Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  It isn’t, of course; 2012 is a long way off. New candidates, perhaps including some Limbaugh conservatives, will emerge from the 2010 congressional elections. Palin may turn out to be the conservative Geraldine Ferraro and disappear, or wind up with a lucrative career in the private sector. She might prove to be the lightweight her critics, in the Republican Party and beyond, take her for. On the other hand, she might get herself nominated and even elected. If a washed up, elderly movie actor like Reagan, or a black man raised in Hawaii and Indonesia named Barack Hussein Obama, can be elected president, anything can be imagined. And it would be undeniably ironic if the first woman president owed her job to Rush Limbaugh, the bête noire of feminism.

  President Obama was unpopular at the start of 2010, but he still has plenty of time to recover. Even if the midterm elections go badly for the Democrats, he could still win reelection with the sort of comeback Bill Clinton staged in 1996. It is possible that Obama, as liberal pundits like Frank Rich believe, represents a new American political demography that will rule for years to come. It is also far from certain. John F. Kennedy was the herald of a new generation “born in this century” (the twentieth)—and four of his first five successors were older than he. Twenty years after Camelot, Reagan, who was born during the administration of William Howard Taft, supposedly redrew the electoral map by turning the clock back to Norman Rockwell’s America. Bill Clinton moved it forward again to the Age of Aquarius. As Larry O’Brien, one of JFK’s smartest aides, once observed, there are no final victories in politics.

  What America has instead is a permanent argument between Federalists and Jeffersonians, progressives and traditionalists, conservatives and liberals. This is an essential argument about human nature, and the balance between personal freedom and collective responsibility. The presence of this debate is one of the vital signs that a society is open and free. Those who decry Limbaugh (or, on the other side, relentlessly partisan liberal Democrats like Frank Rich or Paul Krugman) “polarizing” ignore the fact that only totalitarian states are unipolar. Democracies are adversarial, and you don’t get to choose the other side’s advocates. Limbaugh isn’t interested in putting himself in the shoes of the Other. He doesn’t want to make a deal, split the difference, or strike a blow for civility. “There are no books written about great moderates,” he sometimes says. “Great people take stands on principle, not moderation.” That’s not true, of course—the founding fathers Limbaugh venerates compromised their way into a Constitution, and even Ronaldus Maximus knew when to bend. Politics is the art of compromise. But, of course, Limbaugh is not a politician or even a political strategist. He is a polemicist and, as polemicists since Cato the Elder have known, moderation doesn’t draw a crowd.

  On December 22, 2009, Limbaugh opened his show by announcing that he had been chosen “radio personality of the decade” by Adweek magazine. “The man manages to stay in the headlines no matter who’s in the White House or who’s gunning for him,” he quoted approvingly. A few days later he flew out to Cape for Christmas with the Limbaugh family, and then on to Hawaii for a golf outing, and promptly made headlines once again. On the afternoon of December 30 he was rushed to the Queens Medical Center with a severe chest pain he thought was a heart attack. The ambulance was still on its way when Wikipedia flashed a bulletin to the world: Rush Limbaugh is dead.

  The news of Limbaugh’s death, like that of his fellow Missourian Mark Twain, proved premature. Within fifteen minutes Wikipedia corrected its report. Limbaugh was alive, resting comfortably, and, as it turned out, all right. Like Tom Sawyer, he had been given a preview of his own funeral. His fans deluged him with e-mail prayers followed by joyful messages. Limbaugh-hating bloggers expressed their delight at his demise and then their deep disappointment. Soon rumors raced through cyber-space that Limbaugh was using drugs again and had overdosed. To counter them, a fit-looking Rush held a press conference with his cardiologist, Doctor Joana Magno standing by, and explained that an angiogram had turned up no heart problem at all. A reporter asked if Limbaugh was once more using pain pills for his back, to which he responded with a grin. “No. Prednisone,” an anti-inflammatory cortiscosteroid.

  At the press conference Limbaugh lavishly praised the hospital for the outstanding care he had received and remarked that as far as he was concerned the American health care system was just great. This provoked a political storm, with commentators on the left charging that Limbaugh had taken a swipe at Obama’s health care initiative. Limbaugh was perfectly well aware that it would, too. “That little comment, we’re going to get three days out of this,” he told Kathryn Rogers. He was wrong. He got a week.

