Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  One of Limbaugh’s favorite techniques is to take liberal words and turn them on their authors. In March 2007, the Los Angeles Times gave Limbaugh a gift in the form of an article by a black, liberal film critic, David Ehrenstein, entitled “Obama the ‘Magic Negro.’” Ehrenstein wrote that Obama was running for an unelected office that exists in the popular white imagination—the “Magic Negro.” This term, he explains, is not meant as a compliment; it is a white fantasy, a black man who “has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist.” Part of the help consists of allowing the white man to accept the Magic Negro, demonstrating tolerance at no real cost and separating himself from the legacy of slavery and segregation. In other words, the Magic Negro is a racial enabler. Ehrenstein said that Obama was being protected by white critics because they needed Obama to be perfect to fulfill their own fantasies of racial redemption. “The only mud that momentarily [sticks to him] is criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama’s alleged ‘inauthenticity, ’ as compared to such sterling examples of ‘genuine’ blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg.”

  Limbaugh knew what he had right away. His goal was to stir problems in the Democratic camp (just as it was in Operation Chaos a year later) and to knock the halo off Obama’s head. He didn’t give a damn about the racial subtleties of the Magic Negro construct or any similar theoretical speculation. This was politics. That same day he read the Los Angeles Times piece on the air, in its entirety. Two days later he introduced a parody song, sung by a dead-on Al Sharpton soundalike, to the tune of “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”

  Barack the Magic Negro lives in D.C.

  The L.A. Times, they called him that

  ‘Cause he’s not authentic like me.

  Yeah, the guy from the L.A. paper

  Said he makes guilty whites feel good

  They’ll vote for him, and not for me

  ‘Cause he’s not from the hood.

  See, real black men, like Snoop Dogg

  Or me, or Farrakhan

  Have talked the talk, and walked the walk

  Not come in late and won!

  Oh, Barack the Magic Negro, lives in D.C.

  The L.A. Times, they called him that

  ‘Cause he’s black, but not authentically.

  . . .

  Some say Barack’s “articulate”

  And bright and new and “clean.”

  The media sure loves this guy,

  A white interloper’s dream!

  But, when you vote for president,

  Watch out, and don’t be fooled!

  Don’t vote the Magic Negro in—

  ‘Cause I won’t have nothing after all these years of

  sacrifice . . .

  The song worked on several levels. It attempted to set the Sharpton Democrats (those who weren’t supporting Hillary Clinton already) against Obama. It mocked Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s observation that Obama was “clean” and “articulate,” and the liberal pretense that only Republicans engage in negative racial stereotyping. It mentioned Farrakhan, always a hot button for Jewish Democrats. And it was funny—even Sharpton admitted that. “I despise his ideology,” he told me, “but Rush is a lot smarter and craftier than Don Imus. Limbaugh puts things in a way that he can’t be blamed for easy bigotry. Some of the songs he does about me just make me laugh.”

  The media, which reflexively squawk at any politically incorrect use of racial language, couldn’t stop talking about it. Two years later, with Obama safely in the White House, the Today show was still asking Limbaugh to defend the song. No wonder it became Rush’s all-time-favorite parody.

  The Magic Negro controversy was a year old when I first met Limbaugh. It appeared that Obama would very possibly get the Democratic nomination, and we discussed the problems it would pose for Limbaugh as a conservative satirist. A couple days later I was at home listening to his show when he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I had a conversation with a friend Wednesday afternoon after the program, and he said, ‘Nobody’s criticizing Obama. How are you going to do this? How are you going to handle criticizing the first black American to run for president?’ ”

  It took me a few seconds to realize that Limbaugh was talking about me. I was surprised to hear myself described as a friend. Limbaugh said that he was going after Obama as he did all his political opponents, “fearlessly.” He had used that word with me, too, and I realized that this was one part of our interview that wasn’t going to remain exclusive.

  “I’m not going to bow to political correctness,” Limbaugh said.

  “I’m going to do it with humor. I’m going to focus on the issues. I’m going to react to what he says. Simple. I’m going to do it just like if it were any other case—he’s a man, right? He’s a liberal. How do I criticize liberals? I criticize them.”

  That’s indeed what Limbaugh had said to me, almost word for word. But he wasn’t finished. “I have devised, ladies and gentlemen, an even more creative way of criticizing Obama. I have, just this morning, named a new position here on the staff. The EIB Network now has an Official Obama Criticizer. He is Bo Snerdley . . . When Obama needs to be criticized, our official criticizer, Bo Snerdley, will do so.”

  The previous night there had been a candidates’ debate in which Obama recounted a conversation he had with an army captain whose platoon in Afghanistan was badly understaffed and underequipped because many of his soldiers and a lot of his equipment had been sent to Iraq. This was a stock complaint of Obama’s during the campaign; Afghanistan, the right war, was being slighted by concentration on Iraq, the bad one. It was, he said, a typical example of Bush’s poor leadership, which he proposed to reverse once he got to the White House.

