by Zev Chafets
The mainstream comics and satirists were protective of the new administration. David Letterman attacked the teleprompter gimmick as “nitpicking,” and ran “Teleprompter vs. No Teleprompter,” a segment that contrasted an eloquent passage of Obama’s address to Congress with George W. Bush’s awkwardly extemporizing at a press conference. It took almost an entire year for Saturday Night Live to run a critical skit, based on the premise that Obama had accomplished nothing in office. Jon Stewart followed a few days later with a similar routine. This was so unusual that it made news. “Is President Obama in trouble with his late-night comedy base?” asked New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich, who, with considerable understatement, noted that late-night comedy had been “relatively gentle” on the new president. “Mr. Obama has of course been a puzzle to comedians for some time,” he wrote. “They agonized during the campaign about how his low-key and confident manner did not lend itself to edgy caricature. The challenge was made greater by the sensitivities inherent to lampooning a black candidate.”
In fact, the president and his administration—like all presidents and administrations—produced a daily menu of comic possibilities, from pompous declaration to incompetent execution. But liberal satirists (on the networks and Comedy Central there is no other kind), like nervous parents at a high school play, watched with crossed fingers and scowls for anyone rude enough to giggle at the performance. There was nothing funny here! This fine young man was doing his very best! And, of course, there were those “special sensitivities” to consider.
This left the field pretty much to Limbaugh, who had no trouble at all discerning and mocking the new president’s narcissism, his bowing and scraping to Third World dictators, his frequent changes of mind, and the pretense that he wanted a bipartisan government. Not all his jokes were funny; many were crude. But they demonstrated that the nation’s comics, like its serious journalists, weren’t doing their jobs.
Four months into Obama’s presidency, the guns were turned around, as the White House Correspondents’ Association held its annual gala dinner at the Washington Hilton Hotel. The WHCA is a venerable Washington institution founded in 1914, during the administration of Wood-row Wilson. Presidents since Calvin Coolidge had been guests. During World War II, the banquet was one of the rare public social events Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed himself to attend.
The WHCA Dinner is a black-tie affair that has gone show-biz in recent years. Journalists invite celebrity guests and a comedian-MC delivers political jokes. In 2006 Steven Colbert eviscerated George W. Bush in his routine, telling the president not to worry about poor poll numbers because statistics merely reflected reality, and reality “has a well-known liberal bias.” The takedown made Colbert a hero to Democrats, but some members of the WHCA thought it was too rough. The following year the anodyne impersonator Rich Little was brought in to make amends.
This time the comedian-in-residence was Wanda Sykes. It was an interesting choice. Sykes is a black, openly lesbian comedienne who works in the misanthropic style of the great Jackie “Moms” Mabley. Obama’s presence on the dais with her was a sign to his African American base—much louder and bolder than “we straight”—that the president was not dropping hot sauce for mayonnaise.
Traditionally the master of ceremonies skewers the president, but Sykes tossed a few softballs at him and then turned to her real target. “Mr. President, Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails . . . like, ‘I don’t care about people losing their homes, their jobs, or our soldiers in Iraq.’ He just wants our country to fail. To me, that’s treason. He’s not saying anything differently than Osama bin Laden is saying. You know you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the twentieth hijacker, but he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight.”
The crowd laughed, and Obama, after hesitating a moment, broke into a grin. Sykes turned to him and said, “Too much? You’re laughing inside, I know you’re laughing. Rush Limbaugh—‘I hope the country fails.’ I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a waterboarding, is what he needs.” At this point Obama stopped grinning; Sykes had finally gone too far. He saw the humor in hooking Rush up to a broken dialysis machine, but waterboarding was nothing to joke about.
Atypically, Limbaugh didn’t say a word on the air about Sykes’s routine, or the fact that the president of the United States had smiled broadly, in front of the entire country, about the prospect of his death. He was disconcerted, though, and he was right to be. He was in first place on the enemies list of the president of the United States. The day after the correspondents’ dinner he sent me an e-mail: “I know I am a target and I know I will be destroyed eventually. I fear that all I have accomplished and all the wealth I have accumulated will be taken from me, to the cheers of the crowd. I know I am hated and despised by the American Left.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE GUNS OF AUGUST
Two weeks after the WHCA dinner, President Obama nominated Judge Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court vacancy left by the retirement of Justice David Souter. The appointment of the first Hispanic to the High Court was warmly welcomed by liberals as a harbinger of the change that Obama had promised in the campaign.
Limbaugh was not so welcoming. Ten years earlier, when Sotomayor had been appointed to the Federal Court of Appeals in New York, Rush predicted that she was being groomed for a seat on the Supreme Court and urged Republicans to oppose her nomination. Sotomayor had been confirmed and served as an appellate judge, without any special distinction or particular controversy. Her power was in her biography, that of the daughter of a poor Puerto Rican widow, raised in a Bronx housing project, who, by dint of hard work—and affirmative action—made it to Princeton and Yale Law School. Sotomayor was also important to the Obama coalition, which is premised on a solid black-Hispanic alliance. Appointing Sotomayor was good politics, especially since it also made a lot of Democratic women, still smarting from Hillary Clinton’s primary defeat, feel included.
