by Zev Chafets
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE - “I HOPE HE FAILS”
CHAPTER TWO - LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
CHAPTER THREE - FROM RUSTY TO CHRISTIE TO RUSH
CHAPTER FOUR - THE CITY
CHAPTER FIVE - THE HONORARY FRESHMAN
CHAPTER SIX - LIMBAUGH IN LIMBO
CHAPTER SEVEN - “ W ”
CHAPTER EIGHT - THE SOUTHERN COMMAND
CHAPTER NINE - THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW
CHAPTER TEN - INTELLECTUAL ENGINE
CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE BOSS
CHAPTER TWELVE - THE MAGIC NEGRO
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THE GUNS OF AUGUST
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - WELCOME TO THE NFL
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - FORWARD TO THE PAST
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
APPENDIX
INDEX
NONFICTION
Double Vision
Heroes and Hustlers, Hard Hats and Holy Men
Members of the Tribe
Devil’s Night
A Match Made in Heaven
Cooperstown Confidential
FICTION
Inherit the Mob
The Bookmakers
The Project
Hang Time
Whacking Jimmy (as William Wolf)
SENTINEL
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First published in 2010 by Sentinel, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Zev Chafets, 2010
All rights reserved
Portions of this book appeared as “Late Period Limbaugh” in The New York Times Magazine.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Chafets, Ze’ev.
Rush Limbaugh : an army of one / Zev Chafets. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-43456-7
1. Limbaugh, Rush H. 2. Radio broadcasters—United States—Biography.
3. Conservatives—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN1991.4.L48C53 2010
791.44’028’092-dc22
[B] 2009053904
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To my brother Joe Chafets and my sister Julie Chafets Grass with love
I know the liberals call you “the most dangerous man in America,” but don’t worry about it, they used to say the same thing about me. Keep up the good work.
—Ronald Reagan in a letter to Rush Limbaugh, December 11, 1992
INTRODUCTION
People tend to remember the moment they first heard Rush Limbaugh. Mine came in the fall of 1989 in Detroit, driving down Woodward Avenue in a black Le Baron convertible. I was there researching a book about the racial politics of the city where I grew up and which I had left many years before. Out of habit I had the car radio tuned to 1270 AM, the popular rock-and-roll station of my teenage years. Clarence “Frogman” Henry was singing “Ain’t Got No Home,” a song that had always made me smile, when suddenly he was interrupted by a baritone voice intoning, “Dadelut! Dadelut! Dadelut! Homeless update.”
In Detroit you get accustomed to bad news. I listened for the latest installment. But this wasn’t about Detroit; it was about a think tank in Washington, D.C., that had, according to the baritone, just put out an inflated figure of the number of homeless Americans—a typical liberal trick to deceive the public and allow Democrats in Congress to funnel “emergency” money to their cronies in big cities. This grew into a riff on the evils of profligate government spending, the debasing effect of welfare on its recipients, and the cynical willingness of the “mainstream media” to treat liberal propaganda as news. The baritone didn’t seem angry. On the contrary, he seemed delighted and amused to be catching another bunch of bleeding hearts, rapacious pols, and crooked journalists in the act. He called himself “El Rushbo” and “America’s Truth Detector,” and he announced that his program was on the “Excellence in Broadcasting Network.”
I had been living abroad for many years, but I knew perfectly well that broadcast networks in America sounded nothing like this. They wouldn’t have dared to strike such an irreverent tone about homelessness or make raucous fun of revered liberal axioms and icons. It is hard to describe how transgressively original Rush Limbaugh sounded in this media environment. Listening to him on the radio reminded me of the first time I saw Elvis on TV with my father sitting in the next room—a feeling that I was witnessing something completely different and possibly even dangerous.
My friends and relatives in Detroit looked at me blankly when I mentioned hearing Limbaugh. Nobody knew a thing about him. When I described how he had gleefully and artfully ripped into a whole herd of liberal sacred cows, the looks became disapproving. These were their cows, after all. What was funny about a man laughing at feminism? How could a white commentator mock Jesse Jackson? And what sort of troglodyte would dare question the settled science of the environmental movement? This man sounded like a conservative. Whose side was I on, anyway?
Listening to Rush became a guilty pleasure. I didn’t agree with everything—in fact, I disagreed with a lot—but agreeing wasn’t the point. He was doing something really interesting. Ridicule has always been a weapon used by the left against the right. Limbaugh had somehow seized the cannon and turned it around. I relished his bravado, laughed at his outrageous satire, and admired his willingness to go against the intellectual grain. But I didn’t expect him to last long. He was too irreverent and subversive, too bold. The keepers of the culture would never let him get away with it. Somehow, they’d find a way to shut him up and make him go away.