  Like all originals, Rush Limbaugh contains multitudes. There is some Sunday School boy in him, left over from the Centenary Methodist Church, and a fair amount of Hugh Heffner; Bo Diddley’s swaggering guitar, and Bill Buckley’s drawing-room harpsichord. He is an introvert with forty guests for dinner on Thanksgiving, a cynical romantic who doesn’t understand women but keeps on trying (in December he sent out save-the-day notices to his friends for a June wedding to Kathryn Rogers), a polite, soft-spoken listener who, on the radio, shouts rude, sometimes vulgar personal insults at his ideological enemies. Limbaugh is a biting and sophisticated political satirist whose own taste in humor runs to mother-in-law jokes told by Borsht Belt tummlers like Myron Cohen and Professor Irwin Corey. There probably isn’t another man on the planet whose heroes and role models have been Ronald Reagan, Muhammad Ali, James Madison, Gordon Gekko, superjock Larry Lujack, and Justice Antonin Scalia.

  But, more than anything else, Rush is his father’s son. Big Rush taught Rush and his brother, David, that being an American meant being a Limbaugh, and that a Limbaugh worth his salt was an outspoken patriot, a conservative Republican, a college-educated professional, a family man, a pillar of the church and the community, and a passionate defender of the well-established truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition as understood in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, circa 1956. Like all sons, Rush often fell short of his father’s standards, but he never stopped believing in them, or trying to win Big Rush’s approval by carrying his message to the world.

  It has been more than twenty years since Rush Limbaugh first appeared on the scene and almost that long since Ronald Reagan passed on to him the half-serious title of “most dangerous man in America.” Limbaugh took the coronation seriously. Over the years he has endeavored to carry forward the banner of Ronaldus Maximus, which he always credits as “Reaganism.” But as time moves on the memory of Reagan fades. It is Limbaugh’s voice conservatives identify with. For millions, conservatism is now Limbaughism.

  Even after more than twenty years there are still many people who refuse to accept that Limbaugh is more than an entertainer, a pitchman, or a hot-air balloon. These are the same people who mistook Reagan for an amiable dunce. Two decades should have been enough to convince even the most obtuse that Rush Limbaugh is someone you underestimate or ignore at your peril. He can’t be wished away or shouted down or sniffed into irrelevance. Smart liberals will listen to him, even if they hate what he has to say. The easily outraged, will be. Those with a sense of humor will find themselves laughing despite themselves. Presidents and politicians come and go, but Rush Limbaugh, equipped now with a clean bill of health and accompanied by a lovely new wife (and, who knows, maybe a future Rush Hudson IV), and in undisputed control of the conservative movement, is ready for the next act. He has often said that he doesn’t intend to quit until he has convinced every liberal in the country. He’s not in a hurry, either. His grandfather, the original Rush Hudson Limbaugh, didn’t retire until he was 103 years old.

  EPILOGUE

  THE PARTY OF “HELL NO”

  Iwas going to end this book at the end of 2009, but Rush just kept on rolling. On January 5, Democratic senator Byron Dorgan announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection. That news was followed by Senator Chris Dodd’s decision to retire (and a couple weeks after that by an announcement by Beau Bi
den, the vice president’s son and the presumptive favorite to win his father’s old Senate seat in Delaware, that he wasn’t going to run). “They know what’s coming in November,” said Limbaugh. “And they know why . . . Don’t doubt me.”

  The momentum kept building. Republican Scott Brown won a special election for the U.S. Senate with moves right out of Limbaugh’s playbook—opposition to the Democratic plan to reform health care and a stinging critique of the administration’s antiterrorism policies.

