REACH: 5 million-plus listeners per week via 340 radio stations and both XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. She appears frequently on television talk shows and has written two books.

FAVORITE TOPIC: Liberal hypocrisy.

MOST CONTROVERSIAL MOMENT: Jeffrey Hart, faculty adviser to the Dartmouth Review, wrote that Ingraham held “the most extreme anti-homosexual views imaginable” as an undergraduate. A decade later she wrote a compassionate Washington Post article about her gay brother, Curtis.

PET PHRASE(S): “It’s not just a talk show — it’s an addiction.”

WEB SITE: http://www.lauraingraham.com/

Ingraham, like Ann Coulter, is a smart, sharp-tongued, and savvy blonde lawyer who rose to media stardom during the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” She literally became conservatism’s “cover girl,” appearing in a borrowed leopard-skin miniskirt on a 1995 issue of The New York Times Magazine.

Ingraham earned a degree from Dartmouth College, where she and author Dinesh D’Souza, to whom she was briefly engaged to be married, wrote for the conservative Dartmouth Review. She became a speechwriter in the Reagan administration, earned her Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Virginia Law School, and served as U.S. Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.

Publisher’s Weekly dismissed Ingraham’s “tone of class resentment” as a “demagogue’s trick.” It never mentioned the long, hard climb she has made to today’s pinnacle of success. Coulter is the daughter of a prosperous lawyer, but Ingraham’s mother worked as a maid to support her family.

Ingraham speaks from her heart when she says of liberal elitists: “They think you’re stupid. They think all freedom-loving Americans are stupid. They think patriotism is stupid. They think church-going is stupid.”

Ingraham is a brilliant, still-rising star whose insider knowledge of government, droll humor, and feisty, fervent conservatism attract more listeners every day to the syndicated radio show she began in 2001. Her goal? Her Web site says she “hopes to become the person her dog, Troy, thinks she is.”

Earlier this year she told listeners that she had undergone surgery for breast cancer and is now in good health.