The transformation of Michele Bachmann from Tea Party insurgent and cable-news Pasionaria to serious Republican contender in the 2012 Presidential race was nearly complete by late June, when she boarded a Dassault Falcon 900, in Dulles, Virginia, and headed toward the caucus grounds of Iowa. The leased, fourteen-seat corporate jet was to serve as Bachmann’s campaign hub for the next few days, and, before the plane took off, her press secretary, Alice Stewart, announced to the six travelling chroniclers that there was one important rule. “I know everything is on the record these days,” Stewart said, “but please just don’t broadcast images of her in her casual clothes.”

Michele Bachmann’s world view has been shaped by institutions and people unfamiliar to most Americans. Illustration by BARRY BLITT

Bachmann, a two-term member of Congress from Stillwater, Minnesota, is an ideologue of the Christian-conservative movement. Her appeal, along with her rapid ascent in the polls, is based on a collection of right-wing convictions, beliefs, and resentments that she has regularly broadcast from television studios and podiums since 2006, when she was first elected to Congress. Often, she will say something outrageous and follow it with a cheerful disclaimer. During the last Presidential campaign, she told Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, that Barack Obama held “anti-American views” and then admitted, “I made a misstatement.” (In 2010, she said that she had been right about Obama’s views all along: “Now I look like Nostradamus.”) In the spring of 2009, during what appeared to be the beginnings of a swine-flu epidemic, Bachmann said, “I find it interesting that it was back in the nineteen-seventies that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat President, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama—I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”

After the second Republican Presidential debate, in Manchester, New Hampshire, on June 13th, Bachmann surged in popularity. Her success there was mainly the result of her clear enunciation of Tea Party talking points. But Bachmann and her campaign staff know that––like Sarah Palin and like Mitt Romney—her image depends on a carefully groomed glamour. As Stewart was spelling out the rules of the plane, a flight attendant solemnly carried a full-length white garment bag from Nordstrom down the aisle, as if she were carrying the nuclear codes. Close behind followed two more aides––Bachmann’s personal assistant, Tera Dahl, and the makeup artist Tamara Robertson, who had been asked to join the team because Bachmann so admired her work at Fox News.

Bachmann’s campaign was already, for the most part, highly professional. We were joined on the plane by her speech and debate coach, Brett O’Donnell, who has worked for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Sarah Palin, among other Republicans. He has also led the debate team at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University to the top ranking in the country. Keith Nahigian, who worked for John McCain, was also on board. He serves as a logistics guru, doing everything from retrieving luggage for reporters to holding up a sign during Bachmann’s speeches to remind her to mention her Web site.

The only senior member of the team not making the trip was Ed Rollins, Bachmann’s campaign manager. Rollins is famous in Washington for two things: managing Ronald Reagan’s successful reëlection campaign against Walter Mondale in 1984, and developing poisonous relationships with most of his high-profile employers since then. They have included George H. W. Bush (“the worst campaigner to actually get elected President,” according to Rollins), Ross Perot (“a paranoid lunatic on an ego trip”), and Arianna Huffington (“the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I’d met in thirty years in national politics”). More recently, he has managed the campaign of Mike Huckabee, appeared frequently on CNN, and worked in corporate public relations.

Bachmann and her husband, Marcus, had been the last to board. She is a tiny woman with a warm smile and blue eyes. She had just finished a round of Sunday-morning television interviews, and had changed out of a gray suit and pearls into a casual blouse and khaki cargo pants. Later, she walked down the aisle handing out candy and hand sanitizer from a wicker basket. An aide turned the cabin’s two monitors to the Fox News Channel. “Isn’t this an incredible way to fly?” Bachmann said to me at one point. “I’ve never been on a nicer plane in my life.”

It was a good day for Bachmann: a new poll showed her sharing the top position in Iowa with Mitt Romney. After we landed in Des Moines, an aide handed Bachmann a copy of that morning’s Des Moines Register. She swung around to face the press, displaying the front-page headline: “ROMNEY, BACHMANN LEAD REPUBLICAN PACK.” It was a perfect shot. The members of the press looked at her cargo pants and then at one another. Nobody took a picture.

Bachmann belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians. Her campaign is going to be a conversation about a set of beliefs more extreme than those of any American politician of her stature, including Sarah Palin, to whom she is inevitably compared. Bachmann said in 2004 that being gay is “personal enslavement,” and that, if same-sex marriage were legalized, “little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and that perhaps they should try it.” Speaking about gay-rights activists, that same year, she said, “It is our children that is the prize for this community.” She believes that evolution is a theory that has “never been proven,” and that intelligent design should be taught in schools.

