MB Civic

ONCE again, Ann Coulter has a book in need of flogging, and once again, people are stunned by what a “vicious,” “mean-spirited,” “despicable” “hate-monger” they say she is.

Ms. Coulter, who seems afflicted by a kind of rhetorical compulsion, most recently labeled the widows of 9/11 “harpies.” It is just one in a series from a spoken-word hit parade that seems to fly out of her mouth uninterrupted by conscience, rectitude or logic.

But Ann Coulter knows precisely what she is saying. Her current book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,” is heading to the best-seller lists in part because she has a significant constituency and in part because no other author in American publishing is better at weaponizing words. With five books and more than a million copies in hardcover sales, she plays to win and is happy to take hostages along the way, including the women she calls “The Witches of East Brunswick.”

“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.” That typical Coulter sortie was hardly a misstep on some overamped talk show. That doozy of a sentence was written, edited, lawyered and then published. By now, she, along with Crown Publishing, have come up with a dexterous formula for kicking up the kind of fuss that sells books. It looks something like this:

 

She did not come out of the gate with such ruthless aplomb. As published at the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998, “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” reflected her background as a lawyer and was fairly scholarly, considering what came after it. But once her lethally blond franchise became part of public consciousness, or at least the lower stem of it that feeds off cable talk, she quickly learned that hyperbole is best sold by the ton.

She has since suggested wistfully that Timothy McVeigh should have parked his truck in front of The New York Times, joked that a Supreme Court justice should be poisoned, and said that America should invade Muslim countries and kill their leaders. And she recently admitted that she is “no big fan” of the First Amendment that allowed her to say all of that.

“She is so smart that none of it is by accident,” said Adrian Zackheim, the publisher of Portfolio, a business imprint, and of Sentinel, a conservative political imprint. “She knows that a few things she says are bound to get attention. She just probably doesn’t know which one.”

But once attention, negative or otherwise, turns toward her, she is all knuckles and know-how. When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that her attack on the widows was “vicious,” Ms. Coulter went casually nuclear, saying that the senator “should talk to her husband, who was accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick.”

The second-stage rollout — picking a fight with Senator Clinton is a way, as they say in politics, to “activate the base.” Only the returns will be financial, not political.

 

“Every single book she has done has become an instant best-seller,” said Bob Wietrak, a vice president for merchandising at Barnes & Noble. “Her fan base is phenomenal and she is in the media constantly. When she is in the media, it creates more media coverage. And every single day, the book sells more.”

You get the idea. Wagging tongue, wagging fingers and before you know it, soon enough you have hundreds of hits on Google News for days to come (this column among them).

And just when things threaten to slow down, Ms. Coulter will saw into Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son in Iraq, describing her as “a C-list celebrity trolling for a book deal or a reality show,” or accuse a disabled Vietnam vet she was arguing with on a talk show of being part of the reason the United States lost the war there. Her attacks on the maimed or the bereft engage the thermodynamics of the media marketplace to send her to even loftier heights.

An explosive device is now baked into every book. For “Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (333,000 in hardcover sales, according to Nielsen Bookscan), she called Katie Couric “the affable Eva Braun of morning TV.” We all tuned in for the ensuing cage match, in which Ms. Couric maintained both the higher ground and the upper hand. (That interview came to mind last week when Ms. Coulter, back on a Couric-less “Today” program, treated Matt Lauer like a cat toy.)

When she was pushing “Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism,” (almost 400,000 in sales), it was all about the misunderstood genius and patriotism of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. In “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)”, she let readers in on the playbook: “You must outrage the enemy. If you don’t leave liberals in a sputtering impotent rage, you’re not doing it right.” And her sales of 301,000 for what was basically a collection of columns seem to indicate that she has mastered the form.

“Godless,” which is already doing gangbuster business according to the folks at Barnes & Noble, suggests that liberalism “is the doctrine that prompts otherwise seemingly sane people to propose teaching children how to masturbate, allowing gays to marry, releasing murderers from prison, and teaching children that they share a common ancestor with the earthworm.”

Does she believe any of this stuff? I doubt she even knows. When I profiled Ms. Coulter a few years ago, I never figured out the line between her art and her artifice. She picked at her plate of lobster ravioli before serving up Fred Flintstone-size slabs of red meat. For the duration of the media opportunity, she was playful and on point, other than fibbing about her age, because she cares deeply about the franchise.

Her sincerity is beside the point as long as people keep taking the bait. Mrs. Clinton, who is the perfect foil for Ms. Coulter — ambitious, allergic to irony, loathed by the people who will line up for “Godless” — simply added fuel to a fire that she was presumably trying to douse. All manner of televised talkfests, including “Today,” welcome Ms. Coulter’s pirate sensibilities back aboard whenever she has something to peddle, in part because seeing hate-speech pop out of a blonde who knows her way around a black cocktail dress makes for compelling viewing.

Without the total package, Ms. Coulter would be just one more nut living in Mom’s basement. You can accuse her of cynicism all you want, but the fact that she is one of the leading political writers of our age says something about the rest of us.

Illustrations by Ingo Fast.