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August
1, 2003, 10:40 p.m.
The
Leader of the Opposition
Meet Rush.
By James Bowman
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EDITOR'S NOTE:
August 1, 2003, marks the 15th anniversary of The Rush Limbaugh Show.
In the September 6, 1993, issue of National Review James Bowman wrote
about Limbaugh, his role in broadcast media, and leadership among conservatives.
Bowman's article, an NR cover story, is reprinted here.
 hich
is the real Rush Limbaugh — the merry prankster of Cape Girardeau,
Missouri, or the unifying voice of conservatives across the country? Just
tune in . . .
To begin with, he's
not Mr. Limbaugh. You've got to call the ornament of the EIB (Excellence
in Broadcasting) network, the man so used to the adulation of his fans
that he long ago asked them to skip the praise with which they prefaced
every phone call and just say "Ditto," the man who likes to
claim he has "talent on loan from God," just plain Rush. That's
what the ever-courtly Ronald Reagan, who has never met him, calls him.
A month after George Bush's defeat by Bill Clinton last year, Reagan sent
him the following unsolicited note:
Dear Rush,
Thanks for all you're doing to promote Republican and conservative principles.
Now that I've retired from active politics, I don't mind that you have
become the Number One voice for conservatism in our Country.
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. America needs to hear the way things ought to
be."
Sincerely, Ron
To some of those
close to Reagan, the letter is evidence that the former President is losing
his grip. "If Limbaugh is leader of the opposition in the true political
sense," one of them told me, "then we're in serious trouble."
Fred Barnes in The New Republic ended a piece on the Republican
resurgence under Clinton by drawing a contrast with the Carter era: "When
the GOP rose in the late 1970s, it had Ronald Reagan. Now the loudest
Republican voice belongs to Rush Limbaugh."
PASSING
THE TORCH
The unspoken premise there is that Limbaugh, unlike Reagan, cannot be
taken seriously as a political leader. But to a surprising number of conservatives
there is a solemn appropriateness about Reagan's passing the torch to
the 42-year-old former disc jockey and college dropout. Certainly if any
conservative is in line to inherit the mantle of "The Great Communicator,"
it is the idol of the "dittoheads," the man who presides over
the country's most listened-to radio talk-show. But his twenty million
listeners a week on 616 stations also make him the eight-hundred-pound
gorilla in the cage in which American conservatism is languishing. "One
reason he unites the Right is that he's the biggest kid on the block,"
says Terry Eastland, editor of The Forbes Media Critic. "People
don't want to be lampooned on the air; politicians don't want to offend
him because he's so popular."
Certainly, of those who might themselves be considered leaders of the
opposition, no one to whom I was able to speak has a word to say against
him. Their compliments sound as if they have been rehearsed in front of
a mirror. "When Rush Limbaugh talks, you know you're listening to
the real world," says Bob Dole. "He's a powerhouse antidote
to the liberal cheer-leading you hear all the time from the national media.
That's why Rush is such a refreshing addition to America's airwaves. He's
smart, he's tough, and he isn't going away, much to the annoyance of the
liberal crowd." In amongst such unmitigated praise, do we detect
just a hint of condescension in the word "refreshing" or that
mention of the "airwaves"? Is there the tiniest smidgen of resentment
of Limbaugh's popularity in "the real world" as opposed to the
power in the political world that Dole wields? If so he is not saying
so. On Rush as leader of the opposition he had no comment.
Phil Gramm says Limbaugh "has had a profound impact on conservative
thinking in America . . . He says things other people are afraid to say.
As an opinion maker and thinker he is very intelligent and, like Ronald
Reagan, a very effective communicator. There are many days when I think
he's doing a lot more good than the Republicans in the Senate are doing."
Dan Quayle agrees: "He's certainly out there carrying his fair share.
I'd say he's leading the charge right now. It's only in the three months
since I returned to Indiana that I've realized how big he is. . . . I
know the Republican Party listens to him. He's got the pulse of our rank
and file."
