Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  A lot of seasoned political reporters thought that Chaos was more about ballyhoo than ballots, but the Obama campaign understood how much it was being hindered. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, described the Limbaugh Effect in his postcampaign book, The Audacity to Win. “If Rush Limbaugh had not encouraged Republicans to vote in the Indiana primary for Hillary as a way of extending our race, we would have won outright . . . Over 12 percent of the Indiana primary vote was Republican and Hillary carried it, despite her through-the-roof unfavorable numbers with these voters. Limbaugh’s project worked in Indiana—it cost us that victory—but it didn’t matter. The die was cast.”

  Limbaugh saw what Plouffe saw; Obama was going to win. Chaos had created turmoil in the enemy camp, but all good things had to end eventually. He had always known that either Clinton or Obama would win out, and he was pretty sure that the winner would also be the next president. It didn’t look like 2008 would be the Republicans’ year, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be a good one for Limbaugh.

  Operation Chaos was not only an act of partisan harassment; it was also a piece of interactive political performance art. By enlisting his audience, he turned them from sullen conservatives without a real Republican candidate to support into merry pranksters. “Rush is a master at framing an issue and creating a community around it,” said Susan Estrich, who ran Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign.

  Rush’s most famous venture in community building came in 1993 when a young guy from Fort Collins, Colorado, Dan Kay, called the show and said he didn’t have the money to subscribe to the newly founded Limbaugh Letter. Rush saw an opportunity to score a political point against Bill Clinton, whose administration was encouraging schoolchildren to symbolically help pay down the national debt with the proceeds of bake sales. Limbaugh said that maybe Dan should do the same to raise enough for a subscription. Listeners began calling the show to say that they wanted to attend Dan’s bake sale. An advertising company in Colorado offered to put up fifteen billboards to promote it. Brennan’s, one of the most famous restaurants in New Orleans, sent a chef to prepare and serve eight thousand orders of bananas Foster. Limbaugh flogged the event on the air. On the appointed day, at least thirty-five thousand people gathered in Fort Collins, where Limbaugh personally welcomed them to “the conservative Woodstock.”

  Chaos was a national bake sale. It drew a crowd, got people laughing at the Democrats, and infuriated liberals—a Limbaugh trifecta. The goal was never to determine the winner of the primaries, just to keep the audience involved. He kept it going until Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign in mid-June, at which point Rush, speaking as commander in chief of Operation Chaos, grandly declared “mission accomplished.” Chaos even enabled Limbaugh to turn an extra buck. He started selling Operation Chaos gear, including a T-shirt that proclaimed its objectives: “Crossover to vote in Democrat primaries. Prolong the Democrat primary battle. Allow the Clintons to bloody up Obama politically, since our side won’t do it. Enjoy liberals tearing each other apart. Drain the DNC of campaign cash. Annoy the Drive-By Media . . . And WIN IN NOVEMBER!” The gear became the biggest seller since the Club Gitmo Collection.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW

  “Do you know what bought me all this?” Rush Limbaugh asked, waving his arm in the general direction of opulence. We were sitting in his study in Palm Beach, puffing on La Flor Dominicana Double Ligero Chisel cigars from his walk-in humidor. There are five houses on Limbaugh’s ocean-front estate in north Palm Beach. He lives in the largest, a twenty-four-thousand-square-foot mansion that he renovated and decorated; the other houses are for guests.

  This is a lot of space for a man who was, at the time, living alone with his cat. When I pointed this out, Limbaugh frowned. I was the first journalist he had ever invited over, he told me, and I could see him wondering if it had been a mistake. He told me that the house was actually quite modest by Palm Beach standards. If I wanted to see really ostentatious living, I should go to south Palm Beach, where Donald Trump and other genuine plutocrats lived.

  I never got to south Palm, but Limbaugh’s neighborhood seemed plush enough. On the way from the studio he had pointed out some good-sized estates, one of which was on the market for $81 million (and sold shortly thereafter). Rush had been offered $65 million for his place, but turned it down. He was comfortable; why move?

  Limbaugh drives himself—at least he did in Palm Beach—in a black Maybach 57 S, $450,000 fully loaded. When we got to his house I saw that he had a garage full of them. “Anticipating a question,” he said, “why do I have so many cars? Two reasons. First, they are for the use of my guests. And two, I happen to love fine automobiles.”

  I actually hadn’t been wondering why he had so many cars. Rich people tend not to stint on transportation. What I did wonder is why all of them were black. He told me that he likes black cars, which made a kind of sense. Limbaugh is old-fashioned, even elegant, in his personal furnishing. Flashy cars are for hip-hop artists and arrivistes; professional men of substance ride in dignified black automobiles. It’s what Rush’s grandfather would have driven if, for some reason, he had been faced with the question of what color Mercedes he should own.

  There was no visible security at the gates of Limbaugh’s estate. We were greeted at the kitchen door by two members of Limbaugh’s domestic staff, which includes a chef he hired away from a local hotel. It was hard to look at these women without thinking of Wilma Cline, the drug-dealing housekeeper who turned Rush in. Limbaugh is known as a very generous boss, but Cline was an object lesson in the limits of loyalty.

  Rush Hudson the First was a man who shunned conspicuous consumption, but his grandson is no Veblenite. Limbaugh’s house is, in the phrase of his close friend Mary Matalin, “aspirational.” Largely decorated by Limbaugh himself, it reflects the things and places he has seen and admired. A massive chandelier in the dining room, for example, is a replica of the one that hung in the lobby of New York’s Plaza Hotel. The vast salon is meant to suggest Versailles. The main guest suite, which I didn’t visit, is an exact replica of the Presidential Suite of the Hotel George V in Paris. There is a full suit of armor on display, as well as a life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo. Fragrant candles burned throughout the house, a daily home-from-the-wars ritual.

  Limbaugh led me into his inner sanctum, the two-story library that is a scaled-down version of the massive library at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. Cherubs dance on the ceiling, leatherbound collections line the bookshelves, and the wood-paneled walls were once, he told me happily, “an acre of mahogany.” We sat at an onyx-and-marble table in a corner of the study with a view of the patio, a putting green, and the private beach beyond.

  There was a brochure on the table for Limbaugh’s newest version of EIB One, a Gulfstream G550, powered by two Rolls-Royce BR710 engines. It can fly at fifty-one thousand feet for as long as it takes to get wherever he’s going. One of his Web sites shows photos of the plane’s interior (which is tastefully luxe) and gives specs, including “armaments: CLASSIFIED.” He told me that it would run him $56 million. Owning such a plane is a convenience, obviously, and a status symbol, but it is also an homage to his father, an aviation bug who subscribed to flight magazines and flew his own Cessna 182 out of the Cape Girardeau airport.

  “One of the saddest things, one of the most regretful things I have is that my father died before we acquired EIB One,” he said one day on his show. “He would have not believed it. I would not have been able to get him out of the cockpit jump seat. He would have tried to go get his jet rating. He wouldn’t have been interested in sitting back in the passenger cabin with the flight attendant serving adult beverages and food.” When I visited him in the summer of 2009, he had a picture of the plane as his screensaver on his Mac.

  Limbaugh was in a very good mood during my visit. Not only was Operation Chaos keeping him in headlines, but he was on the verge of finishing negotiations on his new contract. His
payday from his radio show would be $400 million for eight years, with a signing bonus of $150 million. When this figure was announced it elicited howls of indignation from journalists, many of whom were losing their jobs in the great media contraction of 2008. CNBC asked Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff if Limbaugh was worth the money. “I think it’s a monster error,” Wolff said. “I’m sitting here saying, ‘What are these people smoking?’ You know, the truth is that Rush Limbaugh has ridden the rise of conservatism for twenty-five years and . . . Maybe nobody quite—quite has been following the news, but that’s coming to an end. It’s going to be over, and Rush Limbaugh, in a relatively short period of time, is going to look like a kind of really-out-of-it oddity. And I cannot, for the life of me, imagine how someone could have made this deal.”

