Michele Bachmann's calling

After President Obama's inauguration in 2009, I wrote about going to a DC church that weekend at which I heard him referred to from the pulpit as a prophet called by God. Love the president or hate him, that's a troubling category mistake.

Now Rep. Michele Bachmann says she feels a "calling" to run for president. The congresswoman told a public television program in Iowa that she "had this calling and tugging on [her] heart that this is the right thing to do."

That's some religiously loaded language, though Bachmann doesn't actually say that it's God who's doing the calling and the heart-tugging. Perhaps there's nothing more here than garden-variety pandering to the many conservative evangelicals who will be caucusing in Iowa before we know it.