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Sunday, September 17, 2006
An evening with Ann… and Lynn
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ann Coulter’s dinner speech to the Georgia Christian Coalition Saturday night was one of the year’s hot tickets for conservatives – even before an after-dinner appeal to open up checkbooks to pay for this year’s voter guide, the coalition had raised over $150,000 from the event, according to state chairman Sadie Fields.
No doubt the sharp-tongued conservative author was the star of the show, as evidenced by the long line that formed for a book-signing afterwards. But on a night with no hecklers to egg her on, she wasn’t the newsiest item on the program.
First, Coulter found herself in the uncharacteristic position of being upstaged by her introducer, Mike Gallagher.
He told the audience he was fresh back from an hour-and-45-minute session which President Bush held in the Oval Office Friday afternoon with him and four other conservative talk show hosts: Atlanta’s Neal Boortz, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Michael Medved. Rush Limbaugh couldn’t make it, he said.
Though he said this session was supposed to be off the record, Gallagher described it at some length, including Bush’s observation to the right-wing radio jocks that the War on Terror has to be about right versus wrong, “because if it’s about Christianity versus Islam, we’ll lose.�
“Remind me never to invite you to an off-the-record session,� Coulter said after his introduction.
Coulter spoke mostly about the long court battle over abortion, a safe subject for the audience, but one that reminded listeners that Coulter was a lawyer before she became a bomb thrower. She saved her freshest barb of the evening for the last question from the audience: She referred to the Republican senators who defied Bush over the rules for interrogating terrrorist suspects as “the al-Qaeda contingent.�
It’s that kind of political incorrectness that people come to hear when Coulter speaks. Her most recent book, “Godless: the Church of Liberalism,� makes her a seeming natural for religious conservative groups, but it isn’t the easiest fit.
On television, Coulter plays off her seeming closeness to the elitist culture she criticizes, with her finishing-school accent and Upper West Side couture.
“In respect to my gay male friends, I’ll resist the temptation to call this an attempt to force gay marriage down our throats,� she said Saturday night.
Her audience laughed, but with what seemed a noticeable squirm, at lines like that. One speaker who did seem to know his audience was Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, and for those of us who keep an eye on the local scene that may have been the most notable thing about the evening.
Rep. Tom Price and Rep. Phil Gingrey both spoke at the dinner, but Westmoreland, one of the Republicans eyeing the 2010 governor’s race, got two speaking spots, including a pitch for contributions to the voter-guide fund after Coulter’s speech.
House Speaker Glenn Richardson, another ’10 mentionable, wasn’t at the dinner, for whatever you make of that. And come to think of it, we didn’t see Ralph Reed.
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