Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  Jackson agreed, adding that Limbaugh had gotten rich “appealing to the fears of whites” (which, considering Jackson’s own corporate scare tactics, was a bit much).

  The head of the NFL Players Association, DeMaurice Smith, piled on. Smith, like Jackson and Sharpton, is a Democrat—in fact, he was a member of the Obama transition team. He wrote to his members that “. . . sport in America is at its best when it unifies, gives all of us reason to cheer, and when it transcends. Our sport does exactly that when it overcomes division and rejects discrimination and hatred.” A few black players said they would refuse to play for a team owned by Limbaugh, and Smith cheered their heroic stand. “We also know that there is an ugly part of history and we will not risk going backwards, giving up, giving in or lying down to it,” he said. “Our men are strong and proud sons, fathers, spouses and I am proud when they stand up, understand this is their profession and speak with candor and blunt honesty about how they feel.”

  Limbaugh knew going in that there would be opposition. But even he hadn’t anticipated the lengths to which some members of the media were willing to go. St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bryan Burwell called Limbaugh a racist and proved it with a damning quote: “Slavery built the South, and I’m not saying we should bring it back . . . I’m just saying that it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.” Dave Zerin, the sports editor of the Nation magazine repeated this on MSNBC, and CNN anchor Rick Sanchez did the same on his show. At least a half dozen writers, including Michael Wilbon of the Washington Post, cited the slavery remark in print.

  It got worse. Karen Hunter, an assistant professor of journalism at Hunter College, went on MSNBC and claimed that Limbaugh had lauded James Earl Ray, the murderer of Martin Luther King. She quoted Limbaugh: “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed.”

  Limbaugh never said these things or anything resembling them. They were inventions, pure and simple, taken from a book by Jack Huberman, 101 People Who Are Really Screwing Up America. Grudging apologies followed. Rick Sanchez, for example, reread the “quote,” mentioned Limbaugh’s denial, and said, “Obviously that does not take away that there are other quotes that have been attributed to Rush Limbaugh that many people in the African American community and other minority communities do find offensive.”

  In Boston, Commissioner Goodell told sportswriters that he, too, had a problem with Limbaugh getting into the game. “The comments that Rush made specifically about Donovan, I disagree with very strongly,” Goodell said. “They are polarizing comments that we don’t think reflect accurately on the NFL or our players. I obviously do not believe that those comments are positive and they are divisive. That’s a negative thing for us. I disagree with those comments very strongly and I have told the players that.”

  Limbaugh had never said McNabb was a bad man or even a bad quarterback. He said that McNabb was overrated (a debatable sports observation) and the recipient of the goodwill and support of some journalists who were rooting for a black quarterback (which was perfectly true and in accordance with the NFL’s own expressed hope for racial diversity in all positions).

  Checketts folded under the pressure and asked Limbaugh to drop out of the ownership group. Limbaugh refused; if Checketts wanted him out, he would have to fire him. So Checketts did. On October 16, Limbaugh told his audience the story. “I still love professional football. I’ll still love the people that play it and admire them, and I’ll probably end up remaining the biggest nonpaid promoter of the sport. . . . I am more sad for our country than I am for myself.”

  That was debatable. Limbaugh was deeply hurt—you could hear it in his voice. As a capitalist he conceded that nobody has the right to buy a football team. And he should have known that there wouldn’t be much sympathy for a man who lives in a twenty-four-thousand-square-foot glass house. Still, it stung. Twenty years had passed since he had been rejected in New York by the elite fraternity of broadcasters he had once dreamed of joining. It had been a long time since he had put himself out there again, and now that he had, he had been rejected again. All his success, wealth, and power weren’t enough to get him in the door of the new club he wanted to belong to. Not only that: the blackballing had been public and cruel. Sharpton and Jackson and DeMaurice Smith (and, he believed, the White House) had successfully branded him a racist, while the media spread the slander and the men he thought of as friends, rich men like himself whose owners’ boxes he had shared over the years, sat by and let it happen. The NFL had been his church on every given Sunday of his adult life. Now he found himself excommunicated.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FORWARD TO THE PAST