Bachmann’s assertions on these issues are, unsurprisingly, disputed. She is also often criticized for making factual errors on less controversial matters. As commentators quickly pointed out, the President during the first swine-flu outbreak was a Republican, Gerald Ford. She got into more trouble this spring when, during a trip to Iowa before she announced her candidacy, she told a long story about her family’s roots in the state.

In the speech, Bachmann said that her family arrived in the state in the eighteen-fifties and experienced a series of misfortunes: “the worst winter in fifty years,” “the worst flooding in forty-two years,” “the worst drought that anyone had ever recorded,” and then a plague of “locusts.” But they persevered, and even started the first Lutheran church in the area. The family came to Iowa, she said, after reading the Muskego Manifesto, a letter sent from Norwegian settlers in the town of Muskego to their families back home. Bachmann quoted the manifesto, which describes an America where people “have civil and religious liberty, and here we can choose whatever profession we want, and no one tells us what profession we go in.” Her ancestors, she said, read those words and “sold everything and took their five children and bought boat tickets to come to Iowa.”

In fact, Muskego is a town in Wisconsin, the state where Bachmann’s forebears, the Munsons, settled in 1857, twelve years after the manifesto was written. Then, in 1861, they moved west, to the Dakota Territory, near present-day Elk Point, South Dakota. That is where, according to the family history that Bachmann relied on, they encountered the awful winter and the flooding and the drought and what the text calls “grasshoppers.” The Munsons seem to have been part of the group that established the first Lutheran church in the Dakota Territory, but there were already Lutheran congregations in Iowa when they arrived there, in late 1864 or early 1865. As the author and historian Chris Rodda has pointed out, the story chronicled is not quite one of superhuman perseverance on the frontier; rather, it’s the story of a family fleeing to the relative safety and civilization of settled Iowa. In other words, Bachmann’s dramatic tale happened near Iowa, but not actually in it.

Since announcing her candidacy, Bachmann, who is fifty-five, has continued to emphasize her Iowa roots—though now she talks about the nineteen-sixties more than the eighteen-fifties. After landing in Des Moines, we travelled to Waterloo, where she was born, and where she lived until she was eleven. Standing in front of the red brick Snowden House, a local landmark built in an Italianate style, she declared, “Everything I need to know, I learned in Iowa.” The crowd cheered. She added, “I grew up here in Iowa.” During her first campaign for Congress, in 2006, her official biography noted that “Michele grew up in a broken home in Anoka, Minnesota.” Since then, her ambitions have shifted from local office to national office, and her emphasis, when she discusses her youth, has shifted accordingly.

After the speech, she did a round of interviews, including one with Fox News, in which she was able to slip in some references to famous Iowans. Then we all drove back to the airport. She seemed energized when she boarded the plane, heading to New Hampshire to continue her tour of the early caucus and primary states.

Soon, however, the mood in the cabin darkened. O’Donnell, the speech coach, had the Drudge Report open on a laptop. There was an unobjectionable picture of Bachmann onstage, backed by an enormous American flag, but below the image was the headline “CONFUSES JOHN WAYNE WITH JOHN WAYNE GACY.” In her interview with Fox, Bachmann had said that she was from Waterloo, “just like John Wayne.” John Wayne, the star of so many John Ford movies, was actually born in Winterset, Iowa. John Wayne Gacy, who killed thirty-three young men, lived in Waterloo.

Why would Drudge, an ardent conservative, publicize that gaffe? O’Donnell thought he knew the answer. “Matt Rhoades and Drudge are best friends,” he said, speaking of Mitt Romney’s campaign manager. Bachmann concurred. “You never see anything about Romney on Drudge—ever,” she said.

Someone turned on Fox News, and the team began discussing the second Bachmann story of the moment. The day before, the Fox anchor Chris Wallace had asked her whether she was a “flake.” Bachmann called the question “insulting” on the air, and viewers had reacted negatively to it. Wallace issued a video statement later in the day expressing regret. “A lot of you were more than perturbed, you were upset and felt that I had been rude to her,” he told the audience. “And since in the end it’s really all about the answers, and not about the questions, I messed up. I’m sorry.”

Bachmann was set to appear again on Fox News in the evening, this time with Sean Hannity. “If Sean says tonight, ‘Have you accepted that apology?,’ then what do I say?” she asked her campaign team. The consensus was that she would not accept it.

