Michele Bachmann returns to Iowa for start of announcement tour

Rep. Michele Bachmann will make her 2012 bid for the Republican nomination official next week with an announcement tour that will start in her birthplace of Waterloo, Iowa, and continue with six stops in the critical early primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Advisors to the three-term congresswoman, who represents Minnesota’s 6th district in Congress, believe Bachmann’s connection to Iowa -- where she lived until the age of 12 -- will help her build support for the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses early next year.

Bachmann, a former tax attorney and home-schooling mother of five, has frequently touched on her Iowa roots during her visits. In recent appearances she mentioned her family’s working-class roots, noting that her grandfather worked in the rail yards and her grandmother handled trays of sliced bacon at a Waterloo meat packing plant.

When asked by a reporter recently what advantage being a native Iowan could give her in the race, she gushed: “Oh goodness, being born in Iowa gives every advantage; every advantage a girl would want to have.”

After her announcement next Monday at Waterloo’s Snowden House, Bachmann will host a “backyard chat” in Raymond, N.H., followed by a series of intimate events in South Carolina, where she will visit Charleston, Myrtle Beach, Lexington, Greenville and Rock Hill.

In a fundraising solicitation Wednesday afternoon, she accused the president of being out of touch with “Main Street America” and said the “momentum” of her campaign had “made many in the Washington ‘elite’ very nervous.”

Bachmann made a splash in the GOP debate in New Hampshire last week by saying she had filed formal paperwork to become an official candidate, but promised a fuller rollout would come.