Jack Kemp, who compares Rush's influence among Republicans to that of
Will Rogers among Democrats in the 1930s, adds that he's certainly leading
the fight against some of the far-left policies of the Clinton Administration
and doing it with wit, wisdom, humor, tenacity, and an irrepressible style.
He shows people that the Democratic Party, and especially Bill Clinton,
who ran as a centrist, are not (New Democrats' at all but old Democrats
who are not trying to empower people but government."
But it is Kemp's partner in Empower America, William Bennett, who must
take the prize as the most convinced Rushophile among Republican leaders.
He has gone from being a listener to the show, to being an occasional
contributor by phone, to being a close personal friend and something of
an intellectual mentor. Rush, says Bennett, "may be the most consequential
person in political life at the moment. He is changing the terms of debate.
He is doing to the culture what Ronald Reagan did to the political movement.
He tells his audience that what you believe inside you can talk about
in the marketplace. People were afraid of censure by gay activists, feminists,
environmentalists — now they are not because Rush takes them on.
And he does it with humor. We have a reputation as somewhat prim and priggish,
and Rush is absolute death to liberals: a conservative with humor."
Yes, but . . . Is Limbaugh really an homme serieux, a man with
the gravitas to be a — let alone the — republican leader? A
lot of very wealthy Republicans consider themselves sophisticated beyond
the Limbaugh types," Bennett goes on. "They miss the point.
Rush is extremely sophisticated, extremely smart. The great thing is that,
never having been through a university, he is not complicated with pedanticism.
He's very serious intellectually. He knows how to frame an issue, how
to debate an issue, how to argue ad finem and ad absurdum. He does both.
But he is larger than a leader of the political opposition. He represents
a shift in the culture. Another ten years of the political change he stands
for will take us beyond Republicans and Democrats."
WHAT
WOULD MAKE RUSH RUN?
All such praise from would-be rivals for leadership depends in part on
Rush's own disavowal of any electoral ambition. Are there any circumstances
in which he would be a candidate? "Maybe, but I don't know what they
are," he told me. "I have said never to this — never, ever,
I don't want to do it. And I don't. I have no desire. Primarily because,
to do it, to be elected to anything you have to walk around like this
— with your hand out. And you have to beg people to put something
in it. Somebody always does, and they want repayment. And not with dollars.
It's going to be with your soul, it's going to be with a portion of your
soul. I don't look at it as fun." The point is that he does look
at hosting the Rush Limbaugh show as fun — "more fun than a
human being should be allowed to have," as he so frequently says.
And if he is to be understood at all it is in terms of what he considers
to be fun.
To look at, Rush is, to use one of his own favorite words, the epitome
of the successful businessman. You have to look closely now to see any
evidence of the teenage prankster growing up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri,
who used to con people over the telephone by pretending to be running
the Baptist Church's "Know Your Bible" or the Lions Club's "Know
Your American History" contests (he and his brother got caught in
the latter case because they called the wife of the Lions Club president).
The evidence is there — in the smile that is a little too cherubic,
the baby face that is altogether too innocent looking — but it is
obscured by the big cigar (Ashton, Jamaica leaf) that he smokes with the
swagger of a Victorian captain of industry. Famous for being fat, he comes
across in person rather as an imposing presence: big, but with the grace
of a jungle cat — a quality that goes with his yellow-green, cat-like
eyes.
It is this combination of the solid citizen and the joker which is the
essential Limbaugh. His sense of fun extends also to his enthusiasm for
the business side of his daily radio and television shows, his pride in
having done what no one thought could be done with the quintessentially
local medium of radio: syndicate a national talk show with a conservative
point of view in the middle of the day. "For the moment leave the
conservatism out," he says: "just the business success of this
show has been totally ignored . . . The media cultures in New York and
Los Angeles refuse to write about this precisely because it's conservative,
I'm conservative. They're scared of it and they try to come up with other
kinds of ways to explain it, like the audience is a bunch of followers
. . . just a bunch of dolts. But now everybody thinks they can do it!
