It looks like Rep. Michele Bachmann will be running for president, unless you hire a renowned campaign manager and plan a major rally in the Iowa town where you were born just to get a cruel laugh out of it. We shouldn't rule that out. But she seems ready to run, capable of doing well in Iowa, and willing to have her good friend and possible Iowa competitor Sarah Palin trashed through surrogates.

The aforementioned renowned campaign manager, or more accurately "campaign manager in waiting," that Bachmann's hired is Ed Rollins, the CNN talking head who ran Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign and Mike Huckabee's surprisingly successful 2008 campaign. He has a reputation for running his mouth a bit too much, so it's hard to tell whether he went too far or was acting in accordance with Michele Bachmann's wishes by slamming Sarah Palin yesterday:

And Rollins, in his appearance Tuesday on Fox News Radio's "Kilmeade and Friends," seemed to telegraph the direction of her campaign.

"Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years," he said. "She got the vice presidential thing handed to her, she didn't go to work in the sense of trying to gain more substance, she gave up her governorship."

"Michele Bachmann and others [have] worked hard," he said. "She has been a leader of the Tea Party which is a very important element here, she has been an attorney, she has done important things with family values."

What fun! Although Bachmann reiterated that she's good pals with Palin afterwards, another Bachmann aide — this time anonymously, phew — just went ahead and continued trashing Palin in the Politico: "The view in Iowa is that she's unstable,... When she resigned her position as governor that whole event seemed odd, and people in Iowa saw that." We all saw it, not just Iowans! It was on the TV and hilarious.

Anyway, Michele Bachmann's staffers are mean. She'll go far in this race.

[Images via AP]