Which, looking back on it more than twenty years later, is pretty much what my father had said about Elvis.
CHAPTER ONE
“I HOPE HE FAILS”
Four days before Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the
United States, Rush Limbaugh went on the air and told his millions of listeners what his policy toward the new man in the White House was going to be. He had been asked, he said, by a major American publication—the Wall Street Journal, it later turned out—to write four hundred words about his hopes for the new administration. Limbaugh told his audience that he didn’t need four hundred words. Four would suffice: “I hope he fails.”
Limbaugh said that he fervently disagreed with Republican moderates who were calling on the party to cooperate with Obama or even give him a chance. This was a reference to a meeting between Obama and a group of conservative pundits that had taken place a few days earlier at the home of columnist George Will. The guest list had been unpublished but was immediately leaked, and it included some of the brainiest right-of-center commentators in Washington. They had ideological differences with Obama, but they had a lot in common, too, including a common language. They, like the president-elect, were products of elite liberal educational institutions.
Obama’s goal was to flatter and charm the guests, and by all accounts he succeeded. “He’s making good on his promise to reach out to Republicans and conservatives with this post-partisan stuff, whatever that means,” Larry Kudlow, a conservative economic commentator, later told a reporter. “I was very impressed. He’s a nice guy, terribly smart, well informed, great smile. He’s just really engaged. He said he likes to know the arguments on all sides.”
Obama had no illusions about converting anyone that night (although he evidently made some inroads with New York Times columnist David Brooks). He simply wanted these critics to recall his smiling face and reasonable demeanor when they wrote about him. He had another purpose as well: to divide his opponents into “good” and “bad” conservatives.
“The Obama message is a crafty one,” blogged Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff the next day. “He’s choosing these fretting, parsing, neurotic, limp-wristed, desperate-to-be-liked print guys, over the crass, spitting, scary, voluble guys on television and radio, the Ailes-Rove-Limbaugh wing of the Republican Party.”
By coincidence, Rush Limbaugh was in Washington on the day of Will’s gathering; in fact, he was at the White House, where President George W. Bush threw him an intimate fifty-eighth-birthday luncheon. When word of the Obama dinner got out, the media began buzzing with rumors that Limbaugh had been there.
The following day, Limbaugh laughed at the very idea. He wasn’t looking to get along with Obama; he wanted to thwart him. That was the meaning of “I hope he fails.” The president was a liberal Democrat, and as far as Limbaugh was concerned, the Republican Party was not in business to expedite or assist liberals. “I’ve been listening to Barack Obama for a year and a half,” he said. “I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don’t want them to succeed. He’s talking about the absorption of as much of the private sector by the U.S. government as possible, from the banking business to the mortgage industry, the automobile business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don’t want this to work.”
Some of the moderate conservative pundits were dismayed by this hard-edged approach. The leaders of the mainstream media, who were already comparing the new president to Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, were appalled. Here was Limbaugh, raining acid on the parade. “I don’t care what the Drive-By Media story is,” Limbaugh said. “I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: ‘Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails.’ Somebody’s gotta say it.”
To reinforce the point, Limbaugh appeared on Sean Hannity’s TV show on the FOX News Channel. Hannity got his national start as a substitute host on Rush’s radio show. His lawyer is Limbaugh’s brother, David, who also represents radio host-author Mark Levin. Hannity tossed Rush a softball and he hit it into deep right field.
“I would hope Obama would succeed if he acts like Reagan,” Limbaugh said. “But if he’s going to do FDR, if he’s going to do the new, New Deal all over, which we will call the raw deal, why would I want him to succeed?” FDR occupies a special place in Limbaugh’s personal hall of presidential infamy. Rush’s father and mentor, Big Rush, was so vociferously anti-Roosevelt that as a young man he was jumped and beaten by New Dealers after a barroom argument. When Rush began calling Obama “the Black FDR,” a lot of left-wing commentators were outraged by the racial modifier. They missed the real insult.
“Look, he’s my president,” Limbaugh told Hannity. “The fact that he is historic is irrelevant to me now . . . Two trillion in stimulus? The growth of government? I think the intent here is to create as many dependent Americans as possible looking to government for their hope and salvation . . . I shamelessly say, No, I want him to fail, if his agenda is a far-left collectivism.”