  As predictions go, this one wasn’t especially accurate. Talkers Magazine , the nonpartisan industry trade magazine, estimated that Limbaugh’s weekly audience grew by a million listeners from the time he signed the deal with Clear Channel through the spring of 2009. A vexed-sounding Wolff wrote, “The most elemental fact about the Limbaugh career might be that, outside of seriously corrupt dictatorships, nobody has made as much money from politics as Rush Limbaugh.”

  Limbaugh considers this kind of analysis amateurish. “Do you know what bought me all this?” turned out to be a rhetorical question, the answer to which is: capitalism.

  “First and foremost, I’m a businessman,” he said. “My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates.”

  The average AM radio station devotes about five minutes per hour to news, reserves eighteen to twenty for advertising, and uses the rest for content. Limbaugh supplies that content on a barter system. For every hour of gross airtime, he owns around five minutes. Since he is on three hours a day, five days a week, on about 588 stations (in most places, he is number one in his time slot), that adds up to about forty-five hours a week.

  Limbaugh sells these minutes. Some buyers are advertisers who simply run their usual ads. Others use Limbaugh as their pitchman, which costs them a premium and a long-term commitment. And lately he had created a new option: at double the normal rate card he will weave a product into his monologue.

  To sell ads to a radio audience, first you need the audience, and nobody has one like Rush’s. “Rush Limbaugh saved AM radio,” I was told by Michael Harrison, the editor and publisher of Talkers. “He created the modern talk format. He’s Elvis and the Beatles combined. He’s been number one in the ratings for the past twenty years, and if he stays on the radio for another twenty years, nobody will ever surpass him.” Talkers puts Limbaugh’s weekly listenership at fourteen million; after 2008, it rose considerably. Nobody else was (or is) close. Sean Hannity, the number two talker, trails by more than a million listeners. Michael Savage was listed at number three. “Savage isn’t even in my rearview mirror,” Limbaugh told me.

  Limbaugh is not effusive about most of his fellow talkers. Sean Hannity and Mark Levin are protégés, and he has defended Glenn Beck from attack by the Obama administration, but he doesn’t really consider them, or anyone else, in his league. When we met in March, Bill O’Reilly still had a syndicated radio show that competed directly with Limbaugh in his afternoon time slot.

  I asked Rush what he thought of O’Reilly and, after a moment’s reflection, he said, “He’s Ted Baxter. Sorry, but somebody’s got to say it.” He claimed he has never listened to Don Imus or Laura Ingraham. Garrison Keillor? “I wouldn’t even know how to find NPR on the dial.”

  “I never mention others on the air, and I don’t engage in contrived rivalry crap. That’s bad business; it encourages people not to hear the station you are on.” He has made an exception for Larry King, who he truly doesn’t like. “He never had nice things to say about me, from 1988 to the present. He was working midnights [on the radio] when I started and demanded that his syndicator move him to afternoon drive when my success was obvious. He bombed and quit radio for CNN e xclusively.”

  Democrats have attempted over the years to find a liberal radio talker to counteract Limbaugh, but they haven’t found one. Mario Cuomo, Jim Hightower, and Gary Hart all tried and failed. “They all did two-hour Saturday shows to combat me, and the media gave them publicity out the ass . . . as though they were the Great White Hopes,” says Limbaugh.

  In the spring of 2004, Air America was launched to great fanfare, as the progressive alternative to Limbaugh and his fellow conservatives. The talent included Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, and Randi Rhodes. But the venture was ill starred. It was discovered that the network received $875,000 in no-interest loans from a nonprofit Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx; the money was returned. Air America attracted a small audience, few stations, and fewer advertisers. Less than two years after its grand launch it filed for bankruptcy protection. Limbaugh celebrated the fall, calling Air America, “an embarrassing, blithering, total bomb-out of a failure.” Liberals, he said, can’t compete in the open marketplace of ideas, because they don’t really want to spell out what they actually believe. “There’s no hiding on talk radio,” he said. “When your ideas sound stupid, it’s out there to be exposed for one and all, and that’s why Air America and liberal talk radio doesn’t get an audience—because it’s not worth listening to!”8

  But more than ideas are behind Limbaugh’s broadcasting success. His innovation was to bring top-40 radio’s energy to political issues, and over his career it has won him four Marconi Radio Awards for Syndicated Radio Personality of the Year from the National Association of Broadcasters and membership in both the Radio Hall of Fame and the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.

