Bachmann, Perry a Gift to Obama

Mike Lupica: GOP destroying its chances with 'fringe candidates'
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 15, 2011 12:39 PM CDT
Updated Aug 15, 2011 1:53 PM CDT
Mike Lupica: Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry a Gift to Barack Obama
Republican presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry addresses the Blackhawk County Republican annual Lincoln Day Dinner at the Electric Park Ballroom August 14, 2011 in Waterloo, Iowa.   (Getty Images)

With the economy weak, the president is looking vulnerable; “the Republicans have Obama right where they want him,” writes Mike Lupica in the New York Daily News. But with Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry in the lead, the party is shooting itself in the foot. For his part, “Barack Obama must be rooting like crazy for both of them, at the beginning of a campaign where fringe Republicans might do a better job of saving Obama than he can of saving himself.”

While Obama should be "challenged on so many things"—like how he exhausted all his political capital on health care, not jobs—the GOP isn't offering up anyone who can do it, writes Lupica. Perry (aka George W. Bush II) and Bachmann (aka the "new president of Ames, Iowa") have no ideas, fresh or stale, about how to pull us out of the economic mess. Their only idea is to make Obama "a one-term president,” writes Lupica. But if the GOP runs the wrong man or woman, "the zealots—religious or otherwise—who make the most noise about showing Obama the door are the ones who might save him." (More Rick Perry stories.)

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