“He didn’t apologize to her,” O’Donnell said. “He just apologized for messing up. There are all sorts of apologies.”

The team began reviewing footage of Bachmann’s Waterloo speech. Marcus, who is not a small man, stood in the aisle, his white shirt untucked, and mouthed his wife’s words as he watched. When she arrived at her big applause line—“Make no mistake about it, Barack Obama will be a one . . . term . . . President!”—Marcus recited it out loud and raised his fist. “That’s powerful, that’s good, that’s excellent!” he said. “Yes, yes, yes!”

“That line, it’s become your signature,” O’Donnell said to Bachmann.

“It tested the best on Ed’s dial testing,” another aide said, referring to measurements that her pollster, Ed Goeas, had made of the enthusiasm for particular Bachmann phrases.

A little later, Bachmann read some coverage of herself on the Web site of the New York Times. She was pleasantly surprised. “Maybe it’s because he was so mean last time and he feels like he needs to do better,” she speculated about the author. She took out a white iPhone and, reclining in her seat, played Wallace’s video apology on the phone. “It was pretty weak, I gotta say,” she announced.

Marcus Bachmann plopped down on the seat next to me, in the back of the plane. He pointed at my laptop and asked if he could take a look. “All I want to know is what they’re saying about me,” he said. “Newsweek came up with the word ‘silver fox.’ Tell me what ‘silver fox’ means.”

“Do you want me to tell you honestly?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t tell me it’s something gay!” he said. “Because I’ve been called that before.” Marcus is a psychologist who runs a clinic that employs people Michele described in 2006 as “Biblical world-view counsellors,” who “reach out and try to bring the medicine of the Gospel to come and heal people.”

I explained that “silver fox” probably had more to do with the color of his hair.

“O.K., I can handle that,” he said. Tera, the assistant, assured him that it was a positive term.

“It’s better than Porky Pig,” Marcus said, with a laugh.

Marcus announced that he would now analyze everyone around him. He asked for three characteristics that a close friend might use to describe me. I demurred. He kept pushing: “So reporters are not that vulnerable?” “Maybe it’s a man thing.”

I tried to change the subject by asking him about the similarities between psychologists and journalists. But he would have none of it. “You are still asking questions about me!” he exclaimed. “That’s a trademark. Ai-yi-yi!”

I gave in and told him a story about one of my young sons. Marcus delivered his psychological verdict: “He takes after his dad: smart, perceptive—has a little control need at an early age.”

Marcus moved on: “O.K., earliest childhood memories. Not the safe one, just the first one.”

Suddenly, his face appeared on Fox. “Look, you’re on TV,” I said.

“It’s the Silver Fox!” he exclaimed as we descended into Manchester.

Inside the airport, another reporter pulled up an image of Buddy Garrity, from the TV show “Friday Night Lights.” The character, played by Brad Leland, is a dead ringer for Marcus, and the reporter showed him the image. “He does look like me,” Marcus said. “My goodness, you guys are quick, sharp, and complimentary so far—just until I get to know you long enough, and then you might even tell the truth.” He paused. “Which I’m really afraid of!” He grabbed a large suitcase from a cart—“I’m the high-maintenance traveller here, with the biggest, heaviest bag”—and he and Michele walked away.

Michele Bachmann’s father, a former Air Force staff sergeant, was an engineer who worked at a bomb factory in Iowa. He travelled around the country and to China, made his own wine, ground his own grain, and drove a gray Volkswagen bug. He was a Democrat and a student of the Civil War. “He didn’t appreciate it if any kind words were said about the South,” she said in a eulogy for him, in 2003. But he was also an “authoritarian.” In a Christmas letter to friends and family that year, she wrote, “He was a man of faults, and he was perhaps the most dominant human figure in my life.” Her parents separated in 1968, and in July, 1970, when Michele was fourteen, their divorce was finalized. The following month, in Las Vegas, her father married a woman twelve years his junior and moved to California. Bachmann, who has three brothers, says that the split devastated her and left the family impoverished. “We had to sell our home and sell most of the things that we had and move into a little apartment,” she told me. Her mother soon married a widower with five children.

In a speech in Minneapolis in 2006, Bachmann spoke of growing up with “the emotional struggles of not having a strong father in my life.” Two years after her father left, Bachmann joined a high-school prayer group. She had been brought up a Lutheran, but she knew little about the Bible. With the help of the members of the prayer group, she explained in the speech, she became a born-again Christian: