By Theodore King

Ann Coulter spoke on behalf of pro-life activist and founder of Operation Rescue Randall Terry, a Democrat candidate for President, on, March 3rd at Arrow Heights Baptist Church in Broken Arrow. The next week Terry defeated President Obama in 12 Oklahoma counties in the Super Tuesday Presidential Primary on March 6th. Thanks to Randall Terry, who knows my father and with whom we had dinner the night before, I had the opportunity to sit down and have an interview with her. It was the only one she gave in Oklahoma, and it is exclusive to the Oklahoma Constitution. In the interview, Ann Coulter was, well, Ann Coulter with the same voice inflections and tone you hear when she is on television. She talked with me about the presidential race, immigration, Mormonism, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Lawrence O'Donnell, the Personhood bill, and the nanny state. Ann Coulter was charming and funny.

KING: Why are you for Randall Terry?

COULTER: Well, he hired me to give a speech, but I love Randall Terry. I've followed him from afar, and ran into him at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference). And I got a call from my speakers' bureau. And I'm a huge pro-lifer.

KING: I know about that; yes, you are. Let me ask you this. By the way, I write for a quarterly, the Oklahoma Constitution. I write about Washington stuff. I used to work for the National Right to Work Committee.

COULTER: Aaah!

KING: ...and Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute.

COULTER: Excellent!

KING: I'm sympathetic. I'm not a hostile interviewer. The guy in the hallway out there -- he's from the Tulsa World. He's going to be hostile.

COULTER: I'll try to gin him up. (He did not interview her.)

KING: You are supporting Mitt Romney.

COULTER: Right.

KING: I don't think Mitt Romney is going to get elected to sell you out. I just don't think he's gonna get it. I think he's going to lose now or in November.

COULTER: Who do you think has a better chance? Because I think I can shoot down any of the other candidates as having a much worse chance. I mean who knows what's going to happen? It's very hard to take out an incumbent. We've done it one time in the last 100 years with Ronald Reagan. And he didn't do it by calling Jimmy Carter a socialist or a Saul Alinsky radical. And so on and so forth. And he did it by being calm and not scaring independents and my gender and so on. And maybe he'll lose, and maybe Chris Christie would have lost. I believe Mitt Romney is way better than he was four years ago. I supported him four years ago as the conservative candidate. He's right on the issues; he doesn't have any skeletons in the closet. You can't call him stupid, and you can't call him nuts. The one issue he flip-flopped on he flipped to my side. That was abortion, and he did it when it mattered when he was still governor. He's good on immigration, and the other ones aren't. I think he's the most conservative of the remaining candidates and the only one who beat him, and that was Michele Bachmann. (Reagan was the only Republican to achieve this in 1980. So, Ms. Coulter's comment about a Republican's defeating an incumbent Democrat President only once in the last 100 years is correct.)

KING: What is it about Gingrich and Santorum that you don't like?

COULTER: AAAH! It's all in my columns. I've written a practical book about it.

KING: What's your opinion of Ron Paul?

COULTER: I love Ron Paul! He'd be my second choice. Foreign policy would go to hell, but it would be better than under Obama. And domestic policy would be fantastic!

KING: I'm going to ask you a dicey question. Mark Levin hates Ron Paul. I mean he hates Ron Paul. It's more than just a personal attack.

COULTER: He hates a lot of things! That's his persona.

KING: I covered Ron Paul in Oklahoma City last week, and I'm listening to his speech and outside of the foreign policy thing I ask myself, "Okay, why does Mark Levin hate him?"

COULTER: I haven't listened to Mark for a while, just because I haven't had the opportunity. I don't listen to radio that much. But I do know of Mark from listening to the radio, and I do think that is part of his persona. Not to demean it, but when you have to fill three hours on radio, you have to have a shtick. I mean Michael Savage is off talking about nutrition half the time or yelling at his mother.

KING: He (Savage) talks about his Italian dinner last night on the north beach of San Francisco.

COULTER: (laughter) Right! Okay, you know what I am talking about. As writers we don't have to say anything unless we have something to say. They got to fill up three hours. Having a sort of shtick going makes the time pass, and, by the way, it's a lot easier to write a critique, to be the attacker, to be in the opposed position, than to be in the support position.

KING: Are you making any other appearances here in Oklahoma?

COULTER: No. I'm debating Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC in Washington, D.C., tomorrow night.

KING: I'm amazed that guy is still around.

COULTER: You are supposed to say, "Wait -- does that guy still have a TV show?"

