......To be sure, Coulter is far from the most accomplished conservative presence in America today. Even post-OxyContin, Limbaugh has greater reach; Sean Hannity has his own TV show; old-guard guys like William Kristol and George Will have more power in Washington. Countless conservative scholars—Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Richard Posner—write with greater intellectual heft.
But no one on the right is so iconic, such a totem of this particular moment. Coulter epitomizes the way politics is now discussed on the airwaves, where opinions must come violently fast and cause as much friction as possible. No one, right or left, delivers the required apothegmatic commentary 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 elation, depending on your views. As a congressional staff member 10 years ago, Coulter used to help write the nation's laws. Now she is far more powerful: she helps set the nation's tone.
Coulter's ubiquity on political talk shows is exceeded only by her inability to write a book that doesn't become a best seller. Her current effort 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 even though it's mostly a collection of previously published columns. Despite Coulter's indifference to the online world—she doesn't blog, and until recently she had little direct role in anncoulter.com—she has a staggering presence in cyberspace, where pro- and anti-Coulter forces wage unending battle. Her "official chat" site, which Coulter never visits, draws 1,000 posts a day. A recent documentary, Is It True What They Say About Ann?—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 significant than the calculations of book sales or Web postings suggest. She is the bogeyman of politics, the figure that liberals use when reaching for the ultimate insult, the way conservatives use Michael Moore. When the New York Times reviewed Michael Crichton's new novel recently, critic Bruce Barcott sneered that it "resembles one of those Ann Coulter 'Liberals Are Stupid' jobs." (After reading that, Coulter e-mailed me: "I AM THE GOLD STANDARD FOR LIBERAL BILE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!") 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 hate" on his blog.
Some conservatives—many of them Coulter's rivals for screen time, as she points out—have also drawn their knives. "Ann's stuff isn't very serious," says a pundit who didn't want to begin a public spat with Coulter. "We have this argument every now and then among our side: whether she is a net minus or net plus to conservatism. I have come to the conclusion that she's a minus." Even fans speak of Coulter in ways that suggest some distance: "I think Ann is a brilliant girl, and she's got the quickest mouth in the East," says the Rev. Jerry Falwell. "Now, I probably won't use her on Sunday morning in my church because she is capable of getting a little aggressive."
That's right: Ann Coulter burns too fiercely for both the temples of the secular left—the New York Times—and of the religious right—Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church. But it's suspicious when conventional wisdom ossifies around someone so thoroughly. Why does she make so many people itch?
It's not just that she can be callous and mouthy; as all those he has called "Feminazis" know, Limbaugh has operated in that genre for years. Coulter is more like Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of this magazine's co-founder, who rankled the Roosevelt establishment in the '40s with her take-no-prisoners opposition to the New Deal and communism. In her first House floor speech as a Congresswoman representing the Connecticut 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 Boothe 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 astounded to hear from Coulter something like, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity," as she famously wrote of Muslims who were cheering after the Sept. 11 attacks, not least because Coulter might be shrink-wrapped in a black-leather mini as she says it. The combination of hard-charging righteousness and willowy, sex-kitten pulchritude is vertiginous and—for her many young male fans—intoxicating.
In February Coulter went to Washington to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the premier annual event for movement conservatives. When she arrived, the Atrium Hall at the Ronald Reagan Building was hot with anticipation. Activists occupied every inch of available floor space; hundreds stood in the back.
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.
"Ann Coulter should be staying on our floor!" one said lasciviously.
During a Q&A at a private reception later, another guy raised his hand and asked her out.
Coulter's speech was part right-wing stand-up routine—she called Senator Edward Kennedy "the human dirigible"—and part bloodcurdling agitprop. "Liberals like to scream and howl about McCarthyism," she concluded. "I say, let's give them some. They've had intellectual terror on the campus for years ... It's time for a new McCarthyism."
Curtain.
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 both 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. But unlike Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News star, Coulter has never wobbled on Bush's signature deed, the war in Iraq.
It's not just her rhetoric that draws comment -- her look does, too. See it evolve over the years.
"The invasion of Iraq has gone fabulously well," she wrote last June, a few weeks after O'Reilly suggested the U.S. might need to pull out.
Her only argument with Bush is that he isn't more like President Reagan. "'Compassionate conservative,'" she says, "carries the same negative implications as 'articulate black.'" Coulter believes not just in less government but in almost no government. She would eliminate the departments of Education, Commerce, Agriculture and several others. She opposes abortion rights and has written that court-ordered school-desegregation plans have led to "illiterate students knifing one another between acts of sodomy in the stairwell."
Coulter conveys an aura of privilege, wealth and—above all—certainty. "Would that we all could have the political and moral clarity that seems to come so effortlessly from Ann Coulter," wrote an admiring Lisa De Pasquale of the Luce Policy Institute last year in the conservative publication Human Events. But can it be effortless? One theory about Coulter is that she is less Joe McCarthy and more a right-wing Ali G, acting out a character who utters what the rest of us won't. ("That led him to masturbate into [White House] sinks?" she asked in 1999, when President Clinton's rough childhood was mentioned on Rivera Live.)
"This isn't a game," Coulter said at CPAC. "The fate of our troops isn't a game. The fate of the victims on 9/11 is not a game." But she told me several times that, as she put it in an e-mail, "most of what I say, I say to amuse myself and amuse my friends. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about anything beyond that."
So which is it? Is she a brave warrior or a shallow hack? Or is Ann Coulter that most unlikely of conservative subspecies: a hard-right ironist?
Not long ago, I called Coulter's mother and read her one of her daughter's more rakish lines. Last year, after the New York Times published a Reagan obituary that mentioned the Iran-contra scandal 15 times, Coulter wrote that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is "a little weenie who can't read because he has 'dyslexia.'" "Oh, dear," said Nell Martin Coulter, 76, with a laugh.
"Now, is that the way little girls are brought up to speak in Connecticut?" I asked. Ann Coulter grew up in New Canaan, Conn.; her mother was raised in Paducah, Ky. "I know it's not the way little girls are brought up to talk in Kentucky."
"I think you've got a point there," Nell Coulter said, chuckling, "but that is the way she expresses herself, and she does have obviously strong likes and dislikes. That's just the way she puts things ... I think a person who has strong convictions is more convincing to someone who is wavering."
In other words, it's not an act. But as Coulter herself points out in Is It True What They Say About Ann?, "I think the way to convert people is to make them laugh or to make them enraged ... Even if I could be convinced that if I had gone through 17 on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hands, I might convince one more liberal out there, I think I'd still write the way I write, because it gives me laughs." Coulter told me that when her editor suggests cutting a line from a column to save space, "I'll ask him, 'But is it funny?' And if he says it's funny, I'll cut an actual fact [instead].".........