Republican heroes suddenly in short supply
smh.com.au
ANN COULTER, dressed in black pants, black top and a sleeveless brown leather vest, her reddish blonde hair falling around her shoulders, a large silver cross on a silver chain around her neck, does not have angel eyes.
In fact the best-selling author's eyes are narrow and hawkish. In the vast basement ballroom of a Washington hotel where, for three days, more than 5000 conservative activists have assembled to restore their faith in themselves and connect with the spirit of Ronald Reagan, the incongruity of the song - a 1960s paean to teenage infatuation - was beside the point.
For the 1000 people in the ballroom - and the hundreds who could not get in and had to watch her on television, this moment, as Coulter made her way to the stage, was the highlight of the day.
They had heard Rudolph Giuliani speak and Mitt Romney, two of the three front-runners for the Republican Party presidential nomination, and both had received something approaching enthusiastic applause.
Giuliani had been fairly low key, obviously aware that many of the delegates from all over America at this annual Conservative Political Action Conference were not thrilled that he had a messy personal history, supported gay rights and was pro-choice on abortion.
These are serious people, committed conservatives, and this shindig, as it is affectionately referred to, is the conservative movement's big event of the year, where every star of conservative America at some point will get up on the stage and urge renewed commitment to the cause.
So Giuliani talked about how he destroyed the Mafia in New York when he was mayor, basically through the use of informers and electronic surveillance and even occasionally killing a few of them when they tried to shoot it out with the police.
All those techniques, he said, could be used to fight terrorism - "remain on the offence" as he put it - if he became president. No mention of gay rights or abortion or even gun control, which he favours. Perhaps the fact that members of the National Rifle Association seemed to make up half the audience meant Giuliani had decided talk of gun control here might not be a great idea.
He left the stage to the sound of Frank Sinatra singing New York New York, which seemed appropriate given the late Sinatra's alleged ties to the Mob.
Mitt Romney, on the other hand, talked at length about all sorts of things, but his speech did not do anything for the man dressed as a porpoise at the back of the hall with several non-porpoises - probably humans - all of them holding up signs that said "Mitt Romney is a flip-flopper".
This was a reference to Romney changing his mind about abortion - he now opposes it - and gay rights - he now trenchantly opposes gay marriage - and he now favours a gun in every home, having recently seen the light and joined the National Rifle Association.
But he is very handsome - tall and well built - and he has a striking blonde wife, five sons and three grandchildren. While he is a Mormon, a religious sect that not so long ago tacitly allowed polygamy, Romney, unlike his Republican challengers - John McCain, Giuliani and Newt Gingrich have all had multiple wives even if not all at once - Romney has opted to settle for one wife.
All of this speculation about Giuliani and Romney and just why McCain stayed away from the conference was forgotten as Coulter made her way to the stage. There are no doubts about her conservatism. No one could accuse her of flip-flopping on anything.
At 45 Coulter looks a decade younger, thin and angular and highly strung, charged, an attack dog for conservatism, if that is what you can call Coulter's spiel, which has earned her millions through the sale of books such as Liberal Lies about the American Right and Slander, in which she refers to Katie Couric, the CBS news presenter, as the "affable Eva Braun" of US television.
Her latest book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, has sold 600,000 hardbacks and topped The New York Times best seller list. She is a regular on Fox News and is a favourite of right-wing radio hosts including Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
And now here she is, on stage at the biggest conservative show in town. She reels off a series of jokes about everyone from Al Gore to Hillary Clinton. The jokes are funny in an appalling way, and the crowd loves it.
Coulter on Gore: "I hear he has a small carbon footprint. You know what they say about men with a small carbon footprint. Mind you, at 400 pounds he probably can't see any footprint."
On John Edwards: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word faggot."
On Barack Obama: "I refer to him as B. Hussein Obama. He's half white and half black, half Christian and half Muslim and half atheist. Something there for every Democrat."
On Bill Clinton: "He was called the first black president. Obama might be half black and half white. Bill was half white and half trash."
On Hillary Clinton: "Hillary has already started to put together her White House team. It has to be diverse. It has to have blacks and whites and men and women. All sorts of women as long as they aren't called Monica."
And on and on - and on and on went the applause. Meanwhile, in the hall where dozens of small stalls were selling books and T-shirts and memberships from everything from the National Rifle Association to a group called Liberal Lies and another raising funds for a Stop Hillary campaign, hundreds of people were lined up for a Coulter book signing event.
They were even more anxious to be on the receiving end of a Coulter smile after they heard that Howard Dean, the Democratic Party boss, had called on the Republican presidential candidates to denounce Coulter for her "faggot" joke.
"Republicans should denounce her hateful remarks," he said, a statement that would no doubt result in a few thousand extra sales of Coulter's book. Mission accomplished.
The briskest trade in the stall hall seemed to be at the "Stop Hillary" stall, where for $US5 ($6.40) you could buy a pack of cards, each with a picture of an evil liberal on it, ranging from Hillary, who of course was the queen of spades, to the feminist Gloria Steinem. Obama was the jack of spades to Hillary's queen - no one can match Hillary in the hate stakes at the conference.
There was a lot of fervour and a lot of talk of recapturing the spirit of Ronald Reagan, by consensus the greatest of US presidents. Young men and women who would have been babies during the Reagan presidency talked in small groups about America becoming great again if only conservatives would go back to basics, back to Reagan's emphasis on American strength and American greatness.
But what was most striking about this conservative jamboree was that President George Bush was hardly mentioned. The Vice-President, Dick Cheney, gave the speech at the official dinner on Friday night and, at the conference at least, Cheney remains a hero.
Not so, it seems, the President. Not only was there hardly any mention of his name, but there were no photographs of Bush on display - and everyone from Cheney to the disgraced former House majority leader Tom Delay received their photographic due.
As for the Iraq war, it was virtually ignored. Giuliani and Romney both half-heartedly said they supported the Bush troop increase and then they both quickly went on to say mistakes had been made in Iraq. That was more or less it.
Conservatives know who the villains are - Clinton and Obama and Gore and the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi - but who their heroes are is far from clear. Except that George Bush is no longer one of them. |
