Bachmann Announces 2012 Run

It's official: Michele Bachmann is running for president. Of course, we already knew that, but the Minnesota congresswoman formally announced her plans today in Iowa, where she was born. “We can’t afford four more years of Barack Obama,” she said to the 300 or so who assembled in Waterloo. “As a constitutional conservative, I believe in the founding fathers’ vision of a limited government that trusts in and preserves the unlimited potential of the American people.”

Bachmann, the only 2012 candidate born in Iowa, lived there until she was 12 and moved to Minnesota with her family, the Des Moines Register reports. Her announcement comes at a particularly buzzy time for Bachmann: Yesterday, she was speaking out against a report that she received federal subsidies (which she is supposedly opposed to), and she also made headlines when Chris Wallace asked if she was a flake. She is also in a dead heat with Mitt Romney to lead Iowa polls. (More Michele Bachmann stories.)