To Limbaugh, Sotomayor symbolized all that was wrong with the liberal, multicultural approach to jurisprudence. She had once remarked publicly that she hoped a “wise Latina” judge would make better decisions than a white man. Limbaugh demanded to know what would have happened to a white man who made such a statement about Hispanic women. The question, of course, was rhetorical. No male candidate could have survived it. Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich accused her of reverse racism.
At a White House briefing, a reporter asked spokesman Robert Gibbs about the charge. Gibbs responded with something that sounded like a threat: “I think it is probably important for anybody involved in this debate to be exceedingly careful with the way in which they’ve decided to describe different aspects of this impending confirmation,” he said.
“Robert Gibbs at the White House yesterday warned people like me to be very careful about what we say about Sonia Sotomayor,” Limbaugh said the following day. “So, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to turn your radio up because I’m going to have to whisper this so that they don’t hear [it] at the White House. In fact, those of you who can, if you’re in your cars, roll up your windows. Those of you who are at home, take your radios to the bathroom, close the doors. Make sure that no one else hears what I’m about to tell you about Sonia Sotomayor.” No sensational material was forthcoming. The “warning” was theater, a way of mocking the White House press office’s effort to dampen what appeared to be effective criticism of Sotomayor.
It failed, of course. Republicans continued to dig and, eventually, came up with a video clip of a speech that Judge Sotomayor delivered at Duke Law School in 2005, in which she said that the Court of Appeals “is where policy is made, and I know, this is on tape and I should never say that because we don’t make law, I know, I know . . .” The audience laughed nervously; the accusation that judges legislated from the bench is at the heart of the conservative critique of liberal jurisprudence. Limbaugh played the tape again and again, adding his own legal c
ommentary. Big Rush would have been proud to hear his son expounding with such passion on issues of constitutional law.
Limbaugh went after Sotomayor especially hard over her opinion in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano. In 2003 the city of New Haven, Connecticut, gave written and oral examinations to firefighters for promotion. There were nine vacancies for captain, and they went to the nine highest scorers—seven whites and two “Hispanics” who may or may not have been “white” (the Census Bureau doesn’t regard “Hispanic” as a racial category). Whites also scored highest on the lieutenant exam and filled all eight available slots. The city of New Haven invalidated the results of the tests. The white and Hispanic firefighters sued, claiming their rights had been violated. A law suit followed. The district court upheld the city’s decision, which had been based on the argument that blacks are a protected minority and were unfairly impacted by the results of the test. The Court of Appeals, which included Sotomayor, upheld the lower court’s decision. But, in a fluke of timing, the decision was reversed by the Supreme Court right in the middle of Sotomayor’s nomination, and it became a cause célèbre. Limbaugh once again saw it as an example of reverse racism and linked it to President Obama’s remark that he wanted judges who were “empathetic.” Limbaugh understood that empathy is in the eye of the beholder. He (and his mostly white, male listeners) had no trouble imagining how the doctrine of multicultural empathy might affect them in a court of law.
In the end, Judge Sotomayor was confirmed easily. She was not, despite some ill-considered remarks, a radical, as her Senate hearing made clear. In any case, the Democrats had an insuperable majority in the Senate, and many Republicans didn’t want to go back home having voted against a qualified Hispanic woman.
Besides, Sotomayor wouldn’t tip the balance of the Court. Limbaugh knew he would lose this one, but he was laying down a marker for Obama. No future liberal nominee to the Court, no matter how personally virtuous, experienced, intellectually accomplished, or ethnically attractive, would get a free pass. In Limbaugh’s view, judicial liberalism was its own disqualifier.
Limbaugh’s opposition to Judge Sotomayor was a gift to Democrats courting the Hispanic vote. President George W. Bush won almost half these votes in 2004, and while Obama had received a comfortable majority in 2008, Latinos, especially the Mexican American community, were still up for grabs. But Limbaugh didn’t believe that the GOP could beat the Democrats at the game of ethnic pandering. “The Republican Party, when it wins, does not do identity politics,” he told an interviewer. “We don’t have one policy for Hispanics, another for blacks, and another for whites. That’s not how Republicans win; it’s how Democrats win.” As proof he pointed to the poor showing that McCain, the champion of immigration reform, had made among Spanish-speaking voters in the 2008 election.
Limbaugh himself became an issue in that election when the Democrats aired Spanish-language TV ads featuring an alleged comment he made about “stupid and unskilled Mexicans” and another in which he supposedly told Mexican Americans to “shut your mouth or you get out.” “John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces,” says the narrator in Spanish. “One that says lies just to get our vote . . . and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families. John McCain . . . more of the same old Republican tricks.”
ABC’s Jake Tapper, one of the few network journalists who retained a modicum of professional distance from the Obama campaign, checked the ad and reported that it was bogus.