I am a trailblazer — if I can be so bold, do you mind? — there
has been a revolution in the way radio is done, the way it is sold, the
way our program makes money. We have identified new advertisers for radio,
we have expanded the market of advertisers. There is more money than was
in network radio before and now everybody wants to do it! What five years
ago couldn't be done, everybody wants to do it."
Certainly the ventures into radio syndication of Howard Stern, Gordon
Liddy, Don Imus, and Pat Buchanan (one of the latest to try it is Ronald
Reagan's son, Michael) are a testimony to Rush's trailblazing success.
But maybe, some of his old admirers would say, he has been too successful.
Now that he is beginning to be taken seriously, he may become too respectable
to go in for the kind of cutting up which has always made the show so
much fun. In the same way, invitations to the White House and appearances
on Nightline and Meet the Press undercut his blasts at "the
dominant media culture." The source of his appeal back in the days
when he developed the show's format in Sacramento between 1984 and 1988,
or when he first came to New York to go into syndication out of WABC in
the latter year, was his spontaneity, his irreverence. Perhaps his most
famous gimmick was the caller abortion — the sound of a vacuum cleaner
and a woman's scream in lieu of a normal call termination — which
was in splendidly awful taste. He doesn't do that any more, he says, because
it takes too long to explain so that people won't take it the wrong way.
But there was a time when he didn't care so much about the sensibilities
of the sort of people likely to take it the wrong way.
He still does his condom update theme (the Fifth Dimension singing "Up,
Up and Away") and his animal-rights update theme (Andy Williams singing
"Born Free" to a background of machine-gun fire) and his homeless
update theme (Clarence "Frogman" Henry singing the wonderfully
wacky Sixties novelty, "Ain't Got No Home"), and he has even
introduced a theme for his Carol Moseley Braun updates ("Moving On
Up" from the old Jeffersons television show) whose delightful offensiveness
made it "Outrage of the Week" for Mark Shields of The Capital
Gang. But his reaction to Shields's attack was instructive. Clearly
stung by the suggestion that it might be considered racist to make fun
of Mrs. Braun's peculiar sort of upward mobility, he defended himself
on the air by disclaiming responsibility because he didn't write the song.
If anyone's a racist, he said, Norman Lear is for attaching the song to
The Jeffersons in the first place. He has also been defensive about
the animal-rights and homeless update themes.
Is the class clown starting to care too much what the goody-goodies in
the front row think of him? Rush acknowledges that there may be less irreverence
these days, but he adds that "that goes in cycles. For the past six
months there has been a pretty serious devotion to the Clinton economic
plan, and there hasn't been a whole lot of irreverence. I think the show
has moved up a couple levels in importance, I think it's a natural evolution
of things. But now today, for example — this week — there has
been more irreverence and more of an off-the-wall spontaneity and humor
than there has been. I don't know why this is; I just follow my instincts.
And they've gotten me to where I am now." So far in the era of Clinton,
which Rush calls "The Raw Deal," his instincts have apparently
continued unerring. Audience figures are up, and the class clown's more
than occasional resemblance to an economics lecturer seems not to bother
his listeners at all.
JFK
AS DITTOHEAD?
In fact, he has proved to be an adept popularizer, often in advance of
the serious press, of such economic arcana as the reading of the bond
market and federal accounting by "current services baseline."
His principal economic advisors are Lawrence Kudlow of Bear, Stearns and
Thomas W. Hazlitt of the University of California at Davis, but a great
many other people provide him with material which he proceeds to adapt
to a popular audience. These include not only intellectual heavyweights
like Bennett and George Will but the thousands of ordinary listeners who
write to him, most of them via electronic mail. When a listener earlier
this summer sent in a tape of a speech by John F. Kennedy to the New York
Economic Club in 1962 in which Kennedy spoke of the economically stimulative
effect of tax cuts, Rush played the tape with his own annotations on the
air and retroactively proclaimed Kennedy a dittohead.
