Via Christian Heinze, I think she’s right. But then, I was long ago rendered mentally disabled by a Gardasil injection.

Actually, if you read the full quote, she really is right. Emphases added:

BACHMANN: I haven’t had a gaffe or something that I’ve done that has caused me to fall in the polls…

VAN SUSTEREN: So you’re talking about clunker — you mean the allegations — underline allegations, no proof of Mr. Herman Cain that there were two women who said that they were sexually harassed, and you had the Governor Perry’s unfortunate 53-second gaffe at the — one of the debates — is that the clunker that brings people down?

BACHMANN: Those clunkers show that people — that that hurts candidates in the polls. I haven’t had something like that.

True. My memory of the arc of her campaign was that she peaked at Ames and then started to disintegrate soon after her irresponsible Gardasil accusation, which even Rush Limbaugh described as a jump-the-shark moment. But my memory’s wrong. By the time she made the claim about Gardasil after the debate on September 12, she’d already slipped from 12-15 percent in July to 8-10 percent by late August. An ABC poll taken at the end of that month put her at just six percent and both Fox News and CNN had her at a meager four percent in their last surveys before l’affaire Gardasil. She’s hovered around four to six percent ever since so it may be the case that that comment cemented her as a second-tier candidate, but the brief Bachmann boomlet over the summer was already fizzling by the time it happened. So yeah, technically, she hasn’t made a campaign-ending gaffe like Perry or Cain did — but only because her campaign was already over by the time she tried to.

Exit question: Does anyone think Bachmann wouldn’t have said something game-changing if given the chance as nominee? C’mon.