The Devil's Adman: Killing Coulter With Kindness

IT'S enough that I was wrong. What makes writing this column so completely unbearable, though, is that it took some guy from Ad Age to help me see the error of my ways. Columnist Simon Dumenco was clearly kidding when he asked conservative

pundit and best-selling author Ann Coulter to

kill herself following what he described as her "rabidly hateful, foaming-at-the-mouth, sub-human" recent appearance on the Today show. You know the appearance Dumenco's talking about: it's the one where she reiterated the stuff from her most recent book about how the 9/11 widows are greedy "harpies." While interviewing her, Matt Lauer read the following quote, which Coulter happily defended: "I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' death so much."

Not being a reader of Ad Age, I saw Dumenco's piece because it got picked by some bloggers in predictable fashion: the left-wingers liked the joke maybe a little too much, and the right-wingers feigned ignorance of the fact that is was a joke. (One hard-right blog headlined the story thus: "Blogger wants Coulter Dead.") My own reaction was also predictable; I was horribly jealous that a fellow columnist got so much play for one silly little joke. I mean, all this guy had to do was make an outrageous suggestion, jokingly, and everyone was talking about him!

Which, coincidentally, explains the Coulter phenomenon, a point I made in this space almost three years ago. It's a time-honored promotional equation: Coulter says outrageous things, people talk/write/blog about her—she's shocking . . . shocking!—and her books climb to the top of the amazon.com bestseller list. With each new book, Coulter has to ratchet up the shocking! quotient to get noticed, so we've gone from her spirited defense of Joe McCarthy some years back to the spirited harpooning of women who lost husbands during a terrorist attack. Her tirades guarantee her a choice slot on Today and endless ink, and predictable snickers from folks like me, who are convinced that her wildly overstated positions must cause intense hand-wringing in the halls of the Republican National Committee, where voters are supposed to be courted with logic, not scared with vituperation.

Ah, and at last we get to where I was wrong, and to an apology I'd like to make to Ms. Coulter. When I wrote about her in July of 2003, I suggested that—to use one of her favorite words—Ann has been a "traitor" to her own party, because she puts her need to shock (and thereby sell books) ahead of the Republican need to seem reasonable (and thereby attract voters). I based that idea on what I thought was a rational read on the sometimes conflicting needs between an individual and a group.

Silly me: it never occurred to me that in making outrageous statements, Coulter might actually be accurately