Melinda Henneberger is a Washington, D.C.-based writer.

Should anyone have been surprised that Michele Bachmann would go out with a bang, a big bang? On Tuesday, in what the retiring congresswoman from Minnesota figured would be her last White House holiday party, Bachmann used the grip-and-grin moment when she got her picture taken with President Obama to raise a reliably grin-killing topic. “The U.S. needs to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities today,” she informed him.

His response?


“A condescending smile and laugh,” she tells Politico, making a little pat-on-the-head gesture. “‘Michele, it isn’t that easy, but that’s OK,’” she remembers him telling her. To which the gentlelady from Minnesota replied that it would be on him, then, to have failed to keep Iran from wiping Israel off the map.

Merry Christmas!

Bachmann, who, amid a probe into possible campaign finance violations during her 2012 presidential run, announced last year that she would not seek a fifth term, put a lot of thought into that final “substantive word with the president,” as she puts it, even if it did make her the holiday guest from hell. “I made the conscious decision I was going to run hard through the tape at the end” of her time on the Hill, she said in a long interview in the borrowed committee room where her staff has been camped out since they packed up her office before Thanksgiving. And using even those few seconds with Obama in the most provocative possible way is just one reason the 58-year-old firebrand feels “like an accomplished person” as she exits stage right.

“I feel almost like my life is over, in a positive way,’’ she says.

Bachmann, after all, came to Washington to fight—and she did, summoning thousands of tea partiers to protest at the Capitol, questioning the president’s patriotism, and “tirelessly,” to use one of her favorite words, painting the Affordable Care Act as downright deadly: “Let’s repeal this failure before it literally kills woman, kills children, kills senior citizens,’’ she once argued from the House floor.

One of the first to tap into the deep vein of discontent and distrust among those who identify with the tea party, she reveled in taking on her own party, too, even opposing the auto bailout supported by President George W. Bush, who had campaigned for her back when she was, as she said in her final floor speech this week, “essentially nobody from nowhere.” In 2011, she gave the “tea party response” to Obama’s State of the Union speech—in competition with the official GOP rejoinder.

During her presidential run, she won an Iowa straw poll, briefly becoming a front-runner as well as a punchline, and unmistakably moved the debate to the right. She leaves a far more conservative Republican caucus than the one she joined in January of 2007. And with her congressional battles behind her, she leaves, she says, a happy woman.

In a mocking salute on Hardball with Chris Matthews on Thursday night, the MSNBC host called her “queen of the hard right-wing clown car,” and showed a blooper reel of her incorrectly claiming that the HPV vaccine causes developmental delays, airbrushing American history by insisting that our nation’s founders “worked tirelessly ’til slavery was no more in the United States,’” and locating the battle of Lexington and Concord in New Hampshire rather than Massachusetts. Al Sharpton ran a similar tape that showed her mispronouncing ‘chutzpah’ and vowing that “President Bachmann will allow you to buy any light bulb you want,” a reference to her bill, the Lightbulb Freedom of Choice Act, which pushed back against Democratic attempts to phase out energy-inefficient incandescent light bulbs.

Yet not unlike liberal House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Bachmann genuinely seems to see most criticism as proof that she’s effectively “contending.” When I spent time with her as she was campaigning for the presidency in Iowa late in 2011, I came away thinking the key to understanding both her personal and political perspective is that she sees adversity as redemptive, and life itself as one hell of a fight.

Michele Marie Amble was formed more than anything, she always says, by the poverty her family had to work its way out of after her parents divorced when she was 13. Their family fell on such hard times, she regularly said on the campaign trail, that her mom had to sell her pretty wedding china for pennies from a card table she set up in their driveway. Nobody gave her anything she didn’t earn, she always said, and from a young age had to work to pay for “my clothes and my glasses and if I wanted lunch at school; that’s life.” Again in the interview this week, she cited that struggle as one that ended up being “good training.”

It certainly made her who she is as a parent who raised her five kids to fend for themselves. For one thing, they never got an allowance: “We told them, ‘We’re not paying you to breathe.’” Instead, because they lived on a golf course, they grew up harvesting golf balls, washing them and selling them back to the golfers, and then moved on to other part-time jobs as they got older. They also grew up knowing that they would mostly have to work their way through college, as Bachmann and her husband, Marcus, had done. (The result, she brags, is that the last two graduated last spring, none has any debt, and none is living in her basement. “We didn’t smother them, we weren’t helicopter parents, and now we can be free.”)

