You Heard It Here First: Ann Coulter Is Over
In her latest column, Ann Coulter says that there's about a 50% chance that Hillary Clinton will "come out of the closet." Not too long ago, she suggested that Bill Clinton was a latent homosexual.
Ann poses a dilemma for me. I know her from my days as an editor at George, when she wrote a column for the magazine. (It was outrageous, but not nearly as bilious as her more recent writings.) In person, she is unexpectedly fun, funny and charming. Seriously. She's good company.
But I'd be hard-pressed to find a single thing she's ever said that I agree with, and I think that the nastiness of her commentary is a negative force in the culture. (I do give her the credit, though, of thinking that she means what she says. She is completely consistent in public and in private.)
So, trying to analyze Ann dispassionately...I have to say that I think she has peaked; her cultural moment is passing; and her cultural influence will diminish steadily.
Consider the remarks above as an example. Ann has lost her power to shock; her put-downs and caricatures have become boring and predictable. Which puts her in an unfortunate dynamic; she must either try to become more serious, in which case she alienates her nutty right-wing base, or she must become ever more outlandish, pleasing the base but losing more general appeal. It's the same thing that happened with
Father Coughlin and, more recently, Rush Limbaugh.
I'm not saying she won't still sell lots of books and be a talk-radio presence. Her latest, Godless, is at
#5 on the NYT bestseller list. Rush Limbaugh still has an audience of millions too; yet his ability to have an impact on those who don't already agree with everything he says has become minimal to nil.
Ann's act has grown stale. And in this time when the country has so many serious challenges, that development is long overdue. Name-calling won't cut it anymore.
