The Devil's Adman: She's Politically Incorrect, Right?

Like most of your successful fascists, Ann Coulter is nothing if not a born marketer. Doesn't take a treasonous, leftist commie pinko like me to tell you that. Welcome to the world as defined by Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism,

on Terrorism, Coulter's latest book-length descent into political name-calling. Apparently, those of us who are skittish about anything done by a Republican president are now "traitors," and any thought that dares veer toward the political center is, well, see the title of the book, above.

This is brilliant promotion, of course. Though unintentionally Orwellian—Coulter uses extremist vocabulary so often that she's draining it of meaning—there's obviously a measured strategy behind all the crazy rhetoric. And that strategy might be best summed up as "Go as far as you can, and then go farther." (Coulter is now spending chunks of her considerable television airtime trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Joe McCarthy.)

Whatever the strategy, it's working. Treason is a huge best-seller, and unlike another best-seller by a blonde partisan—Hillary Clinton's Living History—chances are Treason is actually being read by the folks who buy it. Where Clinton's stump-speech prose is wistful and dull in equal measure, Treason is typical Coulter: reckless, mean and a whole lot more fun to read. So Coulter, the brand, is thriving.

The question is, do folks like Ann Coulter and Mona Charen (author of Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got it Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First) have the best interests of Conservatism, the brand, in mind when they hawk their extremist literary posturing? Or are they merely paying lip service to the movement in order to enrich themselves? (Please, no cracks about the Bush tax cut.)

When the pendulum heads back toward the political center, the right can thank Coulter and the gang for hastening the swing. Because in their fervor to preach to a very specific audience—the choir, as it were—they neatly ignore the true aim of political movements: conversion. They happily sabotage the work of the Republican National Committee, which is to appeal to those on the fence and thereby expand its base, so that they can sell more political books the old-fashioned way . . . by telling one group of people how stupid, evil and dangerous another group of people is.

I've got to thank Coulter though, because thanks to her I've finally truly understood my own political leanings. I'm serious.

In college, I was the "conservative columnist" for the Daily Northwestern. Didn't matter that my politics tended toward centrism: in the politically correct environment of mid '80s higher education, any thought not to the extreme left was deemed conservative. I once turned down an offer from the campus conservative paper because it seemed more interesting to try to change minds than to sing to the "amen" chorus.

In recent years, though, I've lurched from center-right to center-left, a move I'd always attributed to growing older and more open-minded. Now I see it wasn't that at all: my politics are largely based on jerk-avoidance. The loudest voices in the media and in government used to be those of smug liberals . . . the Phil Donahues, the Ted Kennedys. People who hectored rather than taught; people who judged rather than understood. People who lectured and name-called.

Kind of like . . . Ann Coulter. Somewhere along the line, the roles have reversed. Now an old lefty like Donahue can't even pull enough ratings to sustain a show on one of the lowest-rated news channels, and the only time Kennedy is on the news anymore is when a relative gets caught behaving badly. Now we get a steady stream of Limbaugh and Hannity, and the networks serve up our nightly dose of Rummy and DeLay. Same hectoring, different party.

As the RNC watches its party's poll numbers continue to slide in the face of a lousy economy and an unclear strategy for getting our men and women out of Iraq, it might do well to distance itself from those who make the conservative "brand" so unappealing to a broader target. It might want to slap a label on those—like Ann Coulter—who put their own interests ahead of the party's. That label, a word any regular reader of Coulter's will recognize, is "traitor."