Ex-Manager: Bachmann is "Out of Money and Ideas"
The GOP hopeful continues to take heat from her former supporters and staff.
| Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011, at 12:35 PM
Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.
UPDATE: The hits keep coming for Michele Bachmann.
Her former campaign manager had this to say Monday about her and her presidential ambitions: She has "run out of money and ideas" and can no longer expect to win in Iowa.
"She's still saying the same things she said in the first debate. There's no substance," Ed Rollins, who left the campaign in September and has clashed publicly with the candidate since then, told ABC News. "She says, 'I'm going to repeal Obamacare.' But she's been saying that from Day 1. I told her: 'That's your Tea Party speech, now you have to say what you're going to do next."
POST Friday, Oct. 28: So much for that "Tea Party favorite" label.
The leader of a key Tea Party-affiliated group wants Michele Bachmann to call it quits and end her bid for the White House.
In a harshly worded statement posted on the group’s website Thursday, American Majority president Ned Ryun said that Bachmann’s campaign "has become less about reform and more about her personal effort to stay relevant and sell books," and that the longer the Minnesota Republican stays in the race the more damage she risks doing to the conservative movement.
As CNN, which first spotted the post, points out: American Majority operates in seven states, trains thousands of supporters and is "liked" by more than 371,000 people on Facebook. Its suggestion that Bachmann step aside is the first time a well-known Tea Party group has so publicly turned on one of its own during the presidential campaign.
"Every day [Bachmann's] campaign flounders, it risks hurting the credibility of the movement," Ryun writes, closing his open letter with this dig at the woman who chairs the House Tea Party Caucus: "The Tea Party doesn’t have a spokesperson, and it’s certainly not Michele Bachmann."
Team Bachmann, responding in a statement to CNN, dismissed the criticism, in part by arguing that Ryun is a Rick Perry supporter (something the American Majority president denies).
"Michele Bachmann enjoys strong support from Americans across party lines and that certainly includes the Tea Party," said Bachmann campaign manager Keith Nahigian. "She will continue to be a strong advocate for the values and principles reflected by the Tea Party as works toward a victory in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses as she seeks to win the Republican nomination."