  Rush compared Brown’s victory to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Democrats had lost Teddy Kennedy’s seat! “This one’s for you, Mary Jo,” he said. “This one’s for you, Judge Bork.” He predicted that 2010 would be an even greater Republican landslide than 1994 and reminded his audience who was responsible. “A year ago [moderate Republican pundits] were telling us we had to cross the aisle, we had to hope Obama succeeded, we had to work with him, we had to show the electorate that we were for larger government . . . that’s what some in our party were actually saying one year ago. There was one man, ladies and gentlemen, who stood tall and opposed every aspect of that, and I don’t mind saying it was I, your host, El Rushbo.” Temporarily speechless at his own prescience, he ended the riff with James Brown’s “I Feel Good.”

  Two days later, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out major portions of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform legislation, which limited the political contributions of corporations and unions. Limbaugh had been calling for this for years; the law, which he considered a limitation of the First Amendment, was one of the first things he raised when I asked him, in 2008, what he had against John McCain. Limbaugh hailed the Court’s decision as a “huge victory for freedom and liberty.”

  More good news was coming. The Pew Institute’s annual poll of voter priorities found that Americans listed concerns about global warming dead last on a list of twenty-one issues. Not only that: The UN panel on climate change (ICCP) was forced to admit that one of its key assertions—that the Himalayan glaciers are rapidly melting—was based on nothing more than an unverified claim by an environmental lobby group. “The primary evidence that they used has been made up,” Limbaugh said. To complete Rush’s environmental trifecta, the AP reported that Osama bin Laden (or whoever issues audiotapes in his name these days) was warning that global warming threatened the world—and that the best way to stop it would be to destroy the American economy.

  The new year rolled merrily along, Air America, the left-wing radio network founded in 2004 as the antidote to Rush, abruptly shut down. Limbaugh had predicted from the start that its staff wouldn’t succeed any better than previous Great Liberal Radio Hopes such as Mario Cuomo and Jim Hightower. Now he mockingly wondered why Air America employees hadn’t been among the millions of Americans whose jobs President Obama claimed he was saving with his stimulus spending—demonstrating once more that he is nothing if not a bad winner.

  The demise of Air America coincided with another survey. Public Policy, a Democratic-leaning polling company, found that Fox News was the only television news organization trusted by a plurality of the public. The media establishment was shocked and outraged, but Limbaugh, the Godfather of the Fox approach (and an increasingly frequent guest on its air), was delighted. Fox, like Rush, had been singled out by the White House as an unreliable source of information. The Public Policy poll was sweet vindication. Somewhere Big Rush, who had eaten his dinner cursing at Dan Rather on the nightly news, was smiling.

  Meanwhile, everything seemed to be going wrong for Obama and the Democrats. Brown’s victory imperiled the prospect of real health care reform along liberal lines. The terrible numbers on global warming, coupled with one of the worst prolonged snowstorms in recent American history, made the passage of cap-and-trade legislation highly improbable. Unemployment remained extremely high and Obama offered no solution. A big majority of the public disagreed with Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to read Miranda rights to the man accused of attempting to blow up a plane over Detroit. Senator Chuck Schumer, one of Obama’s stalwart supporters, pushed back against the president’s proposal to hold the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 hijackers in downtown Manhattan. The prison in Guantánamo was still open, despite Obama’s promise to shut it. “The fact that Obama’s agenda has totally failed this year is the best thing that could have happened to this country,” he told an interviewer on Fox. “I thank God it is going down the tubes” (the agenda, presumably, not the country). In one year, Limbaugh had gone from hoping the president would fail to declaring he had.

  Rush celebrated in Las Vegas, where he served as a judge at the Miss America pageant and stole the show by winning the judges’ dance contest with some strenuous moves to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” Then he flew back to the Southern Command and right into a new controversy.

  White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, it was reported by The Wall Street Journal, had lashed out at liberals in his own party, calling them “fucking retarded” for their all-or-nothing approach to health care reform and the threats of some interest groups to run against Blue Dogs who weren’t supporting the legislation. Sarah Palin, who has a mentally handicapped child, denounced Emanuel’s use of the word “retarded” and called on him to apologize or resign. Limbaugh saw this as a fine opportunity to make fun of Emanuel. “What did the politically correct language police want from the guy?” Rush asked with mock innocence. All poor Rahm had done was tell the truth, “calling a bunch of people [i.e., liberal Democrats] ‘retards,’ who are retards.”

