Ann Coulter Hearts Mitt Romney

Rejection stings.

Ann Coulter had chosen Chris Christie as her dream date to the presidential prom. So much to love, she might have mused.

Alas, it was not to be. Christie chose a Jersey girl.

Despondent over the rejection, Coulter quickly returned to a prior favorite, the candidate, Mitt Romney. He looks a lot more like Prince Charming.

Wanting to show Mitt that no one has a greater love than she, Coulter attacked the current frontrunner, Newt Gingrich in her latest column.

Normally a model of genteel tranquility and ladylike serenity, Coulter is now fulminating about her choice. In her mind, Mitt is the only Republican who can defeat Barack Obama.

Coulter believes that the godfather of American socialized medicine is best suited to lead the charge against Obamacare.

Doubtless, she did not read Jonathan Gruber’s interview where he, a principle architect of both health care bills, explained that they are fundamentally the same thing. See my prior post.

Besides, for all any of us know, by as early as this summer Obamacare might be a dead issue. If so, what then?

Blinded by her passion for Romney, Coulter seems to have missed the most recent McClatchy-Marist poll that shows Gingrich running stronger against Obama than Romney.

She is willing to give Romney a pass on appointing very few Republican judges in Massachusetts because he is now taking advice from conservative icon Robert Bork.

She cannot possibly know whether Romney is going to take Bork’s counsel when it comes to appointing judges.

Coulter is the soul of forgiveness. Spinning like a dervish she suggests that good conservative Romney disguised himself as a liberal to trick Massachusetts voters into electing him. Better yet, he then effected a liberal agenda, capped off with Romneycare, in order to keep tricking them into thinking that he was not a conservative.

There's a reason why people who fall deeply in love are said to be madly in love. You have to be madly in love to traffic at that level of rationalization.

Even if Coulter is right, the next logical thought is: how does she know that Romney is not tricking Republicans into thinking he is a conservative, the better to enact a liberal agenda in the White House?

One appreciates that Coulter wants to be part of the in-crowd. Today’s Republican in-crowd—acting more like a hit team--has been throwing everything it has at Newt Gingrich.

Every one of Gingrich’s bad ideas—and he has had a lot of them— and every instance of his bad behavior—there have been more than a few—has been sprayed across the media by sometime Republican pundits.

Gingrich has certainly had his defenders. Many people respect his abilities, his intelligence, and his leadership qualities.

Even some Democrats do. They know that Barack Obama can probably handle Romney in debate and will almost surely be wiped out by Gingrich, yet some of them, Bob Beckel comes to mind, praise the former Speaker of the House.

Also, writing on his blog Legal Insurrection, Prof. WilliamJacobson makes the conservative case for Newt with uncommon cogency.

In his words: “While any of the Republican candidates running can argue against a particular policy or piece of legislation, only Newt has shown the ability to see the historical forest for the trees, to argue for American exceptionalism and greatness founded in history and constitutional principles, not sound bites.”

He continues: “Newt is uniquely capable of communicating a winning conservative vision in a persuasive and forceful manner, as the positive reaction to his debate performances demonstrates.  Obama versus Newt on stage before an audience of tens of millions of voters could lead to a catastrophic defeat for Obama, while Obama versus any other current candidate could have the opposite effect.”

How could someone as perspicacious as Ann Coulter have missed the obvious?

Let’s say that Romney defeats Obama and signs an executive order exempting all states from Obamacare. Then what?

Too many people fail to think through to the day after tomorrow. Democrats believed that electing Obama was, in and of itself, a great victory. They never really considered how he would govern and lead, or even whether he would be capable of doing the job. It turns out that he has not.

Some might argue that when America ousted Saddam Hussein, it failed to think past the first flush of victory. Victory is sweet, but you have to have a plan that goes beyond tomorrow's success. In Iraq it appears that we were ill-prepared for the day after tomorrow.

A president must have a governing agenda; he must have a set of policies that he will champion; he must make the case for a set of principles.

It’s not enough to remove Obama from office. You need to replace him with someone who can lead the nation out of the wilderness.

Does Coulter think that Mitt is the man to lead that charge? By failing to project beyond his first day in office she suggests that she is not so confident in his leadership abilities.

Perhaps she is suffering from a malady that Melanie Phillips has brilliantly outlined in a recent column in the London Daily Mail.

Phillips argues that too many conservatives have been influenced by the conventional wisdom to the point where they have come to think that only a moderate centrist candidate, one who has never led from conservative principles, can beat the Democrats. They are suffering from what she calls a cultural mind-bend.

Isn’t that the kind of thinking that gave us John McCain?

The same conservatives have been railing against the media for years now get queasy when Newt Gingrich stands on the national stage and challenges the purveyors of the conventional liberal wisdom. To their convention-driven minds, he is being testy, cranky, and ill-mannered.

Phillips wrote: “Faced with the apparently overwhelming power of the left-wing media and intelligentsia, weaponised through their Orwellian hijacking of the language of the centre ground and their career-ending bullying and intimidation of all who dare to disagree, many conservatives have succumbed to the cultural mind-bending without even realising they have been in effect captured by the enemy.”

She adds: “The reason why Newt Gingrich is striking such a chord is principally because he does realise all this very well, and so delivers a very clear message and the hope of a return to reality. He gives expression, in other words, to an authentic conservative voice. Gingrich is very smart, a serious thinker and a good communicator.  He is also extremely tough and resilient. He is without doubt a Big Beast in the political jungle -- beside whom Mitt Romney, his chief rival, seems a diminished figure.”