The first “quote” was from a 1993 monologue on NAFTA in which Limbaugh said that the bill would cause “unskilled, stupid Mexicans” to take the place of “unskilled, stupid Americans.” And “shut your mouth” had nothing to do with immigrants. It was part of a bit on Limbaugh’s Laws of Immigration: “First, if you immigrate to our country, you have to speak the native language. You have to be a professional or an investor; no unskilled labor.” No government business would be conducted in a foreign language, he said, and the schools would not offer bilingual education. “If you’re in our country, you cannot be a burden to taxpayers. You are not entitled to welfare, food stamps, or other government goodies . . . if you want to buy land, it’ll be restricted. No water-front, for instance. As a foreigner, you must relinquish individual rights to the property. And another thing: You don’t have the right to protest. You’re allowed no demonstrations, no foreign flag waving, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his policies. You’re a foreigner: shut your mouth or get out! And if you come here illegally, you’re going to jail.”
There was a punch line to this rant: These are Mexican laws.
“That’s how the Mexican government handles immigrants to their country. Yet Mexicans come here illegally and protest in our streets!”
I asked Limbaugh how he felt to be demonized in a language he doesn’t speak. It gave him an idea. “Maybe I should start broadcasting my show in Spanish,” he said. “Of course, I’d have to find a broadcaster who could do it with my charisma and showmanship, but you never know. Maybe I can find one. It’s a thought.”
Just as the Sotomayor controversy was dying down, another racially charged incident made headlines. Harvard Professor Henry “Skip” Gates, a black man in his late fifties, was arrested in Cambridge by a white policeman who had received a report that someone had been seen breaking into a house. That someone was Gates, and the house was his. He had been abroad, returned home from the airport, and found his door jammed. He and his driver jimmied the lock, which is what set off a neighbor’s call to the cops. Gates took umbrage at the officer’s request for some form of identification and an argument ensued. Professor Gates wound up handcuffed and booked for disorderly conduct.
That evening, during a press conference, a reporter asked President Obama about the incident. Obama, who is a friend of Gates, said he didn’t know the facts or what role race played in the event, and added, “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know, separate and apart from this incident, is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that’s just a fact.”
Shooting from the hip like that was a rookie presidential mistake. The cop, it turned out, was neither a racist nor stupid; in fact, he was a highly regarded veteran of the Cambridge force who taught courses in racially sensitive policing to new officers. And Professor Gates hadn’t been an entirely innocent figure in the argument that led to his arrest. In fact, it was alleged, he had made some unflattering comments about the cop’s mother. Obama, who had come to office promising to heal racial rifts, invited Gates and the officer to the White House for a beer, a handshake, and a photo op. Limbaugh dismissed it as “two guys with an attitude” who had jumped all over a cop and didn’t even apologize.
It wasn’t a great moment in Obama’s presidency, but he was certainly right about one thing: there is a long history of blacks being stopped by the police for no good reason. Limbaugh thought that the remark, coming from the country’s chief law-enforcement officer, was extreme and inappropriate, a sign of what he saw as Obama’s basic disaffection with the country he had been elected to lead. In an interview with Greta Van Susteren on FOX News, he said, “Let’s face it. President Obama is black, and I think he’s got a chip on his shoulder.”
Rush and I were both raised at a time of racial optimism and naïveté, when the goal of decent white people was an integrated society. We were taught that skin color shouldn’t matter, that we were all basically the same, that we should judge others not by their color but the content of their character. And if we didn’t achieve this in practice, or even try very hard—and most of us didn’t—it was, at least, the ideal that decent people subscribed to.
But things changed. Malcolm
X introduced a compelling analysis of the black condition in America that included a historical counternarrative leading to a doctrine of racial nationalism and separatism. In one of his most famous metaphors, he compared black integrationists like Martin Luther King to “house Negroes” who loved the slave master more than the master loved himself. The black masses, he said, were “field Negroes” who caught hell every day and hated white people. “When the master’s house caught on fire, the field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he died . . . He was intelligent.” The militancy of Malcolm X begat the Black Power movement (just as Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois begat Malcolm) and encouraged African American intellectuals to see themselves not as Americans but as people of color whose interests and sympathies were properly aligned with the (anti-American) Third World.
White America was baffled by this. At the very moment the United States was passing landmark civil rights, black people (still known in polite circles as “Negroes”) were rioting in the streets and kicking well-meaning whites out of the civil rights movement. How could that be? Then Dr. King was murdered, more rioting followed, and more white reaction. Efforts to integrate schools by enforced bussing were violently opposed in Northern Democratic cities like Boston and my own home town of Pontiac, Michigan. The Republican Party capitalized on white fear and disaffection with the “southern strategy” that brought Richard Nixon to office. Blacks left the Republican Party en masse and became a permanent wing of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the American intelligentsia stopped talking in terms of an integrationist, national melting pot and adopted a tribal model, in which righteously disaffected minorities (blacks, women, gays, Hispanics, and Native Americans) made group identity the basis for their politics.