  The joke blew up in Rush’s face. It sounded like he was dissing Palin as “politically correct,” and using “retard” as a putdown in the same way Emanuel had. When reporters asked her why she wasn’t going after Limbaugh as she had the White House chief of staff, she lamely said that name-calling is always wrong and, besides, Rush was just being satirical. Governor Palin clearly didn’t want to get into a fight with the one man in America who could end her national aspirations in a few sentences. Besides, Governor Palin is a lifelong Dittohead (years ago her father ran into Limbaugh at a golf tournament and requested an autograph for his daughter).

  Rush’s influence on Palin was apparent in her speech to the inaugural meeting of the Tea Party movement in early February. Her talking points were orthodox Limbaughism—a call for low taxes, small government, domestic energy drilling, a muscular foreign policy based on national interest, and American exceptionalism. Even her best jibes at Obama (“a charismatic guy with a teleprompter”) and his policies (“how’s that ‘hopey-changey stuff’ working out for you?”) were lifted from Rush’s routine. Predictably he loved the speech and even compared the governor to Ronald Reagan.

  Palin was very careful in Nashville to make clear her opposition to turning the Tea Party movement into a political party. Limbaugh adamantly opposes third parties on the right (“that’s how Democrats win,” he said after the speech). The conservative mission was to reclaim control of the GOP from the moderates and compromisers and then lead a unified party to victory in November and beyond.

  On Super Bowl Sunday, Limbaugh hosted his annual Super Bowl party. He and his thirty-six guests sat sipping 1961 vintage Château Latour and firing up cigars from Rush’s vast humidor when President Obama appeared on the giant theater screen in his viewing room for a pregame interview with Katie Couric. Obama invited Republicans to a health care summit at the White House at the end of February. “I want to come back and have a large meeting with Republicans and Democrats to go though, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move forward,” the president said.

  The next day, Limbaugh called the invitation a trap. His “I hope he fails” rejection of Democratic outreach had been a winning political strategy for more than a year, and Rush called on Republicans to stay the course. “Don’t be afraid of the media calling you the ‘party of no,’” he counseled his listeners, who include every Republican in the country who hopes to win election this fall. “We need to be the party of �
�no.’ We need to be the party of hell no.”

  In mid-February, John McCain announced he intended to reprise the 1994 Contract with America with a new set of 10 Republican Promises to American voters. Limbaugh didn’t care for the idea. What kinds of promises could a moderate like McCain make? He advised even hard-core conservatives, including members of the Tea Party movement, to refrain from offering ideological programs or electoral pledges on the grounds that these would only foster internal Republican disunity and confuse voters. Limbaugh offered a simpler formula. “My ten promises to the voters in 2010? The Bill of Rights. The Constitution of the United States. That’s the only document we need.” Specifics to come, of course, every weekday at noon Eastern Standard Time on your AM radio dial.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have been in the book-writing business a long time, but I was amazed to discover that almost no New York publisher wanted a book about Rush Limbaugh that didn’t have the word “idiot” or “liar” in the title. A friend in the business explained it to me. “I have to go out for lunch in this city every day.” Luckily I found an editor, Adrian Zackheim, who doesn’t care about lunch. He and his extremely talented assistant, Courtney Young, have been steady partners in this project, and I am very appreciative.

  Warm thanks, as always, go to Flip Brophy of Sterling Lord Literistic. Somehow she keeps me working, which is the highest compliment an author can pay to an agent.

  The world of Rush Limbaugh is not an easy one to enter. HR “Kit” Carson, Rush’s executive producer, decided, for some reason, to help me and provided a portal into Limbaugh-land. He arranged my first trip to Palm Beach, got me a front-row seat at CPAC, let me hang around Limbaugh’s New York studio, sent me photos and transcripts from programs past, and generally helped me understand the history and trajectory of the Limbaugh Show. Other members of the staff were also very helpful. Thanks to Dawn, Cathy, Brian, Michael, and James Golden, aka “Bo Snerdley.” Many of the song parodies and skits on The Rush Limbaugh Show are written (or cowritten) and performed by comedian Paul Shanklin. I want to thank him for giving me permission to quote from his work.