Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  Limbaugh’s audience is routinely disparaged by the national elite as a collection of dummies; civil rights attorney Constance Rice, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called them “a low information cohort.” In fact, Limbaugh listeners have above-average education and an unusually high degree of interest in what the Pew Center defines as “hard news.” They also fare better on current information tests than the readers of most elite publications, including the Los Angeles Times.11

  Whatever their IQ, Dittoheads are presumed to be a collection of miserable human failures. Professor Marc Cooper of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication calls them “embittered and battered” fools who can’t discern their real allies from their enemies. “Limbaugh’s audience is not a happy lot,” Cooper says. “They are completely convinced that an unholy coalition of liberals, homos, Feminazis, and overly entitled minorities are responsible for the mess of their own tiny, dead-end lives.” Professor Cooper didn’t cite a source for this conclusion. My own unscientific hunch is that the lives of Limbaugh fans are not necessarily tinier, messier, or more embittered than those of the average professor.

  The Limbaugh Institute of Conservative Studies provides a daily tutorial on a variety of political, cultural, and historical issues, but no topic is visited more often or with more vehemence than the professional—ethical, ideological, and moral—imperfections of the mainstream American media establishment. The national media have constituted a Republican bête noire since the Washington press corps fell in love with JFK and Jackie. Richard Nixon famously hated journalists and put some on his enemies list. His vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, blasted the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Ronald Reagan was mocked by elite editorial pages and senior Washington correspondents as a dangerous fool for believing that the Soviet Union was an evil empire that should, and could, be defeated. Republican voters were caricatured as angry rednecks, religious fanatics, and reactionary idiots by an overwhelmingly Democratic press corps. (In 1972, when Richard Nixon got about 60 percent of the popular vote, the national press corps overwhelmingly voted for McGovern.)

  When Rush Limbaugh came along, in 1988, the elite national media consisted of four conventionally center-left liberal television networks, three big Democratic newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times), two politically correct weekly news magazines (Time and Newsweek), two nominally objective wire services (AP and Reuters), and the unmistakably liberal PBS and National Public Radio. There was no Internet, no Drudge Report, no Fox News, and no conservative talk radio. Right-wing opinion could be found on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, in a couple of small magazines of opinion, and in the columns of a few token conservative pundits like Bill Safire and George Will. Limbaugh rudely shattered this soothing consensus. He was the un-Cronkite, the anti-Moyers, the Bizarro Brokaw, the inventor of back-talk radio. He wasn’t fair or objective and he didn’t pretend to be. His very existence on the other side of the teeter-totter provided balance. “I am equal time,” he has boasted.

  If Limbaugh had been all bombast, his act wouldn’t have lasted long. But he proved to be not just a great broadcaster but a very astute media critic. He realized that the mainstream media’s greatest vulnerability was high-handed obtuseness. News organizations acted as though their biases and interests—financial, political, and personal—were invisible to the public. Limbaugh pointed out, in the clearest possible way, that the Emperor’s clothes were all tailored in the same shop, according to the same specifications, and he let his listeners in on why and how.

  This was embarrassing, of course. Journalists like to think of themselves as independent thinkers and speakers of “truth to power.” In fact, they work for big organizations and, like organization people everywhere, they toe the company line. To soften this reality, editors and reporters are almost uniformly recruited from a pool of like-minded people. They don’t need to be explicitly told what to cover or how, any more than the Pope needs to send out memos to his cardinals about abortion. Here and there you can find editors and reporters with a certain degree of independence, but they are rare. As for editorial writers, they have all the latitude of West Point cadets.

  The light Limbaugh has shined on the news business has played an important role in undermining the public’s respect for it. In 1985, three years before Limbaugh went on the air nationally, only 45 percent of Americans thought the news media were politically biased. In 2009, 60 percent thought so. The number of people who said the media tend to deal fairly with all sides declined almost by half. Three quarters of Americans now believe that the media favor one side—and by a more than two-to-one margin they think the favored side is the liberal one. The majority have gone from trusting the media to be fair and reliable to believing that they are neither. Rush Limbaugh did not cause this to happen all by himself, but no single individual, with the possible exception of FOX News President Roger Ailes, Limbaugh’s former producer and close friend, has contributed so much to the public’s realization that “news” is not whatever the half dozen like-minded news organizations in New York and Washington decide that it is. “I am equal time,” is not a hollow boast. At the very least he is a check and a balance on the power of the liberal media, a man willing to challenge the dominant news narrative. He is hated for this, of course, by people whose monopoly he destroyed. Some, like Professor Todd Gitlin of the Columbia School of Journalism, think the government should take Rush off the air. “Limbaugh is a liar and a demagogue, a brander of enemies, a mobilizer, and a rabble rouser,” Gitlin told me. “I’m for re-instating the Fairness Doctrine [the federal policy, revoked in 1987, that paved the way for uninhibited political commentary on the radio],” Gitlin said. He conceded that this would constitute a government limitation of free speech. “The corner that right-wing radio has on the medium is a warping factor in our politics,” he says. “Limbaugh is truck-driver radio. His voice is the voice of resentment, or in Nietzsche’s sense, ressentiment—it sounds better, more venomous, in French.”

