www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/04/18/ann.coulter.tm/index.html
Ms Right Love her or hate her, you don't know the real Ann Coulter By JOHN CLOUD Ann Coulter and I were well into a bottle of white Bordeaux -- and I beli eve she was chewing her fourth piece of Nicorette -- when it happened. From what little I knew of her -- mainly her propensity for declamations such as "liberals love America like OJ loved Nicole" -- I thought it i mpossible for Coulter to blush. Many of her fans would later tell me it was her fearlessness they admired , her fully unburdened sense of outrage against liberalism, against anyo ne left of Joseph McCarthy (whom Coulter flattered in her best-selling b ook Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism ). But in person, Coulter is more likely to offer jokes than fury. But in person, Coulter is more likely to offer jokes than fury. For insta nce, you might ask her to name her historical antecedents in the conserv ative movement, and she'll burst forth, "I'm Attila the Hun," and then b reak into gales of laughter so forceful you smell the Nicorette.
and a "skank," according to a blog kept by Vanity Fair's James Wolco tt). Why, I asked, did she enjoy attacking others and being attacked? She composed herself and offered a very Ann Coulter answer. the se are people who believe," she said, now raising her voice, "you can de liver a baby entirely except for the head, puncture the skull, suck the brains out and pronounce that a constitutional right has just been exerc ised. The woman looked at Coulter with white-hot hatred, and Coulter ... As she continued to pinken and covered her mouth with a delicately thin hand, she giggled and protested, "I am not . OK, she had, but whether she was truly embarrassed, what I saw of Coult er in that moment was a personality far more labile and human than the u mbrageous harridan I had expected. When I spoke with her friend Miguel Es trada, an attorney and onetime White House nominee for a judgeship (Estr ada asked President Bush to withdraw his name in 2003 after a Democratic filibuster targeted Estrada's conservatism), he said Coulter's appeal 1 5 years ago, when they met, was "the same as it is today. She was lively and funny and engaging and boisterous and outrageous and a little bit o f a polemicist ... Most of the time, people miss her humor and satire and take her way too l iterally." I began to wonder, in a moistly liberal formulation, whether Ann Coulter might be ... "), Coulter was an Ivy League-educated legal writer b efore she was a TV pundit. She's an omnivorous reader (everything from h er friend Matt Drudge's website to the works of French philosopher Jacqu es Ellul), and she isn't afraid to begin a column on Bush, as she did in January, "Maybe he is an idiot." ") Although Coulter is often compared to Rush Limbaugh, he is "first a broad caster," as he described himself in one of his books. He said his show " is, after all else, still entertainment." Coulter, on the other hand, do esn't think of herself as an entertainer but as a public intellectual. M any would say she's more of a shrieking ideologue, but regardless, her p aychecks come solely from writing and giving speeches. To be sure, Coulter is far from the most accomplished conservative presen ce in America today. old-guard guys like William Kristol and George Will have more power in Washington. But no one on the right is so iconic, such a totem of this particular mom ent. Coulter epitomizes the way politics is now discussed on the airwave s, where opinions must come violently fast and cause as much friction as possible. No one, right or left, delivers the required apothegmatic com mentary on the world with as much glee or effectiveness as Coulter. It is almost impossible to watch her and not be sluiced into rage or elat ion, depending on your views. As a congressional staff member 10 years a go, Coulter used to help write the nation's laws. Now she is far more po werful: she helps set the nation's tone. Coulter's ubiquity on political talk shows is exceeded only by her inabil ity to write a book that doesn't become a best seller. Her current effor t is titled as churlishly as the three that preceded it: How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter. It recently ended a 16-week run on the New York Times best-seller list ev en though it's mostly a collection of previously published columns. she has a stagg ering presence in cyberspace, where pro- and anti-Coulter forces wage un ending battle. Her "official chat" site, which Coulter never visits, dra ws 1,000 posts a day. co-directed by a friend of Coulter's, journalist Elinor Burkett? has played at film festivals and won some favorable notices. But Coulter's influence on the culture is both more diaphanous and more s ignificant than the calculations of book sales or Web postings suggest. She is the bogeyman of politics, the figure that liberals use when reach ing for the ultimate insult, the way conservatives use Michael Moore. When the New York Times reviewed Michael Crichton's new novel recently, c ritic Bruce Barcott sneered that it "resembles one of those Ann Coulter 'Liberals Are Stupid' jobs." ") Vanity Fair 's Wolcott has called Coulter "the Paris Hilton of postmodern politics"; TIME's own Andrew Sullivan has called her a "huckster of ideological ha te" on his blog. "Ann's stuff isn't very serious ," says a pundit who didn't want to begin a public spat with Coulter. "W e have this argument every now and then among our side: whether she is a net minus or net plus to conservatism. Even fans speak of Coulter in ways that suggest some distance: "I think A nn is a brilliant girl, and she's got the quickest mouth in the East," s ays the Rev. "Now, I probably won't use her on Sunday mor ning in my church because she is capable of getting a little aggressive. But it's suspicious when conventional wisdom os sifies around someone so thoroughly. as all those he has cal led "Feminazis" know, Limbaugh has operated in that genre for years. Cou lter is more like Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of this magazine's co-foun der, who rankled the Roosevelt establishment in the '40s with her take-n o-prisoners opposition to the New Deal and communism. In her first House floor speech as a Congresswoman representing the Conne cticut district where Coulter later grew up, Luce called Vice President Henry Wallace's liberal approach to postwar foreign policy "globaloney," a proto-Coulterism that shocked many in Washington. Today Coulter often speaks under the auspices of a conservative group called the Clare Boot he Luce Policy Institute that was founded by Luce admirers in 1993. Vanity Fair once said of Luce, who edited that magazine in the '30s, "She combines a fragile blondness with a will of steel." Similarly, one is a stounded to hear from Coulter something like, "We should invade their co untries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity," as she f amously wrote of Muslims who were cheering after the Sept. In February Coulter went to Washington to speak at the Conservative Polit ical Action Conference (CPAC), the premier annual event for movement con servatives. When she arrived, the Atrium Hall at the Ronald Reagan Build ing was hot with anticipation. Activists occupied every inch of availabl e floor space; Wearing an ankle-length fur and a wide-eyed expression, Coulter had to be pushed through the crowd by a team of handlers. When she swept past the spot I was wedged into, the young men near me went aflutter. During a Q&A at a private reception later, another guy raised his hand an d asked her out. "L iberals like to scream and howl about McCarthyism," she concluded. They've had intellectual terror on the campus f or years ... Liberals who believe that Bush's is the show-no-weakness, make-no-apology presidency see Coulter as its Ur-spokeswoman. That is a facile insult b oth to Bush, who constantly professes a desire to unite the country, and to Coulter, who wouldn't mind if much of the country moved to Canada. B ut unlike Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News star, Coulter has never wobbled on Bush's signature deed, the war in Iraq. "The invasion of Iraq has gone fabulously well," she wrot...
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