With Michelle Bachmann, the GOP’s new front-runner, the formula just doesn’t work. Maybe it should. Bachmann has all the raw materials of Palinhood. As a conservative woman who opposes abortion and gay marriage, she’s fishing with the same bait that served Palin so well. If anything, Bachmann’s explicit and wholesale rejection of feminism sets her well to Palin’s right. If ther media were the master agenda-setters and opinion-makers their critics take them for, then Bachmann’s strong showing in the Iowa straw poll should have raised her profile to Palinesque heights. But it hasn’t.