MichiganRadio

An official with the Michigan Republican Party is hoping a tea party favorite will rally enough support with GOP members to elect him to lead the party next year.

Bobby Schostak is the finance director of the Michigan Republican Party. He hopes members will elect him chair when the GOP meets next month in Grand Rapids. Schostak's daughter works for Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and he asked if she'd come stump for him.

Bachmann said Michigan republicans made huge gains last November thanks to the tea party movement coming together with the party. Incoming Michigan Congressman Justin Amash agreed.

"We had leadership here like Bobby Schostak who weren't concerned about (if you were or were not tea party enough), they supported you because you were a republican. You didn't have to agree on 100% of the issues but if you were 80% there with them then they were going to support you and I appreciated that."

Amash was one of four new republican congressman elected in November. He says the gains Republicans made are a miracle, and he says it's important the Republican Party selects tested leadership to keep the momentum in 2012.

"Certainly I've been in the state house, where I was in the minority and the democrats were in the majority and they had a hard time holding it together. And we're going to have the same kind of struggles, I think, so we've got to have some good leadership at the top that will keep us together."

Amash says Schostak is good at that. But some within the party question Schostak's loyalties because he's given campaign contributions to some democrats in the past, including Michigan Senators Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin.

Bachmann on Michigan as "a living laboratory"

Bachmann says Michigan "has the ingredients to show us the greatest turnaround ever" and that Schostak will be able to help do that. Bachmann says Michigan is an inspirational example because of its dramatic turn to Republicans. She says this happened mainly because of the swell of the conservative tea party movement. She says tea party members are fair-minded, reasonable people of all political parties who want to see their nation balance its books and remain the leader of the free world. She says Michigan's come-back would inspire the country to elect Republicans in 2012.

Bachmann takes shots at President Obama

Bachmann also took knocks at federal employees, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama. She told the group at the Grand Rapids Hilton there are two reasons Republicans must not allow President Obama to have a second term in office. One, she says, is because the country is less safe since he took office. "I know it may seem like a brazen statement," Bachmann said before referencing the 2009 shootings at a military base in Fort Hood Texas, a fatal shooting outside a recruiting center in Arkansas, and the underwear bomber', who attempted to blow up a jet over metro Detroit. The second reason, Bachmann said, is because of the increasing size of government.