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Ann Coulter, Joe Scarborough and the Mitt Romney Rorschach test
By AARON BARNHARTThe Kansas City Star
If you’re not a regular watcher of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (my wife and I are daily communicants), then it might not be entirely clear from the tape how badly today’s appearance on the show by author Ann Coulter went.
The bumper sticker version of what happened is that Coulter called Ted Kennedy “human pestilence” in front of Kennedy family friend and “Morning Joe” regular Mike Barnicle, not to mention thousands of viewers outraged at the desecration of Teddy’s memory.
Coulter also called John McCain a “douchebag,” but that was bleeped out.
Within moments of opening her mouth it was obvious Coulter was using her appearance on MSNBC not only to explain her support of Mitt Romney but to get a rise out of the hosts. Mission accomplished! But it was also a curious moment in the Mitt Romney candidacy, and probably could only have happened in this no-man's land between the end of the merry-go-round of anti-Romneys and the arrival of ballots.
More about that in a moment — first, though, about the bleep. Coulter, who supports Mitt Romney as the inevitable candidate the GOP must get behind, was arguing that Romney is a far superior candidate to the 2008 nominee, John McCain. She says it doesn’t matter that Romney has flipped on views he held in the past because — like Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Andrew Breitbart and many other ex-Democrats — he has finally come to his senses and is now embracing the right views.
While making this case, Coulter called McCain, by various accounts, a “douchebag.” It was bleeped. Aware that she was just bleeped, Coulter asked tartly if someone thought that word was offensive — and was bleeped again.
“Just blur it all out,” said Scarborough.
I thought the signal had been lost — I time-shift “Morning Joe” on my DVR — and looked over from the kitchen to see if my picture was pixellating. It was not. It was as if Coulter had gone on a Gilbert Gottfried/Sam Kinison-inspired rant against McCain. What the what?
Then I remembered what happened this summer. MSNBC political analyst and “Morning Joe” regular Mark Halperin was on the show the day after a press conference by President Obama in which, some would say, the president had failed to take any responsibility for the debt-ceiling crisis on the Hill. Halperin, speaking to the frustration many of us were feeling, said he didn’t want to say what he was really thinking because it might get him in trouble. Scarborough said ahh, c’mon, go for it.
OK, said Halperin, “I think he was kind of a dick.”
Riotous, I-can’t-believe-you-said-that laughter ensued, but after the break, Halperin ate his words and MSNBC suspended him for a month. Buried in the hubbub was the fact that “Morning Joe” had just lost its longtime executive producer Chris Licht to CBS, and in the shuffle of producers someone wound up at the seven-second-delay button who either didn’t know how to use it or was reluctant to.
After the Halperin mess, you knew that wouldn’t happen again. Unfortunately for Ann Coulter, she was the one who got to test the new improved bleep protocol. I know almost everyone reading this will find this hard to believe, but for once this wasn’t about her.
***
Today was sort of a Rorschach test for the people who will help decide President Obama's opponent. For months, we've been told the No. 1 question about Romney is: Are you really a conservative? Despite previous endorsements (Chris Christie, Tim Pawlenty), the question has stubbornly remained. But now — and Coulter's street theater was a vivid display of this — we are starting to see people within the conservative movement look at the same candidate and with the same arsenal of facts come to entirely different conclusions. It's swift-boating all over again, only it's intraparty instead of partisan. On one side there's Ann Coulter saying: Of course he’s a conservative. On the other side, an equally credentialed conservative like “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough saying: Don’t make me laugh!
There’s great similarity in what Coulter did today on “Morning Joe” and what Mitt Romney did last week, quoting Barack Obama about the economy being a loser in his new campaign ad. This classic smear from the red-scare days was patently unfair to the president — but it showed Romney could throw a punch.
Ann Coulter gets paid to throw punches. She is part of the political jockocracy, an elite of well-paid pundits and broadcasters who spend all day pounding the other team while rooting for the home team, in between towel-snaps. Listen to the emails and faxes that get sent into Jim Rome’s sports radio show and then compare them with a typical Coulter performance.
Horse race is the wrong metaphor to describe politics today. The correct one is tackle football.
Essentially, Coulter’s defense of Mitt Romney celebrates partisanship for its own sake. Romney may have previously held positions untenable to conservatives but he doesn’t now. He did so — and again this is not a classic political argument so much as a sports fan’s mentality — because back then he was playing for Boston.
Romney really had no choice but to take the stands he once did because he was running for senator, then governor in America’s socialist commonwealth, aka the state of Massachusetts. And look how well he did! Not only did he get elected, he nearly knocked off the iconic Ted Kennedy in the 1994 race for the U.S. Senate, before Teddy used a barrage of attack ads calling attention to Romney’s — yep — shifting political views to pull away in the polls.
In this line of argument, Romney is someone you want on your team. He’ll QB. (Ann Coulter, presumably, will be at left tackle.)
Alluding to that 1994 race a few moments later, Coulter said, “I mean, you're flipping from positions you held when you came within five points of taking out that human pestilence. Come on, give the guy a break!”
Raucous laughter did not ensue.
After a scheduled segment with outlier presidential candidate Buddy Roemer, “Morning Joe” then devoted an entire segment to recalling what a fine statesman and practical legislator was the late, great Ted Kennedy.
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And it wasn’t over. In the show’s traditional closing bit, “What Have We Learned Today?,” Scarborough again emphasized what a class act Teddy Kennedy was.
If you were just tuning in, you may have wondered if was the anniversary of Kennedy’s death — but no, that was Aug. 25. It was an unspoken apology as embarrassed and abject as Halperin’s was.
Well, it’s not like Scarborough learned anything new about Ann Coulter. As TV Barn reader Amber Taylor noted on my Facebook page, “As a regular viewer of the show, I have to say she just didn't fit in with the civil tone they try for every day...but, we all knew that already!”
***
It was clear that Scarborough was trying to avoid a cage match with Coulter. He initially tried bouncing questions off Geist and Barnicle in an effort to avoid speaking directly to her. (Compare with the very next segment, in which Scarborough spoke directly and affectionately to Roemer, the blackballed GOP presidential candidate who’s now embracing the Occupy movement.)
However, when Kennedy’s legacy was desecrated, Barnicle — who appeared quite upset in the later segment — opted out, and Scarborough had no choice but to face Coulter directly.
The whole incident raises questions about why MSNBC would want to have such a quintessential Fox firebrand on its air. Ann Coulter is different things to different people, but one thing she objectively is not is “Morning Joe” material.
Apparently MSNBC agrees. The clip at the top of this story was taken off a third-party YouTube site. “Due to the inappropriate language used during the segment, we chose not to post it on our site,” the network’s representative said.