Only fools underestimate Michele Bachmann

It is a truth universally acknowledged that to turn the public against public figures, it is best to portray them as dumb or boring.

Al Gore? Mitt Romney? Boring. Dan Quayle? Sarah Palin? Dumb.

"Crazy" won't stick. "Crazy" works only when your audience is limited to people who already agree with you. After all, one man's crazy is another man's clairvoyant.

So after months of identifying Michele Bachmann as a foaming-at-the-mouth Tea Party darling, the People Who Craft Election Narratives began to find themselves in a bind. And suddenly, the narrative shifted.

Now, it is not that Bachmann is crazy. It is that she is dumb.

This was a miscalculation. Michele Bachmann has many traits, but "dumb" is not among them.

"But she misidentified the location of the shot heard round the world!" you say. "But she mixed up John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy!"

This could happen to anyone, and it often does. And since these incidents, Bachmann has turned out to be anything but an unceasing fountain of gaffes.

"Are you a flake?" the microphone-toters goad. No, and the question backfired.

With Palin, "dumb" stuck. She has a gift for saying what people who didn't think were thinking, a tendency to coin words and a willingness to pose for the covers of magazines with dutifully deployed winds blowing her hair.

This is not Bachmann's milieu at all. Not only isn't she dumb, she doesn't even sound dumb most of the time, which is more than can be said for most of us, at least once you get us into a cocktail setting or anywhere near a microphone.

And people have started to notice. Bachmann is surging in the polls. She leads in Iowa -- even after a debacle of a weekend in which she signed a vow that described slavery as a stable, family institution and homosexuality as a choice.

Meanwhile, the People Who Snap Up These Things are squatting in the bushes outside the Bachmann tent, waiting for another faux pas to emerge.

"Are you sure that quotation is right?" they ask.

Does it matter? She's left through the back flap and is off leading the pack.

Petition by petition, remark by remark, some are scrabbling to swing the pendulum back to crazy. "Crazy" is the new political arena, where the race goes to the loudest. Yell it! The more egregious the remark, the better!

So what's one to do? The best answer is to treat Bachmann like anyone else.

She isn't dumb or dull. The worst thing one could do would be not to take her seriously.

Tackle her arguments one at a time, respond to her with the respect that any candidate is due. Don't wait for gaffes in the hopes of dismissing her as a lightweight. I doubt any of those will be forthcoming.

But maybe I'm crazy.