Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann told The Daily Caller Wednesday that author Gore Vidal’s “snotty, mocking attitude” helped her realize she was a conservative.

Vidal died on Tuesday of pneumonia. Bachmann credits Vidal’s book “Burr” with her political conversion to conservatism, and hammered home her distaste for the liberal writer on the day his death was publicly announced.

“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,'” said Bachmann at the Young Americans for Freedom conference in Washington, D.C.

“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,” Bachmann said.

“And I just thought,” said the former GOP presidential candidate, “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.”

Videography by Sarah Hofmann

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