  When I told Limbaugh that Professor Gitlin, a prominent faculty member of America’s preeminent school of journalism, had called him a liar, Limbaugh seemed amused. “Anybody who talks for fifteen hours a week extemporaneously for twenty years makes mistakes, but I correct mine as soon as I can, for a very practical reason,” he told me. “If people don’t trust me, they won’t listen, and I won’t have any sponsors. I make my living selling advertising. I have no idea who Todd Gitlin is, but he obviously doesn’t know anything about the media.”

  He also doesn’t listen to Limbaugh. Rush, like any satirist, engages in hyperbole, sarcasm, and ridicule, none of which is meant to be taken literally. Only the most oblivious or humorless critic would confuse it with lying. On reflection, and after consulting the Media Matters archive, Gitlin himself contacted me and asked to amend “liar” to “bullshit artist.” In the commentary business, “bullshit” is what you call the opinions of those with whom you disagree.

  “The liberals’ favorite argument is that there is no argument,” Thomas Sowell has written. “Nothing uttered in opposition to liberal beliefs exists, in their minds, at least nothing worthy of their intellectual engagement.” This is certainly the way Democratic politicians, professors, and journalists have dealt with Limbaugh, and it has proven to be a highly unproductive strategy. For more than twenty years Limbaugh—using nothing more than ideas, words, and a microphone—has won (and kept) the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, reshaped the contours of the national media, articulated the central messages of conservatism, and helped set the Republican agenda. And, as the past year has demonstrated, he is very far from finished.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE BOSS

  Limbaugh’s central place in the national debate was on display at the end of February 2008, when eight thousand right-wingers gathered in Washington, D.C.’s Omni Shoreham Hotel for CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference of the Am
erican Conservative Union Foundation. Only a few years earlier, at the 2004 Republican National Convention, the party had fielded a dream team of popular speakers and advocates: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson, the former senator from Tennessee who was now playing a district attorney on the TV series Law & Order. But they were all out of the picture now. Schwarzenegger had veered to the left on social issues and made a botch of California’s economy. Bloomberg had become an independent. The primaries killed off Giuliani and Thompson. Pataki came to Iowa, opened an exploratory office, found out what he wanted to know, closed the office, and disappeared. In the posttraumatic climate of the economic melt-down, Mitt Romney reminded voters of the CEO who fired them. Jeb Bush was probably the most talented Republican politician in the nation, but for once in his life he had the wrong last name.

  For a while, Limbaugh had been touting Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the son of immigrants from India, as the coming man. At the age of four, Jindal had changed his name from Piyush to Bobby, in honor of his favorite character on The Brady Bunch, and in college he converted to Catholicism. It made a telling contrast to Obama’s journey from Barry to Barack and the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation theology. Jindal was an Ivy Leaguer and Rhodes Scholar with a common touch; he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives at age thirty-three, got reelected with 88 percent of the vote in 2006, and at thirty-six became America’s youngest governor. Best of all, from Limbaugh’s perspective, he was a Reaganite—hawkish on foreign policy, opposed to big government and high taxes, and conservative on social issues. Rush thought the Louisiana governor had the intellectual firepower and GOP-style melting-pot credentials to take on Obama, and he used this influence to help Jindal land the assignment of delivering the televised Republican rebuttal to the president’s first address to a joint session of Congress. But Jindal blew his chance. He came across as stiff, callow, and boring. YouTube lit up with comparisons with Kenneth, the overeager, hypernaive page on the NBC sit-com 30 Rock. On the day after, Limbaugh spoke up for Jindal—“We cannot shun politicians who speak for our beliefs just because we don’t like the way they say it,” he said—but he understood that his protégé was a long way from prime time.

  The delegates to CPAC 2009 wandered around the conference like political orphans, attending workshops with names like “The Key to Victory? Listen to Conservatives” and “Rebuilding the Movement Brain-storming Session.” Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schafley, Michael Barone, Ward Connerly, Senators Tom Coburn and John Cornyn, Representatives Mike Pence and John Boehner, and 2008 primary washouts Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney made speeches and presentations aimed at analyzing the party’s postelection predicament and rediscovering its electoral sweet spot. They were received politely but, as Malcolm X once said about the civil rights leaders of his time, they neither incited nor excited anybody.

  That job fell to Rush Limbaugh, who was due to give the final speech of the event on Saturday at 5:00 p.m. As the hour grew near, the mood in the hotel grew lighter and more boisterous. El Rushbo was coming! Finally there would be some action. By 3:00 p.m. the five-thousand-seat Diamond Room was packed to capacity, and ushers began leading the spillover—a couple of thousand people, at least—into adjacent rooms where they could see the speech on huge television screens.

