Top Republican launches bid to oust Obama

WATERLOO, Iowa, Tuesday

Firebrand Republican Representative Michele Bachmann formally launched a bid for the White House on Tuesday, warning that the United States “cannot afford” to re-elect President Barack Obama.

“America is at a crucial moment,” Ms Bachmann, a darling of the archconservative “Tea Party” movement and of Christian conservatives, declared in a speech to some 200 cheering supporters in the key heartland state of Iowa.

“We can’t afford four more years of failed leadership here at home and abroad,” the outspoken lawmaker from Minnesota said here in the town where she was born. “We cannot afford four more years of Barack Obama.”

Ms Bachmann, 55, pointed to the swelling US national debt, soaring gasoline prices, waves of home foreclosures, historically high unemployment, and took aim at Obama’s signature health law, a magnet for conservative voter anger.

“We can’t afford the unconstitutional health care law that costs so much and delivers so little,” said Ms Bachmann, a prodigious political fundraiser who at times has raised eyebrows with superheated rhetoric and verbal missteps.

“We can’t afford four more years of millions of Americans who are out of work,” she said to voters in Iowa, home to a first-in-the-nation caucus that shapes the Republican presidential field.

“And we can’t afford four more years of a foreign policy with a president who leads from behind and who doesn’t stand up for our friends like Israel, and who and who too often fails to stand against our enemies,” said Bachmann.

Obama re-election campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt fired back that Ms Bachmann “talks about reclaiming the American Dream but her policies would erode the path to prosperity for middle class families.”

Mr LaBolt cited her support for a Republican budget plan “that would extend tax cuts for the richest Americans on the backs of seniors and the middle class” and push to repeal the most sweeping Wall Street overhaul law since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Ms Bachmann was to tour Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, important states in the Republican presidential nomination fight, bolstered by a weekend poll showing her virtually tied in Iowa with frontrunner Mitt Romney.