.