  In August 2009, when I saw Limbaugh in Palm Beach, he was in an upbeat mood. He had lost eighty pounds and was actually swimming laps, although he didn’t like admitting that he was exercising. He still thought he had a shot at buying the Rams. He was making more media appearances than he had in years—the following week he was scheduled to fly out to California to tape an episode of Family Guy, and he was booked to be one of the first guests on the new prime-time Leno Show. And he had a secret—he was in love.

  Professionally he was at the top of his game. The Atlantic named him the second most influential commentator in America, preceded only by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a man with whom he shares a pugnacious, partisan style. A recent Gallup Poll reported that 40 percent of Americans now identified themselves as conservative, 35 percent as moderate, and just 21 percent as liberal. And politically, his just-say-no strategy was bearing fruit. Thanks to Rush, the president and his party were left alone as champions of a very unpopular health care reform initiative. Obama and the Democrats had been shrinking in the polls for months, but members of Congress, home for summer vacation, were shocked by the outrage that greeted them at town hall meetings. Irate constituents demanded to know why the federal government, which was trillions of dollars in debt, wanted to take over health care and provide “free” medical coverage to forty million uninsured citizens. These questions came directly out of Limbaugh’s daily talking points.

  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attacked the demonstrators as “un-American,” a characterization that the White House itself stepped away from (“I think there’s actually a pretty long tradition of people shouting at politicians in America,” Deputy Spokesman Bill Burton told a group of reporters). New York Times columnist Frank Rich said the meetings were violent and compared the protestors to the militant right-wing anti-government movement. (It later emerged that there were a dozen or so reports of violence, mostly for shoving and pushing, at the more than four hundred town meetings. The worst casualty was a Republican whose pinky was bitten off by an Obama supporter.) A number of pundits began referring to the tea party crowds as “tea-baggers” a term that describes an esoteric form of oral sex that requires dexterity and a considerable amount of courage. Most people had no idea what tea-bagging actually was, but it caught on as a pejorative term. MSNBC turned it into an inside joke. David Shuster said that the protestors wanted to give President Obama “a strong tongue lashing and lick government spending” and that “if you are planning simultaneous tea-bagging all around the country, you are going to need a Dick Armey.” On CNN, Anderson Cooper noted that “it’s hard to talk while you’re tea-bagging.”

  Limbaugh, who once coined the term “addadicktome” for female-to-male sex-change operations, was not at all offended by this sort of crude humor. On the contrary, he saw it as a sign that the left was once again playing on his court. He hadn’t started the tea party movement, but he had done as much as anyone to fuel it and to provide the protestors with ammunition. He argued that health care was simply a socialist Trojan horse that would allow the government to assume control of a large part of the economy and serve as a pretext for bureaucrats butting into the personal lives of citizens in the name of promoting healthy behavior. And even before Sarah Palin began talking about “death panels,” he was poi
nting out that any government-controlled health system necessarily winds up making decisions about life and death based on cost effectiveness. All summer he had been playing a taped exchange between the president and the daughter of a 105-year-old woman whose request to be fitted with a pacemaker, at the age of 100, had been refused by her doctor. Luckily, she said, a second surgeon had performed the procedure, and her mom was still alive. “Outside medical criteria for prolonging life for somebody who is elderly,” asked the daughter, “is there any consideration that can be given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, the quality of life, or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?”

  Obama had answered honestly. “I don’t think that we can make judgments based on people’s spirit,” he said. “I think we have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good quality care for all people. End-of-life care is one of the most difficult sets of decisions that we’re going to have to make. But understand that those decisions are already being made in one way or another. If they’re not being made under Medicare and Medicaid, they’re being made by private insurers. At least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery but taking the painkiller.”