KING: He (O'Donnell) had that breakdown on national TV in 2004, calling one of the Vietnam Veterans against Democrat John Kerry, aka the Swift Boaters for Truth, a "creepy liar!"

COULTER: Speaking of shtick, he goes off about Romney being a Mormon, but I know him, and he's really, actually, very nice. He's smart. I think it's a little bit of a shtick.

KING: What would you say to Oklahoma voters who are not crazy about Romney's Mormonism? They'll accept a Catholic (Santorum and Gingrich), but I don't know about a Mormon.

COULTER: I would quote Martin Luther: "I would rather be governed by a smart Turk than a dumb Christian." And, secondly, I would remind them Jimmy Carter, evangelical, nearly wrecked the country. Look, you are picking between a Mormon and a Muslim this time. I'm just kidding; Obama's an atheist, obviously. I'm just a straight Christian. It seems to me the history of Christianity is man comes along and attaches a lot of things to it, as long as it's basically Christian. There are Christian churches in Africa that were brought there by missionaries who are still practicing voodoo. I don't think that goes together yet, but and still that is the history of Christianity. It's not scientology. It's Christianity with other stuff added on. And Mormons are really good people, and it ought to give them the optimism that I have that Romney's going to be as right wing a president as I think he's going to be. And that is to say Mormons are totally right wing. Clinton came in third in Utah in 1992, third! That's your Mormon for ya.

KING: He (Romney) is the most moderate of all the candidates.

COULTER: I don't think so, not on the issues. He's moderate in demeanor. He's the toughest on illegal immigration. Gingrich is dying to give illegal immigrants amnesty. Santorum is dying to give illegal immigrants amnesty. Ron Paul wants open borders, as if we aren't living in a welfare state here. The second most important issue after ObamaCare is illegal immigration. There's only one candidate who's good on that.

KING: And whom would you have had in a perfect world if Ann Coulter ran the Republican Party?

COULTER: I used to say Chris Christie, but to be honest, Romney may be better than Chris Christie this year. I trust Christie to make the right decisions. He didn't think he was ready for the presidency, and even though I was pushing, pushing, pushing, parachuting into the governor's mansion and holding his children hostage until he would agree to run for the President. Once the debates started, I thought, wow, Mitt Romney's gotten good. In 2008, he was really stiff. He was good on paper. I trusted him. He had answers in the debates now that were so beautiful, and if I had two weeks to write a one paragraph answer, I couldn't have written a better answer. And, for one thing, I was really impressed at how Romney had changed and how much a presidential candidate has to know, at least if you are running as a Republican. The only thing you have to answer as the first black president is, "Would your parents be proud tonight?" That's the sort of questions they get.

KING: Do you know about the Personhood bill here in Oklahoma?

COULTER: No. I've heard of those. Wasn't there one in Mississippi, and there was a problem with it, and the Republicans were against it? Is this the one that passed and was imitated?

KING: It's a bill in the legislature now that says a person is a person basically, as I understand it, from conception to natural death. It's a legal status.

COULTER: Riigght. (She drawled out the word.)

KING: And a lot of pro-lifers are backing it, and some are not. Here's a different question. A lot of Republicans and Mitt Romney signed a smoking ban as governor of Massachusetts.

COULTER: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

KING: There's an effort in this state to have local communities essentially ban smoking everywhere. A lot of Republicans have lost their sense of private property in the name of protecting the public health.

COULTER: Right!

KING: To me it's like a little issue, but it's really a big issue.

COULTER: No, I agree, and this is the problem with liberals, and to a large extent Newt Gingrich and Santorum, with the government. You've got to knock it back to the local level, knock it back, knock it back to the local level. And it's much harder to pass these regulations, and, yeah, there are going to be fascists everyplace, but I mean whatever the rules are, no salt on the tables in New York. In Berkeley, they want to ban plastic bags for groceries. Okay, so don't live in Berkeley; don't live in New York. You also can't smoke anyplace in New York. The more this is done on the local level that was the genius of the framers of our Constitution. Congress does almost nothing. They do national defense and interstate commerce.

KING: A lot of local officials can be really petty.

COULTER: I know. I agree. I live in those cities. And I have to bring my own salt yet and still.

KING: You have to bring your own salt?

COULTER: Nah, I'm kinda joking about that. You have to ask for it in a lot of restaurants. They don't just leave it on the table [in New York]. You have to ask.

KING: I appreciate your time.

COULTER: Thank you! It was great talking to you!