Watch: GOP Audience Gasps as Michelle Bachmann Tells Them She Was Once a Democrat, Worked for Jimmy Carter
At a speech to Michigan Republicans in Troy on Tuesday, Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) elicited gasps from the audience as she told them she was once a Democrat.
Michelle Bachmann says she was a "fair-minded Democrat" who worked on Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign (and danced at his inaugural ball before she read a "snotty" novel by Gore Vidal that she perceived as mocking the Founding Fathers.
"And as a reasonable, decent, fair-minded person who happened to be a Democrat, I thought, 'You know what? What he's writing about, this mocking of people that I revere, and the country that I love, and that I would lay my life down to defend -- just like every one of you in this room would, and as many of you in this room have when you wore the uniform of this great country -- I knew that that was not representative of my country."
"And at that point I put the book down and I laughed. I was riding a train. I looked out the window and I said, 'You know what? I think I must be a Republican. I don't think I'm a Democrat.'"
Watch, AFTER THE JUMP...
she let ONE BOOK 'change' her? then she never had strong convictions to begin with.
Posted by: ACe | Dec 31, 2010 6:11:38 PM
Shes apparently been telling one version or another of this story for years.
To paraphrase Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters: "You don't deserve Gore Vidal."
Posted by: Mike Friedman | Dec 31, 2010 9:17:49 PM
So, reading a novel by Gore Vidal turned her from a Democrat into a Republican. I can see how that might happen, given that Vidal was the Chairman of the Democratic Party for many years.
Oh wait...
Posted by: MajorTom | Dec 31, 2010 11:57:31 PM
She thinks all Democrats are like Gore Vidal? That's patently moronic.
Posted by: ophu | Jan 1, 2011 1:40:32 AM