  Obama was at a town meeting in New Hampshire that day, and his televised town meeting took place at the same time as the Limbaugh Show. Rush provided a real-time fact check. When someone asked about end-of-life care, Rush once more played the exchange about the hundred-year-old mom. “You know what ‘give your mom the pain pill’ means, folks,” he said. “It means loop her out, let her die . . . you may be deciding it yourself about your grandmother, you may—or your mother—you may be deciding it with your doctor, but the United States government, the president of the United States is not issuing the guidelines yet.” Then he played a parody of Randy Newman’s “Short People,” sung by a faux Obama.

  Old people got no reason

  Old people got no reason

  Old people got no reason

  To live

  They need lots of drugs

  New hips

  After fallin’ down

  Just a couple of steps

  They need pacemakers,

  The cost is out of sight

  I give ’em a pain pill

  And just say good-bye . . .

  Don’t want no old people

  ‘Round here.

  . . .

  Fat people got big bodies

  Fat people got big bodies

  Fat people got big bodies

  And bad luck

  They don’t exercise

  They move too slow

  They got heart disease

  And cholesterol

  They’ll need those expensive machines

  That go beep beep beep

  Hospital tests that don’t come cheap

  Gonna tax everything they eat

  Every greasy bag of chips,

  Every single treat . . .

  While the song played, James Golden said, off the air, “He’s full of shit, this stuff about letting you keep your insurance.”

  “He’s a fucking liar,” said Limbaugh.

  “If I could lie like this I’d have any woman I wanted,” said Golden.

  Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, a member of the audience rose and asked if Obama supported a universal, single-payer system. “I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter because frankly we historically have had an employer-based system in this country . . .” he began, but that was enough for Limbaugh, who hollered at his engineer, “Roll the tape, 2003, AFL-CIO conference, Obama campaigning for the U.S. Senate.” Sure enough, there was candidate Obama saying, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan.”

  “Mr. President,” Limbaugh said, cutting back in. “You can’t do this and have people trust you. The power of your cultlike appeal is gone . . .”

  Limbaugh almost never has guests in his studio, but he had two today, college-age brothers from Arizona who were such big Dittoheads they had invited Rush out to attend an Arizona State football game. Limbaugh had made a counterinvitation, to visit him at the Southern Command. The brothers, both finance majors, were wide-eyed as they watched their hero perform at the EIB microphone (“It really is golden” one said to the other in awe) through the glass of the control booth. They listened in silence until Obama began talking about the cost benefits of preventive care for illnesses like diabetes. “But if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that’s $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, immediately, the surgeon is reimbursed. So why not make sure that we are also reimbursing the care that prevents the amputation? Right? That will save us money.”

  One of the brothers whipped out his cell and called his father, a surgeon, in Arizona. At the top of the hour, they informed Rush that a surgeon’s standard charge for a foot amputation, including three months of aftercare, was a thousand dollars. Anything more went to the hospital. Back on the air, Limbaugh quoted this figure, crediting his guests and their father. The boys were now a part of EIB history.

  As they were exchanging high-fives, Kathryn Rogers walked in. I hadn’t seen her since our dinner at Trevini, when her relationship with Rush was still more or less secret. Since then they had been photographed together, and the media were calling her Rush’s girlfriend. Kathryn rarely comes to the studio, but she was there today to look after Rush’s guests from Arizona. Like a lot of diplomats’ kids, Rogers has an easy way with strangers; the brothers were very obviously charmed by her.

  We chatted for a while about Rush’s diet, which she had arranged with a local weight-loss clinic, and how arrangements were going for the next Super Bowl. As we spoke, I noticed (couldn’t help but notice, actually) that she was wearing a gigantic rock on the third finger of her left hand.

  “Do you need to get congratulated?” I asked.

  She laughed and said, “It’s not real.” Which didn’t exactly answer the question.

