Did Bachmann Get Boring Overnight, or Did Mediatocracy Deem it So?

I find this an oh, so clever photo from Getty Images. At face value, it shows Bachmann boring the audience to death at Sunday’s candidate forum in South Carolina. Just beyond that surface, however, the photo is a wonderful commentary on how quickly the candidate has been X’d. If this guy is yawning, it seems the interpretation, since M.B. has been at least as much a curiosity as the next GOP wannabe is that he, and the rest of the audience, is taking its cue from the media after it put a fork in Bachmann’s candidacy two weeks ago. (Then, there’s the matter of Jim DeMint’s format, regardless of who held the stage, putting the audience to sleep.)

Now, if Perry (the presumptive overnight front-runner and current bright shiny object) wasn’t as crazy as Bachmann, there might be some merit to the Kool-Aid conventional wisdom that his entry into the race had substantively, somehow, “knocked her into the second tier.” The way the media and Washington insiders take the liberty so assuredly and definitively, however, to pass judgement on who’s in and who’s out, however, based on a couple of flimsy polls, Bachmann’s evisceration (faster than you can say “Dean’s scream) might make some sense.

In the meantime, I have a couple of questions. First, did Rollins bail out because of some longer-developing split with the campaign, or because the mediatocracy — of which Rollins has also been a prime, card carrying member — scared him off too? And second, if Bachmann was a man, would she still have been dispatched as quickly as she has been, immediately upon winning the Ames Straw Poll?