Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Ann Coulter: Palin Presidential Skeptic?

On a Red Eye episode last week, Ann Coulter said that she hopes Sarah Palin does not run for president: she believes that Palin would be more effective where she is right now in the media.

I can't seem to find a clip of that moment, but, while searching this, I saw that this was not a one-off for Coulter. In a video of an appearance in early 2010, Coulter makes the same point, as she does in the report of an appearance in November.

Though Coulter is famed as a conservative bomb-thrower, her eye as a political analyst is often under-appreciated.

Take her infamous appearance on Hannity and Colmes in late January 2008, in which she claimed that she would vote and campaign for Hillary Clinton if John McCain was the Republican nominee. Coulter's argument revealed a deep antipathy towards McCain, and it certainly generated a lot of buzz for her.

But can you really imagine Ann Coulter campaigning for Hillary Clinton? By late January, Coulter might have calculated that she never would have to campaign for Clinton---because Clinton was not going to be the Democratic nominee. In retrospect, Coulter's endorsement of Clinton over McCain can be seen as a sign of just how dire things were for the Clinton campaign in early 2008. (It might also be noted that, shortly after her H&C appearance, she refused to say that she would support Obama over McCain.)

So Coulter is offering some additional political analysis here---and this analysis implies that Palin would be more effective not running for the Oval Office. Is it time to add Coulter to the list of Palin presidential skeptics?