A week before U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann announced that she would not seek re-election next year, the top House GOP campaign official in Washington was asked whether, given the Minnesota Republican's mounting legal problems, the party might not be better off running someone else.
"We are a member-driven organization," said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. "We don't recruit against our own members."
Walden went on to express confidence in Bachmann's national fundraising base, saying "she will figure out a way to win."
It seems doubtful now that Bachmann had, as some of her supporters have suggested privately, the requisite "fire in the belly."
Without any advance warning — not even to her Minnesota colleagues in Congress — Bachmann cut an eight-minute video announcing her decision, then released it in a 2 a.m. time slot designed to minimize press coverage.
Other than a friendly interview with Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity, a financial supporter, the video provides the only public account Bachmann has offered so far on her decision to leave Congress at the end of her fourth term.
In the video, Bachmann avers that her decision was not driven by any fear of losing. Nor, she said, was it "impacted in any way by the recent inquiries into the activities of my former presidential campaign or my former presidential staff."
But veteran Republican congressional aides have a difficult time imagining that the decision was based on anything but a clear-eyed calculation — based on polling — of her 2014 electoral prospects.