From the Los Angeles Times:
Elwyn Tinklenberg is living the long-shot candidate’s political dream.
There weren’t enough chairs for the volunteers crammed inside the four-room campaign office Wednesday morning. Every time aides hit “refresh” on their computers, hundreds more online donations appeared. Downstairs, the postal carrier spent 10 minutes trying to cram a two-foot stack of envelopes stuffed with checks into the mail slot. “It’s been raining money,” said Beth DeZiel, 39, the campaign’s dazed deputy finance director. “There’s so much, we can barely keep up. It’s unbelievable.”
But this unsolicited good fortune — $1.3 million since Friday — isn’t based on anything the Democratic former mayor and grandfather of seven did. It’s all because of something his rival, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, said. On Friday afternoon, Bachmann appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” and made what has been dubbed the million-dollar mistake: Bachmann, 52, alleged that presidential candidate Barack Obama may hold “anti-American” views, and proposed a media investigation into “the views of the people in Congress [to] find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?”
This summer, one of the few polls conducted in the race showed that Bachmann held a 13-point lead over Tinklenberg. But on Wednesday, the National Republican Congressional Committee pulled all of its TV advertising supporting Bachmann in the 6th District, according to a GOP source.
