Yesterday morning I watched Ann Coulter's appearance on The Tonight Show (I think this YouTube link still works).

Coulter slunk out on stage in her usual black cocktail dress -- but what's odd is that there's nothing genuinely charismatic or sexy or radiant about her. I've watched far too many starlets making talk-show entrances over the years, and they exude not just sex appeal but vitality and a glow of health. Coulter, by contrast, is frail -- she all but tottered out, on Karen Carpenter legs. If you didn't know who she was and you'd been told she was a well-known abuse survivor making the TV rounds and putting on a brave face, you'd believe it. You'd write off the cocktail dress as an eccentricity; you'd think she's had a hard life and just doesn't know any better than to wear her hair in a style suited to a twelve-year-old girl.

She got off zingers, but her delivery was awful. At one point, commenting on a joke Jay Leno had previously told in which he'd compared to her to the Wicked Witch of the East, she asserted -- no, she proclaimed -- that she disagreed with the point of the joke and thinks of herself as Dorothy. Hearing this proclamation was like hearing a joke at an office party from the shy person who never tells jokes and is, temporarily and ill-advisedly, feeling confident about public speaking; Yes, you're telling a joke, but you're also telling us you're telling a joke. That's why it's not funny.

But when Coulter did it, the audience roared approval.

I think I understand this. Her appearance of ill-health, her odd grooming choices, her deficiencies as a public speaker -- I think all this makes her seem like the victim, the underdog, the embodiment of How The Liberals Beat Us Down. She's not the sex bomb of right-wing vitriol -- she's a plucky little girl surviving in a liberal world she never made.

Yes, I know -- her fan base doesn't think of her that way. Her fan base thinks of her a sexy, tough, gun-totin' dame. But I think her fan base is responding to the victim as much as to the dame. She is who they think they are (victims) as well as who they'd like to be. Somewhat similarly, the alpha male of her pack, Rush Limbaugh, regularly declared during his rise to fame both that he was a guy with "talent on loan from God" and that he was "just a harmless little fuzzball." He was (and is) both aggressive and rotundly asexual. He was (and is), for his fans, the picked-on fat kid from fourth grade speaking truth to power.

Preceding both of them as right-wing victim-heroes, of course, were Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; the former was successful only temporarily, the latter until his death (and even beyond). Nixon obviously couldn't sustain an air of innocence; Reagan exuded innocence and frailty and eventually suffered a literal gunshot wound, so he seemed like a plucky Boy Scout or toothless grampa even as practically every word out of his mouth accused liberals of some crime or other against humanity.

There are other approaches to creating an air of right-wing victimhood that don't require the victim to seem weakened -- Bill O'Reilly, for instance, has mastered the Put-Upon Dad, tut-tutting in a disgruntled way (when he's not verbally kneeing interviewees in the groin) -- but top-dog status on the right requires some show of being hobbled or wounded and yet soldiering on bravely. That's what, Michelle Malkin, say, doesn't understand, and Ann Coulter apparently does.