Her early deprivations also formed her as a candidate. When she ran for president, she said her tough-love parenting had given her the ability “to know when to say no, and that’s tremendously applicable” in a country that she feels needs to stop “overindulging.”

And those tough times as a kid shaped her into a lawmaker who sees government aid as truly harmful to people who would be better off in the long run struggling to pay their own way.

She leaves Congress, she said in her last floor speech, "the same person I always was'' — a self-described former housewife from the burbs of the Twin Cities who listens to the Big Guy, speaks for the little guy, and tells the truth as she sees it. Which is not to say that she hasn't changed her mind a time or two.

Before she got here, for instance, “I thought members of Congress were a bunch of boozing, skirt-chasing slackers.” Whereas now, she feels they “tend to be smarter than people think. They work harder, and their integrity is a lot higher. I respect most members. Some I don’t, but most I do.”

She herself jokes that she’s not sure who’s happiest to see her move on—Pelosi or the leader of her own caucus, House Speaker John Boehner. Despite her red red rhetoric, she does, she insists, have friends across the aisle: Former congresswoman and current senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, was one of the first lawmakers with whom she bonded, even if once any member moves from the House to the Senate “you never see them again.” She likewise considers Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois a girlfriend. “We talk about everything under the sun.”

“I just love Jim Langevin,’’ she says of the Rhode Island Democrat, “and the feeling is mutual.” New York Rep. Eliot Engel is also on her ‘nice’ list: “I love him,” too.

“I don’t have enemies; I don’t burn bridges or yell at people. I contend and take people on,” but even the president, she says, “I don’t consider an enemy.”

Asked about her experience as a woman on the Hill, her review is mixed: “Men trip over themselves to be nice to women; they don’t want to be sexist.’’ But, she says, they nevertheless “seem to feel more uncomfortable communicating with women.’’

Tinier than she looks on television, Bachmann often pulls her hair up and twists it around her hand as she talks. A tax lawyer who started a business with her husband, “I always felt liberated,’’ she says, and clasps her hands behind her head. Yet at times in the House, she added, she has felt “discounted. I don’t know if that’s the right word, and I don’t say that to castigate any of the men here; they don’t try not to listen to us” even if that is what happens. She decided a long time ago that she’d rather find a way around problems than “gripe about them.” But in this case, she said, “I haven’t completely done that yet.”

Speaking of that decision not to gripe, she never did say what she thought of the decision of Tina Brown’s Newsweek to run an unflattering, wild-eyed picture of her on the cover when she was running for president. She laughs that that’s not because she was holding anything back: “There’s never been a filter here.”

Instead, she didn’t respond because “I don’t take myself that seriously,’’ and in a world in which terrorism is one of her main concerns, “the media certainly can’t be the enemy; that’s the least of my problems.”

What she’s going to miss most when she leaves office, she says, is access to what she sees as the “knowledge factory,” otherwise known as the House of Representatives. “I’m really a scholar at heart.”

She’ll also have fewer chances to talk to “consequential people” such as former Vice President Dick Cheney. On one of her first days in Congress, she remembers being shoved out of the way by the security detail for George W. Bush when the president greeted her by name as he walked down the hall with the Dalai Lama. “You know my name—and you’re the Dalai Lama!” she recalls, saying she pinched herself twice.

But how will people likely remember her? Her legacy, she says, is making “Obamacare” a dirty word. When she first got into the presidential race, she was one of the few advocating the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and by the time she dropped out, “every man on the stage” in presidential debates was in full agreement on that point.

“That became the default position” in her party, she says, “and I did that,” moving the debate to the point that “Democrats didn’t even want the president in their state talking about it” ahead of the midterm elections this year. “That’s not to be minimized.”

As the only woman running then, and the only Republican woman to even briefly be considered a frontrunner, “I occupy a unique space; I’m it,” and have earned a spot in the thick of the ’16 campaign, though “I’m not putting together my own team” as a candidate. “I’ve been there, done that, plus I’ve served with Mrs. Clinton, the godmother of Obamacare” and so feels she’s perfectly positioned to take her on from the outside.

She may or may not run again some day, and meanwhile hopes to start getting paid for all the speaking and writing and media she does for free now.

Asked if she’d go back to Minnesota or live here, she does sound like an ex-politician: “I’d love to live under a palm tree,’’ she says, and repeats that with her kids launched, “the world is my oyster; I’m free to go anywhere.”

“I used everything I had, and that’s why I leave so happy,” she says. “I redeemed the time.” Used it all, she means. Even in the photo line at the White House Christmas party.