  Limbaugh played a clip of Obama saying this, and then turned the microphone over to James Golden, who introduced himself as “Bo Snerdley, African-American-in-good-standing-and-certified-black-enough-to-criticize-Obama guy.” Snerdley said he doubted Obama was accurately portraying the situation and asked for the name of the captain. Switching into dialect he said, “On behalf of our EIB brothers and sisters in the hood, we’re asking you, Mr. Obama, what’s up with that, yo? You got proof? On behalf of our Hispanic brothers and sisters, we’re asking, Señor Obama, es verdad? ”

  Limbaugh’s intention was not to question Obama’s veracity. It had very little to do with Obama. He was taking the challenge of opposing a black candidate and turning it into an opportunity to make fun of the Democratic Party’s convoluted racial coalition building and the racial authenticity tests of the American left. In June, Charles Steele, the former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King’s old group, claimed that Obama was getting an easy ride from white people because he wasn’t really black. “Why are they attacking Michelle Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and not really attacking, to that degree, her husband?” Reverend Steele wondered aloud. “Because he has no slave blood in him. He does not have any slave blood in him, but Michelle does.” It wasn’t hard to figure out Reverend Steele’s meaning—that Americans have an easier time dealing with blacks whose ancestors were not chattel for four centuries—but expressing it in terms of blood levels conjured up the old Jim Crow “one drop” criterion. Limbaugh, who sometimes reminds his audience that Democrats (including Bill Clinton’s mentor, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas) were historically the party of racial discrimination and segregation, knew what to do. He turned the microphone over to Golden once more, who went on the air as Bo Snerdley, “Official Barack Criticizer for the EIB Network, certified black enough to criticize with a blend of imported and domestic one hundred percent fortified slave blood.”

  Throughout the campaign, Obama sent mixed messages about his cultural identity. When Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton ran for president, they sounded unmistakably like themselves, black preachers. Obama’s self didn’t sound like that. Black English was not his mother tongue. For national audiences he spoke in the flat, Midwestern tone of the Kansan grandparents
who raised him. When he appeared before black audiences, in churches or at venues like the convention of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, he slowed and softened his speech and dropped in South Side Chicago expressions (but never any South Side attitude).

  Linguistic flexibility is common political practice. Al Gore spoke Southern in Tennessee and Northern above the Mason-Dixon Line. In the campaign of 2004, Bostonian John Forbes Kennedy went to a store in rural Ohio and asked, “Can I get me a hunting license here?” And who can forget candidate Hillary Clinton at a civil rights meeting in Selma, Alabama, trying to channel the gospel style of the Reverend James Cleveland (“I don’t feel no ways tired / I come too far from where I started from / Nobody told me that the road would be easy”). But in Obama’s case there was a special significance to his changing dialects.

  During the campaign, a black waitress at Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington, D.C., asked the candidate if he wanted change, and Obama replied, “Nah, we straight.” A Politico reporter, Nia-Malika Henderson, explained that this exchange was conducted in black code. “The phrase was so subtle some listeners missed it. The reporter on pool duty quoted Obama as saying, ‘No, we’re straight.’ But many other listeners did not miss it. A video of the exchange became an Internet hit, and there was a clear moment of recognition among many blacks, who got a kick out of their Harvard-educated president sounding, as one commenter wrote on a hip-hop site, ‘mad cool.’ ”

  “Mad cool” in the barbershop in Harlem plays differently at the Varsity in Cape. Same with the famous fist-bump that Barack and Michelle shared at the Democratic Convention. Something seemed to be going on that white middle America didn’t get, a change of cultural signals they failed to decode. Such changes had happened before, in music and other forms of popular entertainment, and eventually they were accepted and adopted. The high-five was once considered a radical greeting; today parents teach it to their two-year-olds. “Right on” and “Uptight” and “Do your thing” went from 125th Street to Sesame Street as an enrichment of the English language. Go to any Elks Club in Michigan on a Saturday night and you will find baby boomers dancing a flat-footed variation of the Watusi to the sounds of Motown. In a few years, these same Elks will be fist-bumping and saying “Nah, we straight,” without giving it a thought. But meeting these innovations for the first time in a presidential campaign was jarring; a lot of people were suspicious that they were a form of secret black communication, something that has animated the white American imagination since drumming was banned during slavery.

  This concern was fueled by Obama’s longtime relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his pastor and mentor in Chicago. Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama’s longtime congregation, preaches black liberation theology. According to its Web site, the church is “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian. . . . Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.”

  Video clips of Reverend Wright’s heated anti-American sermons about “the USA of KKK” and American chickens coming home to roost on 9/11—shown first on FOX News and then, grudgingly, on other networks—made it clear who Obama’s minister thought was the source of injustice. Such rhetoric is the stuff of the black liberation church, and Obama may very well have ignored it, as many candidates have ignored the sermons of their pastors over the years. But white America heard the congregation cheering Wright and found it disconcerting. The fact that Obama had dedicated one of his books to Wright added to a general sense that there was something deeply different and alienated about the senator from Illinois and his exclusionary brand of religion.

