Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) on Wednesday said that she would not be a member of the Republican Party if it were not for novelist Gore Vidal.

“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,” she told Michelle Fields of The Daily Caller.

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“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,’ because 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.”

On Tuesday, Vidal died in his home from pneumonia. The provocative liberal author and social critic wrote 25 novels, essays, Broadway hits, screenplays and television dramas.

“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,” Bachmann added.

Watch video, courtesy of The Daily Caller, below: