ORU Graduate Running for President

She’s Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Christian voice with a Lutheran background who has officially declared her candidacy for president of the United States. And she’s off to a good start.

Bachmann, an Oral Roberts University graduate, is neck and neck with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the Des Moines Register Iowa poll, garnering 22 percent of the vote.

“We have to recapture our founders’ vision of a constitutionally conservative government if we are to secure the promise of the future,” Bachmann told supporters at her Waterloo, Iowa, campaign kick-off this week.

Bachmann grew up a Democrat and even worked for Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. She switched allegiances after she witnessed Carter’s big spending plans. And she still remembers her grandmother’s prophetic words about the future of America.

“I remember standing in the kitchen of my grandma’s house on Lafayette Street in Waterloo listening to my dad, a Democrat debating the merits of the Great Society with my grandmother, a Republican,” Bachmann said. “I remember her prophetic admonition to my father that the Great Society wouldn’t work because it wouldn’t be my father’s generation who paid for it, but rather my brother, David, and me. And now that prediction has come true and neither my Democrat father nor my Republican grandmother would have condoned this spending and debt.”

Elected in 2006, Bachmann is the first Republican woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota. From the beginning, she has demonstrated bold reform, pushing to fix what she calls Washington’s broken ways.

Prior to serving in the U.S. Congress, Bachmann was elected to the Minnesota State Senate in 2000 where she championed the Taxpayers Bill of Rights. Before that, she spent five years as a federal tax litigation attorney, working on hundreds of civil and criminal cases.

“My voice is part of a movement to take back our country, and now I want to take that voice to the White House,” Bachmann said. “It is the voice of constitutional conservatives who want our government to do its job and not ours and who want our government to live within its means and not our children’s and grandchildren’s.”

In July 2010, Bachmann hosted the first Tea Party Caucus meeting. Her values include the call for lower taxes, renewed focus on the Constitution and the need to shrink the size of government. She received her J.D. at the O.W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University and an L.L.M. in Tax Law at the College of William and Mary.