  Michelle Obama compounded the problem during the election campaign when she called the United States a “mean” country and said that her husband’s candidacy had made her proud, for the first time, to be an American. Obama’s advisers realized that these remarks were too blatantly honest and revealing, and with the candidate’s approval, they scheduled appearances that would enable Michelle to walk them back and show the country that she was just as sweet and friendly as the nice (white) girl next door.

  Limbaugh had been concerned about Obama’s view of America for a long time. From his perspective, he was right to be. Obama did not share Limbaugh’s veneration of the founding fathers or the conviction that the Constitution was a near-perfect document. He saw the United States as a deeply flawed nation whose international behavior was often aggressive and self-aggrandizing. He ran as a revolutionary, someone who would alter and improve precisely those things about America that Limbaugh most wanted to preserve. Rush had always been a master of ambiguity—Is he serious? Is he kidding?—and he saw that Obama had a similar skill, to be Harlem or Harvard, Hawaii or Kansas, a man of the world or a bro from the hood, as the occasion demanded. Limbaugh wanted to make the point that Obama was a shape-shifter, but the candidate was too good at it. His wife, who had less practice, made a better target.

  Michelle Obama opened the Democratic National Convention with a major speech. Obama’s team worked with her on a talk that would showcase her as a patriotic mom from the Midwest who happened to be African American. They came up with a template: The upscale, non-threatening, good-natured cast of the Bill Cosby Show. The media, briefed in advance on the message, prepped the country. “Michelle Obama has to make this the Huxtables,” said NBC’s Norah O’Donnell. “Present the Huxtable image of the Obamas,” urged Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. “The challenge is making the Obama family into the Huxtables,” said Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. Her colleague Chris Matthews begged Michelle to show the country, “This is the Bill Cosby family!”

  The future first lady stayed on script, and the next day Rush unleashed his Official Criticizer. “It was evident, my dear, that you have been handled,” James Golden said. “We did not see the real Michelle. . . . [Y]ou papered things over with a nondescript presentation that could have come from Martha Stewart’s America.”

  Golden then slipped into his Bo Snerdley persona.

  What was up with you last night, girl? The big lights all up on you and you come out frontin’ instead of breaking it down, yo? Ever since you broke about being proud for the first time, you’ve been taking heat. Last night was your chance, yo. You said America was mean, everybody went off on you. Last night you coulda explain it, okay . . . you coulda told ’em like, yo, listen, yeah sometimes I’m mad, check it out, if you came from where I came from you be mad, too, okay? Schools all messed up, brothers can’t get no jobs. . . . Yeah I’m mad. You all be mad, too, if this was going on in your neighborhood, okay, criminals running all up and down the street, come on, yo, it ain’t like that up in white land where Hillary live, okay?

  . . . look, you are a strong black sister, yo, come from our culture, you were out there fronting like you Michelle Partridge, everything is cute. Come on, you coulda told them, for instance, Fourth of July, yo man, we ain’t down with that, June 15th is when we’re free, but that don’t mean we don’t love America, everybody is down with this, you know? Okay, look, Michelle, you Obama’s shorty, you got the slave blood, he don’t. You supposed to understand what it is, and you are supposed to break it down for us. What did you do? You were fronting, girl. Fake.

  Limbaugh himself concentrated his fire on the Drive-By Media, which he accused of attempting to throttle criticism of Obama by enforcing a code of acceptable commentary:When Obama started out, we couldn’t talk about his big ears ’cause that made him nervous. We’ve gone from that to this: Not only can we not mention his ears. Now we can’t talk about his mother. We can
’t talk about his father. We can’t talk about his grandmother unless he brings her up as a “typical white person.”

  We can’t talk about his wife, can’t talk about his preacher, can’t talk about his terrorist friends, can’t talk about his voting record, can’t talk about his religion. We can’t talk about appeasement. We can’t talk about color; we can’t talk about lack of color. We can’t talk about race. We can’t talk about bombers and mobsters who are his friends. We can’t talk about schooling. We can’t talk about his name, “Hussein.” We can’t talk about his lack of experience. Can’t talk about his income. Can’t talk about his flag pin. We can’t call him a liberal. It started out we just couldn’t talk about his ears. Now we can’t say anything about him.

  After the election, the Washington press corps took to writing about Obama in heroic terms, comparing him with the great figures of American history. Limbaugh regarded this as a blatant dereliction of duty. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton had mocked her opponent’s ethereal style, and now, taking a page out of her playbook, he began calling Obama “the Messiah.”

  Limbaugh was quick to notice that, despite his reputation for eloquence, Obama was not much of an extemporaneous speaker. In fact, the new president rarely spoke without a teleprompter. After Obama accidently read the speech of his guest, the Irish prime minister, instead of his own, Limbaugh developed the conceit that the teleprompter, not Obama, was in charge.

  “Teleprompter, do you have a name?” he asked. “In your opinion, how is President Obama doing so far? Did he convey the level of anger you hoped for regarding what you told him to say about AIG? Teleprompter, is the president ever argumentative with you, or is he compliant with your instructions? Are you dating anybody, Teleprompter? Mac or PC?” This bit caught on, and when the wind blew over the teleprompter during a speech by Vice President Biden, he cracked, “What am I going to tell the president when I tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?”