I just returned from the National Press Club, where you can feel the conventional wisdom on Michele Bachmann shifting. Not long ago, the inside-the-Beltway take was that she was an in-over-her-head ambitious House member from a safe district with no chance of making a serious run at the GOP nomination.

Now she’s undoubtedly in the top tier of Republican presidential candidates and perhaps one of the best communicators in the field. With this, of course, comes greater scrutiny. Today’s event with Bachmann was sold out, with no less than 20 television cameras and multitudes of press in attendance. The head table featured, among others, Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Sustren and ABC News This Week host Christiane Amanpour. Each was seated next to one of Bachmann’s daughters.

Bachmann spoke for twenty-five minutes – she paused and asked if it was okay to run over, a refreshing change for a politician – and in the Corner, Katrina Trinko as a fine rundown. I will need to check a transcript to see if “Iowa” or “Reagan” was invoked more frequently.

On the elevator after the event, one elderly member of the Fourth Estate remarked with raised eyebrows, “well, she’s certainly more astute than Palin.”

“You could see it in the question on what she read,” nodded the other. Perhaps he was pleased that Bachmann said she actually reads liberal sites on her iPad before the conservative ones, and named MSNBC and the Huffington Post among them. (She also gave a shout-out to NR’s Andy McCarthy, repeating his argument that the real threat to America’s credit rating and financial health is not the debt ceiling but the debt itself.

In the coming weeks and months, it is likely that Bachmann is going to run into serious flak over her husband’s clinic, which she co-owns. Here is the entirety of the back-and-forth with moderator Mark Hamrick, president of the National Press Club, reading questions submitted by members of the audience, this one from a reporter from the Washington Blade.

Hamrick: Recent reporting has revealed that the clinic you co-own with your husband engages in a kind of therapy that is meant to help people get over their homosexuality. Do you believe that reparative therapy can change gay people into being straight, and does any federal funding go to that clinic?
Bachmann: I’m extremely proud of my husband. I have tremendous respect and admiration for him. We’ll celebrate our thirty-third wedding anniversary this coming September. But I am running for the presidency of the United States. My husband is not running for the presidency. Neither are my children, neither is our business, neither are our foster children. I am more than happy to stand for questions on running for the presidency of the United States.
Hamrick: Just to be clear then, you don’t believe that your personal finances are something that should be questioned by the American people ?
Bachmann: I am running for the presidency of the United States, and I have no doubt that every jot and tittle of my life will be fully looked at and inspected before November of 2012.

Note the first question Hamrick asked wasn’t actually about the clinic or her husband; both queries were fairly yes-or-no. (And we effectively know the answer to the first question; how likely is it that Marcus Bachmann would practice a form of therapy that his wife thought was pointless, ineffective, or worse?)

Bachmann may find the issue entirely irrelevant to what she wants to do as president, and many Americans are likely to agree with her. From the way the issue is covered, it would be easy to believe that the notion that homosexuality is a choice is a fringe position, but a 2009 Angus Reid poll of 1,001 American adults found that 47 percent believe homosexuality is a choice; only 34 percent believe gays and lesbians are born with that sexual preference.

However, for gays and lesbians who believe their sexual orientation is a fundamental, unalterable element of their identity, as natural and instinctual as attraction to the oppose sex is for straights, the notion of therapy to alter that condition invokes images of brainwashing or malevolent psychological manipulation. Their cries of outrage and disbelief will be deafening on this issue, and it is almost certain to come to dominate mainstream media coverage of Bachmann. In time, she will need to answer with something more than the contention that the issue is not relevant to running for the presidency of the United States.