asked her thoughts on the passing of noted author Gore Vidal. Classy as always, Bachmann offered this assessment of the man and his work.
I had been a Democrat and I’d actually worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign and I was reading a novel by Gore Vidal and when I was reading it he was mocking the Founding Fathers and all of the sudden it just occurred to me, I set the book down on my lap, I looked out the window of a train I was riding in and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t think I’m a Democrat. I think I really am a Republican.
The Founding Fathers were not the characters that I saw Gore Vidal portraying in his novel and that snotty, mocking attitude to me didn’t in any way reflect who we are as a nation.
That’s a completely different philosophical view of the United States, and I know that Gore Vidal has passed away today, I understood he’s 86 years old, and it’s interesting how his work, while he intended it, I think, one particular way, it was used actually to help me see a completely different way which is the conservative way. I started then examining the conservative position and realized at heart, I really am a conservative and that’s far more reflective of American values than the values that Gore Vidal was espousing.