  This was my first visit to a CPAC, but I had read about them, and I wasn’t surprised to see that men outnumbered women and there were very few dark faces. The youth of the audience was unexpected, though; close to two-thirds of the CPAC delegates were under the age of twenty-five, a great many of them students in on a free pass. I sat next to a twenty-year-old named Jake, a student at Gardner-Webb, a Christian college in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. In the 2008 primaries Jake had worked hard for Ron Paul, and he thought his man should be getting the Defender of the Constitution Award, which Limbaugh was slated to receive after his speech. “Rush is a defender of the Constitution,” Jake conceded, “but two years ago he laughed at Ron Paul.”

  The elevated press platform in the center of the ballroom bristled with television cameras. FOX News was planning to broadcast the speech live and in its entirety, and CNN carried a large part of it as well. Reporters roamed the halls, asking the kinds of questions reporters ask at conservative gatherings and nodding vigorously at the answers to demonstrate that they didn’t think the people they were interviewing were imbeciles. Before Limbaugh arrived, CPAC published the results of its annual straw poll. In presidential primary years this poll is considered an important symbolic test of the relative strength of GOP candidates with their core constituency. This year it dealt mostly with policy. Delegates were asked to pick their main priority from among three choices. Seventy-four percent chose “promoting individual freedom by reducing the size and scope of the government and its intrusion into the lives of its citizens.” Only 15 percent picked “traditional values” by which they mainly meant opposition to gay marriage and abortion. Ten percent mentioned national security—a subject on which George W. Bush had won reelection four years earlier. The delegates were hawks and social conservatives, but, like Limbaugh himself, their first priorities were economic and ideological.

  The poll included a second question: “Who is your favorite conservative media personality on either TV or radio?” Limbaugh won in a walk, outpacing Glenn Beck by 26 percent to 17 percent, and garnering more votes than Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Mark Levin combined. When these totals were announced, Jake shook his head unhappily. How could so-called conservatives give so much love to a man who had publicly laughed at Ron Paul?

  At exactly 5:00, Limbaugh took the stage to the tune of his radio theme music, the Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone.” Limbaugh looked terrible, bloated and sweaty in a black sports coat and a black shirt open two buttons at the neck. He looked less like the avenging angel of Republican values than John Goodman playing a Vegas lounge singer.

  The audience cheered wildly and chanted “Rush! Rush! Rush!” as Limbaugh pumped his arms and threw down some self-mocking rock star moves. He is a radio man first and foremost, but he is not uncomfortable on stage. In his early years in New York, he did three annual Rush to Excellence tours across the country, one-man shows to build his audience. The tours were a success, and his Web site touts them as examples of his “mastery of live performance on stage.” Recently, though, Limbaugh has limited his live appearances to a handful each year, and his stage chops seemed a bit rusty. Still, he was obviously delighted by the reception and thrilled to be delivering what he repeatedly called “my first live address to the nation”—a bit of faux presidential bombast intended to enrage any liberals who happened to be watching.

  As usual, Limbaugh was joking and serious all at once, playing his celebrity for laughs, but he was mindful of the moment. Ronald Reagan (“a two-bit actor,” people once said) had occupied this very same podium at CPACs thirteen times. Now here he, Rush, was, center stage.

  Limbaugh opened with a not-too-funny joke that began, “Larry King passed away, goes to heaven . . .” The story was an old one—King went to heaven, sat on the celestial throne, and was told by God that the seat belonged to Limbaugh. The crowd chuckled at Rush mocking his own pomposity. Would a guy who actually was pompous do such a thing? I later learned that Limbaugh had another motive for telling that particular joke. In 1993 Limbaugh was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, and Larry King presented the award. “There is a new organization being formed,” King said at the time. “It’s called ‘Feminists, Blacks and the Homeless for Limbaugh, and they are meeting in a phone booth in Wichita.” Limbaugh didn’t react at the time, but he was mortified—many of his radio idols were in the audience. It took him sixteen years but that evening he settled a score—“Larry King passed away” on national television.

  Limbaugh then turned to the issue at hand. “Let me speak about President Obama for just a second,” he said. “President Obama is one of the most gift
ed politicians, one of the most gifted men that I have ever witnessed. He has extraordinary talents. He has communication skills that hardly anyone can surpass.”

  There were nervous giggles, as the crowd waited for the punch line, but Limbaugh held up his hand, signaling that he was serious.

  It broke his heart, he said, to see the president misuse his gifts by fighting for high taxation to promote government welfare programs that would only make citizens more dependent on Washington rather than inspiring them to individual effort in the free market. He accused Obama of suffering from the chronic liberal disease of pessimism about America. “Ronald Reagan used to speak of a shining city on a hill,” he said. “Barack Obama portrays America as a soup kitchen in some dark night.”

  The audience cheered, and this time Limbaugh let them go on as long as they liked. He was on national television and he was in no hurry to get off national television. “President Obama, your agenda is not new,” he said. “It’s not change, and it’s not hope. Spending a nation into generational debt is not an act of compassion.” It was not, he added, the role of Obama or any other politician to remake the country, tear the country apart, and rebuild it in their own image.