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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.