The new administration saw opportunity in Limbaugh’s oppositional stance. The Republican Party had emerged from the 2008 election as a headless horseman. George W. Bush had gone home as an unpopular figure; his near-catatonic handling of the financial crises in his last days of his presidency made it clear that no leadership would be coming out of Crawford. McCain ran one of the worst campaigns in recent memory and alienated much of the party’s conservative base in the bargain. Besides, he was too old to run again in 2012, which left a void where the party’s titular leader should be.
The GOP’s post-2008 congressional leadership was, if possible, even more lackluster. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a competent parliamentarian, has the charisma and demeanor of an undertaker. House Minority Leader John Boehner is equally dreary. President Obama and his advisers saw the Republican leadership vacuum as an opportunity to define their opposition before it could define itself. Obama is a student of the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the legendary Chicago political activist and organizer, who taught that the public pays more attention to personalities than to policy. Obama’s strategy started with a scapegoat. George W. Bush had filled that role for eight years but he was gone. So were bogeymen like Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Tom DeLay. Who should succeed them? Democratic pollsters came up with a clear candidate. The data made it clear: Rush Limbaugh. Democrats had hated him for years. Independents and moderate Republicans were scandalized and offended by “I hope he fails.” Even some conservatives thought Rush had gone too far.
Putting Limbaugh’s face on the Republican brand seemed like a brilliant move. Obama himself kicked it off, less than a week after taking office. He invited the Republican congressional leadership to the White House for what was billed as a summit meeting meant to mark the bipartisanship the president had pledged to bring to government. Obama implored the heads of the opposition party to begin by supporting his trillion-dollar economic stimulus bill, and then dropped the Rush Bomb. “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told them.
This raised eyebrows all over Washington. American presidents don’t normally single out private individuals, even powerful commentators, and attempt to put them beyond the pale. They certainly don’t do this in the first week of a new term. The wildly popular new president was offering the GOP a choice—a place of influence and participation in the gleaming Age of Obama or that symbol of yesterday’s harsh partisanship, Rush Limbaugh.
At Limbaugh’s studio in Palm Beach, Florida, which he refers to with his trademark grandiosity as “The Southern Command,” Obama’s words were greeted with incredulity and glee. Limbaugh had been trying to goad him into a fight ever since the Democratic convention in Denver. For a long time it seemed that the young man from Illinois was too cool to engage and that Rush would have to spend the next four or eight years beating up on Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, and other lesser Democrats. But Obama, for reasons of his own, had called Limbaugh out. Not since Bill Clinton had Rush had such a worthy adversary.
Limbaugh immediately labeled Obama’s stimulus the “porkulus bill” and demanded that Republicans in Congress oppose it. He also responded to the idea—being floated all over t
he capital by White House aides—that he was now the real head of the Republican Party. His vehicle was an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal titled “My Bipartisan Stimulus.” The premise was simple: Obama said he wanted a bipartisan administration? Limbaugh would give him one. Let Obama take 54 percent of the stimulus money—$486 billion, which corresponded to the Democrat’s share of the popular vote—and spend it on infrastructure projects. He, Limbaugh, as head of the GOP, would take his party’s 46 percent—$414 billion—in the form of corporate and capital gains tax cuts. Then they would compare results and know, once and for all, if John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman got it right.
“The economic crisis is an opportunity to unify people, if we set aside the politics,” Limbaugh wrote. “The leader of the Democrats and the leader of the Republicans (me, according to Mr. Obama) can get it done. This will have the overwhelming support of the American people. Let’s stop the acrimony. Let’s start solving our problems, together. Why wait one more day?”
Limbaugh knew perfectly well that Obama didn’t really consider him the Republican leader, and the Journal article was his way of saying so; a signature trick he calls “illustrating the absurd by being absurd.” But, at the same time, the sort of tax cuts Limbaugh was proposing were completely serious and, from a conservative economic perspective, logical. Over the years, Limbaugh has cultivated a larger-than-life, intentionally ambiguous persona, which has made him illusive. It is a trick he learned from Muhammad Ali, whose big mouth, braggadocio, and sheer raw nerve enabled him to draw and keep a crowd throughout his long career. The young Ali, still Cassius Clay, invented disparaging nicknames for his opponents (Sonny Liston was the “Big Ugly Bear”) and arrogantly predicted the round of his victories, which led boxing “experts” to denounce him as merely an entertainer. The first Liston fight dispelled that notion, but it took the boxing establishment a longer time to finally admit that Ali was not just a champ at the box office but, truly, the Greatest, a revolutionary talent who transformed the way professional boxers worked.