He himself disclaims any pretension to being an intellectual, and in fact
feels humble and "in awe of many of them" who have been toiling
away in obscurity for years. He once went to William Bennett and asked
him for a reading list (Bennett set him to reading C. S. Lewis). "I
am nothing but a regurgitation of what these original thinkers have labored
all their lives to produce," says Rush. But the same could be said
of Ronald Reagan or any other leader bright enough to see (as intellectuals
often are not) what ideas will move the popular imagination. It was a
feat not only of the loudest voice but also of a keen political brain
to round up, as Rush did, the media herd and drive them into the conservative
corral over the Clinton budget. Weeks after he began playing on the air
tapes of the claims of Bush, Panetta, Sasser, and others for the 1990
deal and comparing them with what was being said about the Clinton budget,
the mainstream media began making the same comparison. Tim Russert did
it on Meet the Press and Joe Klein did it in Newsweek. But
imagine Rush's gratification when the New York Times ran as its
lead editorial "A budget worthy of Mr. Bush."
He does all this on his three-hour daily radio program with a tiny staff,
consisting principally of the broadcast engineer, Mike Maimone, and two
others: James Golden, his call screener, known on the air as Bo Snerdley,
and his grandly named "Chief of Staff," Kit "HR" (for
Haldeman) Carson. He sometimes makes reference to "the EIB memory
division" or other (non-existent) research help, but the show is,
as William Bennett says, basically just Rush reading the papers and cutting
things out, carrying on a conversation with the American people."
That, Bennett adds, "is talent on loan from somewhere." The
problem is to tell how, or if, this conversation can translate into political
potency. Fred Barnes makes the point: "Rush Limbaugh has a political
— like following. He's not like Leno or Letterman. But one of the
things that makes you think about his influence is the outcome in 1992
— Bush's bad showing after Rush Limbaugh had been boosting him day
after day. It makes you wonder if he's just preaching to the faithful."
That suspicion is reinforced in a way by Jack Kemp's comparison of him
to Will Rogers. Rush himself considers the comparison a compliment, but
it does rather put him in his place. It is a place which he is mostly
happy to occupy, and he himself sometimes insists that he is an entertainer
as a way of putting off fans who, perhaps under the influence of the Perot
phenomenon, seem to want to regard him as a politician because he comes
across well on radio and television. (It is a powerful argument in favor
of the mental acuity his admirers attribute to him, by the way, that he
has never mistaken Perot for a politician for the same reason.) But there
are traces of ambivalence about being "just" an entertainer
when the leader of the dittoheads is asked to think of being leader of
the opposition.
"I think that's temporary. I think that comes from the fact that
within the Republican Party there's no unified voice. They can't even
come to an agreement on taxes. The one thing I'm not is indecisive. I
think this is one of the reasons people don't like me — those who
don't: I am so cocksure. I don't say, Well, I think maybe that . . .'
I tell people: (Here's what is.' And I think that is naturally going to
draw people. In the 1970s Reagan came along and gave conservatives confidence
that what they believed was good, right, wholesome, and worthwhile. And
so they were able to publicly be and act who they were . . . I have, I
think, done that aspect of what Reagan did."
TWO
MIDWESTERN BOYS
There are other similarities to Reagan. Both men grew up in small Midwestern
river towns, and both got their start in radio. Both are religious believers
who rarely attend church. Both combined careers as entertainers and salesmen
and both have enjoyed the success of all salesmen who believe in their
products, whether commercial or political. Both are raconteurs, rather
than intellectuals, who combine a tendency to think in terms of personal
anecdotes with remarkably shrewd political instincts. But Limbaugh is
as unmistakably of the baby-boom generation as Reagan was of the generation
of the Depression and the Second World War. Some liberals, like E. J.
Dionne of the Washington Post, think that this is the real secret
of his success: namely, "using the enemy's methods to his own ends"
by hijacking the counterculture for conservatism.
