Later today, Dana Perino will give her 145th* press briefing, ending a long tour in the hard duty as the chief public face for a man named George W. Bush. She is looking enthusiastically to the future, with plans for a six week trip around the world with her husband, which will include a stop in South Africa to volunteer for two weeks at an HIV-AIDS clinic that was funded by Bush’s PEPFAR project.
And then what? She’s not entirely sure, just yet. She has signed up for a speaker’s bureau, so she can get speaking gigs, but has so far declined to take meetings about any jobs as a television pundit. She has also ruled out any sort of tell-all memoir about her time in the White House, though she is considering another book project, about popular misperceptions of Republican women.
“Ann Coulter is very popular. She has got a niche,” Perino explained Friday morning, at a breakfast with reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “She is a bestseling author. But she doesn’t represent Republican women.” Perino would like to explore a different group of Republican women, those with the “grace and dignity” of First Lady Laura Bush and Susan Molinari, the former New York congresswoman.
With that comment, the nation’s book agents were put on notice, and if Perino chooses to go through with the idea, Coulter, whose new book is currently #23 on the Amazon bestseller list, may find herself with yet another reason to cause trouble on the network morning shows.
*This morning Perino said that today she would do her 146th press conference, a number that was originally used in this post. The White House has since sent out a correction. The correct number is 145.