  After the show, Rush and I sat in his studio alone, and I mentioned the ring on Kathryn’s finger. Since his last, acrimonious, divorce, he had insisted that he was through with marriage; he often told friends that if he ever even mentioned matrimony, they should tie him up and drop him in the ocean. He said something similar to me the first time we met. I was expecting to hear something like that again, but he said, “If Kathryn and I were to get married, I know they’d go after her,” he said. “I’m always going to be a villain. I learned in rehab that you can’t control what people who don’t know you think of you. But Kathryn—I don’t know how it would be for her, all the gossip and the nastiness. I worry about it.”

  The animosity level was indeed exceptionally high, not least because of Limbaugh’s unrelentingly harsh attacks on the president. The president had recently hosted a “beer summit” between Professor Gates and the Cambridge cop who arrested him; I asked Rush if, in that conciliatory spirit, Rush would be interested in reaching out. “You guys are both golfers,” I said. “Would you play a round with the president and show the country that there are no hard feelings?”

  Limbaugh thought it over and said, “He’s the president of the United States. If any president asked me to meet him, or play golf with him, I’d do it. But I promise you that will never happen. His base on the left would have a shit-fit.”

  “You never know,” I said. “After all, you thought the Times wouldn’t run a profile of you.” I wanted to add that I still hadn’t seen my Yankees tickets, but I thought it would seem small. “How about letting me ask?”

  “Go ahead,” Limbaugh said. “Nothing will come of it.”

  “What’s your handicap, just in case?”

  “Eighteen, nineteen,” he said. “What’s his?”

  I had no idea, but I promised to check in the event the president agreed. In the coming days I tried several times to reach David Axelrod, whom I know slightly, but he didn’t return my calls. I spoke to a very senior Democratic ac
tivist with whom I’m friendly, and he said he would convey the message. A day or two later he got back to me with the answer: “Limbaugh can play with himself.”

  On November 3, the voters went to the polls. The main attractions were the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, and in both places the Democrats were, as Virginia senator Mark Warner said, “walloped.” Just a year before, Virginia had been hailed as a bellwether of the new political demography when a coalition of African Americans and idealistic young voters and white suburbanites gave Obama a large majority—the first for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson carried the state. In 2009 the Obama coalition disappeared. A conservative Republican, Bob McDonnell, beat a moderate Democrat, Creigh Deeds, by a landslide, 17 percent. Democrats said that Deeds was not a good candidate. Maybe not, but in 2005 he had lost to McDonnell for attorney general by just 323 votes. Either the Republican had undergone a remarkable improvement in the intervening five years, or something else was going on.

  New Jersey was even worse for the Democrats. Chris Christie, a conservative Republican, unseated Democratic incumbent Governor Jon Corzine in a three-way race, by a comfortable 5 percent margin. New Jersey hadn’t elected a Republican governor for fifteen years. Obama won it by 16 percent in 2008. The president came to the state three times to campaign for Corzine and told voters how much he needed Corzine in the state capital, Trenton, to help him carry out his agenda. On the Sunday before the election, they appeared together at a rally at the Prudential Center in Newark, where they didn’t even draw a capacity crowd. Corzine, Democrats said after the election, was unpopular. That much was obvious, but it didn’t explain his loss to a not especially attractive or dynamic Republican conservative in one of the bluest states in the country.

  The Democratic leadership tried hard to put a positive spin on these results. They blamed the bad economy, which they argued was George W. Bush’s fault, and emphasized that gubernatorial elections always turn on local issues. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went so far as to declare the November 3 elections a victory for her party, staking her claim mostly on the outcome in the 23rd congressional district of New York, where a Democrat, Bill Owens, was elected to the House of Representatives for the first time in more than a hundred years. The 23rd—a normally obscure stretch of upstate New York that runs up to the Canadian border—became the focus of national attention in 2009. It began when Obama named the very popular incumbent congressman, Republican John McHugh, to the post of secretary of the Army. The seat was vacant, and a special election was scheduled. Local party bosses, animated by the fear that only a moderate-to-liberal Republican could win in the post-Obama climate, picked State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava.