Perhaps no one has been so steadfast in support of Mitt Romney as Ann Coulter. Now that the former Massachusetts governor is the all-but-Republican-nominee, Coulter has an even more important role — helping her candidate win the actual White House. She’s already hard at work, lobbing Obama’s attacks right back at him.

In an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, Coulter revisited Obama’s “silver spoon” comment. “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” Obama said in a recent speech in which he also called for increased student aid. While Obama’s remark was relatively offhand, most interpreted it as a jab at Mitt Romney — and Coulter adopted that interpretation, as well. The pundit pointed out the rich irony of Democrats’ disdain for Romney’s wealth, given their movement’s particular idols and a certain policy of affirmative action:

“Really, this ‘silver spoon’ business?” Coulter said. “Are they going to do that about every Republican while simultaneously revering FDR and JFK?  They really were pure silver spoon aristocrats inheriting all their money. Mitt Romney gave away all the money he inherited. He made it on his own.”

“And the silver spoon Obama got — I mean that generation, it can’t be denied, you can’t support affirmative action and then pretend it doesn’t exist. You don’t transfer from Occidental, which by his own accounts in his autobiography he mostly spent smoking pot, to a fine Ivy League university like Columbia if you’re not checking off ‘black’ on your application. So you know, the silver spoon since I’ve been alive has been an affirmative action silver spoon.”

And while she dismissed the rich-versus-poor meme some Democrats have been promoting, she did say there was another sort of class warfare occurring between those earning money from the government and those whose tax dollars are paying for it.

Coulter’s last point is particularly relevant: The class warfare that has grown up between taxpayers and government program beneficiaries is real. Beneficiaries will vote and approve of the expansion of government, while exhausted taxpayers will resist that growth. That warfare won’t end until politicians and other limited-government advocates begin — consistently and creatively — to make more than an economic argument against an unsustainable social safety net. The impending insolvency of entitlement programs and/or the likely damaging effects of the deficit and debt are clearly not motivating government beneficiaries to vote against big government — but the knowledge that earned success is far likelier to bring happiness than handouts might inspire them to work their way out of dependence and into relative self-sufficiency and to then vote accordingly.