I usually gave up quoting Ann Coulter. In my pre-blog days I even gave one of her early books a good review since she had not by then gone totally over the top. I later did posts on her increasingly outrageous comments on TMV until I belatedly realized that topping her outrageous comments were part of her marketing shtick for her books and speaking engagements. Then I just stopped.
But I had always heard two things about Coulter: 1)People who met her “offstage” usually liked her (particularly the studio techs who do those cable remotes, or at least some of the ones who I met doing some CNN political panel appearances who had very nice things to say about her) and 2) she is astute politically, despite her shtick.
Mediaiate now has a quote from a TV appearance (they also have the video) which again suggests that she is more than someone who tosses out verbal atomic bombs:
Close doesn’t count, and if we don’t pick up those seats…I mean, ooh, maybe Boxer’s in a close race, but this isn’t a good year for the Republicans in the Senate. There are as many Democrats as Republicans are up in the Senate, only a third of the Senate is up every year, so I think Republicans ought to be careful with all this rah, rah cheering. We’re not going to take the Senate. Even if we pick up 30 seats in the House, we’re not taking the House.
This is interesting coming from Coulter. My own feeling is that if GOPers turn out in force as they will likely do and some Democrats stick to their stated intention to either teach their party a lesson for Obama and Congress not being progressive enough by staying home, or just don’t bother to vote it will indeed be a GOP wipeout. Democrats have blown their long term objectives in the past and in some ways seem on the brink of doing it again for several reasons. The all-or-nothing segment of the Democratic party (you know, the ones that sat on their hands for Hubert Humphrey and Al Gore) are seemingly now poised to hand a GOP — armed with lots of new Supreme Court sanctioned corporate money and political ammunition against an Obama administration that has performed below expectations — a November gift.
One little note. There are few people who I trust on political predictions. One is University of Virginia Political Scienist Larry Sabato. The other is Philadelphia newspaperman, blogger Dick Polman. And CNN analyst, former White House advisor David Gergen. And then there was one Chris Matthews who wrote a wonderful — and often accurate when he made a prediction — column for the San Francisco Chronicle that was syndicated in over 200 newspapers. Matthews is still tries to discern what’s happening and give a professional take on what he thinks will happen. These people are far different from the ideological prognosticators of the right and left whose predictions more often than not are either political statements in themselves or a political version of positive affirmations.
But Coulter? I tend to think she’s stepping back and analyzing here — even though at this point I disagree with her (and Nancy Pelosi).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.