"His message is traditional but his means are modern," says
Dionne. "The implicit message is that rock and roll and other pop
cultural artifacts are OK, which is appealing along the lines of a class
split and a sensibility split to people who are uncomfortable with the
Robertson/Buchanan rhetorical style." But conservatives are more
likely to see another split: between game and earnest. How seriously can
we take what one calls Rush's "cartoons on the air"? It may
be, as Adam Meyerson, editor of Policy Review, says, that "only
comedians can say a lot of the things that are on people's minds these
days. Limbaugh can say the things he does because people don't take him
seriously." One who disagrees is R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor of The
American Spectator and author of The Conservative Crack-Up.
He sees Rush's playfulness as being, along with his generosity of spirit
and willingness to promote other conservatives, matter of great hope for
the unity of a movement hitherto fractured by personal jealousies and
intellectual inertia: "We need to have people who can dramatize ideas.
You need that literary spark. Luigi Barzini had it; Buckley has it. And,
though he's a great talker rather than a great writer, Rush has it too."
But to his critics, Limbaugh's literary imagination is mainly employed
in dramatizing himself. He is certainly right to say that the source of
animus against him, even among conservatives, is the booming, boisterous
self-confidence of his public personality — referred to in these
pages by Florence King, not disapprovingly, as "The Vain Brain .
. . male ego personified." Typically, Rush himself took up the joke
the next day: "You are listening to the Vain Brain," he told
his listeners, "Rush Limbaugh: redefining masculinity for the Nineties!"
A more sober conservative, however, decries "his incredible vanity
and pride. Some of it is self-mockery, I know, but not all of it."
Others who recognize that the mock braggadocio of his on-air persona is
just part of the show wonder whether the show is ever quite over.
What those who accuse him of vanity seem to want is some kind of guarantee
that there is a real person behind the public persona, some glimpse of
a sense of irony about himself. But it is hard for either admirers or
skeptics to be sure that there really is a private Rush Limbaugh. Paul
Colford, a media reporter for Newsday, is about to bring out an
unauthorized biography based on investigations into Limbaugh's personal
life and interviews with, among others, one of his two ex-wives. Colford
will purport to show, as Peter Donald tried to do last year in the New
York Observer, that Rush, though not himself a draft dodger, was less
than straightforward in his account of his own dealings with his Vietnam-era
draft board at a time when he was accusing Bill Clinton of draft-dodging.
It is a weak case which seems to boil down to the charge that he describes
his classification as 4-F at a time when it was 1-Y. The task is not made
any easier by Rush's elaborate leg pulls, as when he told a caller that
his father had paid $ 3,000 to the draft board to get him classified unfit.
His father, who was still alive at the time, was furious with him. So
was his uncle, who had just been appointed to the federal bench by Ronald
Reagan.
Colford himself admits he is chasing a phantom. One of the most striking
things revealed by his researches, he says, is how many people Limbaugh
has worked for over the years who have no personal recollection of him.
One station manager who both hired and fired him and worked with him daily
was flabbergasted when Colford informed him that the man who had broadcast
for him under the name of Jeff Christie and Rush Limbaugh were one and
the same. He had noticed something vaguely familiar about Rush but he'd
had no idea. It was as if the band playing in the next apartment had turned
out to be the Beatles." Does such a man even have a private life?
It's debatable," says Colford. His work has become his life."
Or, as Terry Eastland puts it, "he's like a priest who has recognized
that the ordinary way of life is not for him. In a way he has taken a
vow."
Edmund Morris, Ronald Reagan's official biographer, has described his
subject as "the most mysterious man I have ever confronted. It is
impossible to understand him." Morris's despair at this was mitigated
by the discovery that "everybody else who had ever known him, including
his wife, is equally bewildered." Reagan too is a man whose private
self was more or less completely swallowed up in his public life. Interesting
that already they're saying the same thing about Rush.
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