Bachmann: Media Want a "Mud-Wrestling Fight" with Palin

Since announcing her candidacy days ago, GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann has fielded a barrage of questions over historical gaffes. But the Minnesota congresswoman on Wednesday said the media are hungry for more than verbal missteps: They want a mud fight.

"They want to see two girls come together and have a mud-wrestling fight," she said at a suburban Charleston, South Carolina campaign stop when asked about the media's portrayal of her relationship with fofrmer Alaska governor Sarah Palin. "And I'm not going to give it to them."

"I have great respect and admiration for the governor. I appreciate her and I wish her well," she said of Palin, a Fox News contributor who has not yet made her 2012 intentions known. "I think this race is wide open. We can accommodate all the candidates who want to come in."

Beyond interest in how the two would interact if Palin throws her hat in the ring, the media onslaught over Bachmann's apparent historical errors has drawn quick comparison to Palin's rocky relationship with the press - as some question whether the early vetting belies a deeper bias against female candidates.

"Bachmann - she'd never get my vote, but she has my ire at how the media is treating her. They'd never treat a man like this week of announcement," Stacy Kerr Wooters, a top aide to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., tweeted Wednesday.

If Bachmann had any further criticism of how the media treat women, she did not reveal it in Charleston, instead concluding her answer with,"At the end of the day, this is all about America and the American people, and making sure that once again we lead from the front and not from behind...We're gonna stick together and we're gonna see this things through. Because the United States will go on."