As Max Sparber noted in yesterday's Daily Glean, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann generated another of her patented word-choice hubbubs when she worried aloud at a Colorado conservative summit on health care whether Obamaism was turning Americans into "a nation of slaves."

I asked for a clarification of what kind of slavery Bachmann was referencing and received this reply from Bachmann Press Secretary Rachel Horn:

"Congresswoman Bachmann’s concerns are that each generation is going to have to work longer and harder tomorrow to pay off the reckless spending in DC today.  www.NationalDebt.gov  shows that the government debt held by the public is $8.6 trillion.  A taxpayer today is automatically on the hook for more than $119,000  of debt in order to pay off the national debt with interest. It’s simply unacceptable for our government to run up levels of debt of that magnitude to be passed off to future generations."

So, to be clear, Bachmann meant that deficit spending is turning future generations of Americans into "slaves" to debt.

Spokester Horn's debt numbers hold up, but Bachmann blew it in Colorado when she tried to accuse Obama of more than doubling the national debt in his first year and a half as president.

The Colorado Independent, which broke the story, reported that Bachmann had:

"pointed to numbers showing that when Obama took office the debt was $5.8 trillion, quickly rising to $13 trillion under his leadership."

That's messed up. The national debt has risen sharply and alarmingly in the late Bush and early Obama period because of the big bailout bills and other things. But the only way you can get from $5.8 trillion to $13 trillion is to use the old apples and oranges gag.

There are two main ways that the U.S. national debt is expressed. The most common, called the "debt owed to the public," was, as Bachmann said, about $5.8 trillion at the beginning of 2009. And, as spokester Horn's email said, it has risen, at an alarming pace, to $8.6 trillion. Debt owed to the public basically refers to U.S. bonds owned by creditors outside of the U.S. government.

The other way to express the debt is the total debt, which is quite a bit higher. It includes the debt owed to the public but also the trillions of dollars worth of treasury bonds that make up the Social Security Trust Fund and other smaller internal government accounts. That figure, Bachmann said, has recently crossed the $13 trillion level.

I am alarmed by the level of the debt and by the speed of its recent ascent. President Obama says he is too, and says he is determiend to address it as the economy stabilized. Time will tell if he can fulfill those intentions, which is a whole other book.

But for the moment, it seems clear that if Bachmann said in Colorado that the debt has risen from $5.8 trillion to $13 trillion under Obama, she got it wrong, probably by using the lower measure (debt owed by the public) at the front end, and the higher measure (total debt) at the back end. I have asked Horn to clarify that this is what occurred, in hopes that Bachmann would retract and clarify, but I have not yet heard back.

The actual quote about Obama and slavery, from the Colorado Independent, goes like this:

"We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves.”

(For fairness, you might note that Bachmann didn't say that Obama was turning us into a nation of slaves, but raised it as a question. This is a recurring theme in these kinds of Bachmann eruptions. Many times, she has seemed to endorse a controversial idea, then retreated to a statement that she hadn't embraced it, only thought it was worthy of discussion.)