  “Rush is just an amazing radio performer,” says Ira Glass, the host of This American Life. “Years ago, I used to listen in the car on my way to reporting gigs, and I’d notice that I disagreed with everything he was saying, yet I not only wanted to keep listening, I actually liked him. That is some chops. You can count on two hands the number of public figures in America who can pull that trick off.”

  Glass compares Limbaugh to another exceptional free-form radio monologist, Howard Stern. “A lot of people dismiss them both as pandering and proselytizing and playing to the lowest common denominator, but I think that misses everything important about their shows,” he told me. “They both think through their ideas in real time on the air; they both have a lot more warmth than they’re generally given credit for; they both created an entire radio aesthetic.

  “Like everyone, I’m a sucker for the smart-ass outsider, which he plays with such glee. That’s what’s great about him at his best: it’s such a happy show! And the idea that he’d just sit there, not take calls, not have guests . . . is as radical an invention as Howard Stern’s format. Rush is a lone figure. Talking to us in that peculiar way you can over the radio—where he’s our buddy, leaning in for a joke, tugging on our sleeve as he tells us something nobody else knows, but he’s also a preacher, delivering the good news to the masses. When I first heard him, I was surprised to hear this tone work in the middle of the day. I’d always thought of that solitary sort of radio as something that works better in the dark, late at night. Something about Rush’s upbeat, triumphal, braggy joy—the happiness of the show—is what makes it play when the sun is still up.”

  On-air joyfulness has always been the default persona for top-40 disc jockeys; it is something Limbaugh has been honing ever since he was Rusty Sharpe. The skits and parodies he runs, mostly written or cowritten with comedian Paul Shanklin, are a part of the jollity. So is the expert use of rock and roll. What other right-wing (or left-wing) talker would have known the spoken B-part of Bo Diddley’s 1962 song “You Can’t Judge a Book by Looking at the Cover” (“Come in closer baby, hear what else I got to say / You got your radio turned down too low. Turn it up!” ) and thought to use it as bumper music?

  Bombastic intros and cutaways to commercials are another Limbaugh trademark. There are more than seventy of these, and th
ey rotate with the mood of Rush and his chief engineer, Mike Maimone, who works out of Limbaugh’s Sixth Avenue studio in Manhattan. Maimone sent me a very partial list:An Army of One

  America’s Beacon of Freedom

  The Center of the Radio Universe

  The Leader of the Pack

  Members of the media—do not panic. Your show prep will

  continue.

  Rated the number one radio personality of all time

  On a roll with lunch

  Redefining where the center really is

  A Weapon of Mass Instruction

  The Wonder of Rush

  America’s Anchorman

  They used to get away with it, but not anymore.

  Unfiltered and unstoppable

  Annoying the left from coast to coast

  Sometimes the cutaways are connected to current events—“insider information you can legally use,” in a segment on Martha Stewart’s trial, for example; or “drilling for truth” after an item on the fight to extract oil from protected lands in Alaska. From time to time Limbaugh adds something new, just to keep things fresh.

  A lot of what makes Limbaugh’s show fun is his irreverence toward subjects that conservatives customarily discuss, in public, with extreme reverence or not at all. Like sex. I was in the studio when Limbaugh decided to take on the prostitution scandal that had just brought down the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, and the admission by his successor, David Paterson, had he, too, had engaged in adulterous conduct. Conservative commentators were bashing both men in harsh language, but Limbaugh took a different approach. He laughed at them.

  There is a format to this kind of satire. Limbaugh first introduces the most ridiculous liberal take he can find on the matter at hand. Today’s text came from an article on LiveScience.com, “Are Humans Meant to Be Monogamous?” Then he reads it in an imitation of how he imagines the author of such a ludicrous article would speak. For scientific pieces, he usually employs a smug, supercilious Oxbridge tone. “Social monogamy is a term referring to creatures that pair up to mate and raise offspring but still have flings,” Limbaugh quoted. “So a cheating husband who detours for a romantic romp yet returns home in time to tuck in the kids at night would be considered socially monogamous.”