Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (10 page)

Nobody would set up Limbaugh again. He and Ailes were in complete control of the format and the content. They taped every day at 5:00 p.m., making sure that the show was freshly topical. Limbaugh commented on the news, bantered with the crew, and clowned around. But there was a serious purpose to the program, just as there was to the radio show. Limbaugh was seeking conservative converts. “They call me the most dangerous man in America,” he boasted. “Know why? Because I am.”

The mainstream critics were dismissive. The show exposed Limbaugh as “a blowhard casting about for a TV persona,” said the
Boston Globe
. But Limbaugh and Ailes couldn’t have cared less about the voices of the liberal establishment. Their audience was elsewhere.

The show ran at various hours on more than two hundred stations. In cities where he competed in the late-night slot, his ratings often topped both Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s. By the end of his first season, he had more than three million viewers a night, a very respectable number, especially considering that some stations put him on at 1:00 a.m.

On the air, Limbaugh did some memorable stunts. Once he sent a reporter out into a snowstorm to interview people about global warming. He showed a clip of Vice President Al Gore at Monticello asking the curator who the plaster busts were (one of them, Gore was told, was George Washington). He ran a video clip of Bill Clinton telling an audience of children how he had learned to count to ten to control his temper, and then showed him cursing and chewing out the mayor of Washington for messing up a photo op.

Some of his bits went in surprising directions. He showed congress-woman and feminist icon Pat Schroeder praising Martha Washington for spending three terrible winters with the Revolutionary Army and boosting the morale of the troops, while Limbaugh, on a split screen, played an imaginary violin. He said that Martha had been in Valley Forge to boost her husband’s morale, not the troops’; and that Washington had made up the troop morale story in order to bill the Continental Congress for her expenses, “under the table.” He then clarified, for the “males in the audience,” that the term “under the table” referred only to money. Not too many comics were doing ribald Colonial humor on television.

As always, a lot of Limbaugh’s humor was self-referential. He ran a home movie of himself visiting Israel (a trip on which he was accompanied by Rabbi Segal), meeting dignitaries, and praying at the Wailing Wall. The clip ended with his standing in the turret of an Israeli Merkava wearing, Dukakis-like, a helmet and commanding the tank.

Some of the TV humor misfired. He ran a training film by a homeless-activist group, Project Dignity, that showed how to salvage edible food from restaurant Dumpsters. Limbaugh thought this was hilarious, but it wasn’t; it was callous and cringe inducing. Sometimes he got it just right. Katie Couric took the
Today
show to a Boston restaurant and girlishly grimaced as the chef cut up and fried a lobster. Limbaugh added a soundtrack of the lobster’s groans and screams of pain to mock Couric’s empathy for an essentially brainless (and soon to be devoured) crustacean.

One of Limbaugh’s recurring themes was his admiration for Ronald Reagan, whom he called “Ronaldus Maximus” and “the greatest president of the twentieth century.”

In mid-October of 1994, Limbaugh received a fan letter from the great man himself. “I am comforted to know that our country is in the capable hands of gifted young individuals like you and your listeners,” Reagan wrote. “You are the backbone of our great nation, solely responsible for the success of our worldwide crusade. God bless you and your audience for believing; for having faith in America’s future; and for making a difference in this world.” It was signed “Ron.”

Limbaugh had never quite captured the admiration of his father, but this was the next best thing, Ronald Reagan sitting in his living room in California watching him on television. Despite his “El Rushbo” shtick and his considerable political and cultural power, Limbaugh had never really been certain that he deserved his place in the conservative movement or the national media. He had been put down too often by his father, and fired too many times by dissatisfied station managers, to easily believe that he had truly and finally made it. The validation of Buckley, and especially Reagan, were critically important to him. He could finally say to himself, in the words of Jesse Jackson, a man Rush despises but in some ways resembles, “I am Somebody.”

Limbaugh was a television star but he didn’t like it. TV was profitable and ego gratifying, but it was also exhausting when coupled with the radio show. In 1996 he pulled the plug. “Rush didn’t like being dependent on so many people, which is the nature of television,” Roger Ailes, who went on to found FOX News, told me. “There are too many meetings for him. He likes the solo style of radio, the fact that it is all up to him. But his TV show was a success, don’t forget that. Believe me, if Rush wanted to go back on television, he could have a program of his own tomorrow. And not just on FOX.”

“I’ve done television and I’ve done radio—and radio, to me, is incomparable and irreplaceable,” Limbaugh said to a convention of broadcasters in 2009. “You own that audience member. It’s not Muzak. They’re not doing anything else. This is direct, hands-on. This is primary listening . . . Television provides the pictures. Radio doesn’t. The host either paints them or the listener paints the image him- or herself. But once that starts happening, you’ve got them locked.”

In the fall of 2009, not long after Limbaugh’s speech, the White House launched a campaign against FOX News. Obama himself said that FOX was more like talk radio than a conventional television network. This was, obviously, a political judgment; FOX, at that time, was the only TV network actually engaged in adversarial journalism in the first part of the Obama administration. It had broken scoops about Obama’s mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and played excepts from his incendiary anti-American sermons; revealed the political and professional connection between Obama and former Weatherman terrorist leader Bill Ayers; raised questions about Van Jones, a presidential adviser who had signed a petition accusing President Bush of collusion in the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and broadcast hidden-camera clips showing employees of ACORN—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a left-wing group with which Obama had close ties—advising a pimp on how to import underage prostitutes into the United States. These stories were profoundly embarrassing to the Obama administration—the president had been forced to sever his ties with Wright, accept Jones’s resignation, and watch as Congress cut off ACORN’s federal funding. Naturally, the president wanted to discredit the network.

Still, Obama wasn’t entirely wrong when he referred to FOX News as “talk radio.” In fact, Limbaugh himself had told me the same thing a year or so before. Later Rush had second thoughts and wrote to clarify that he hadn’t meant to put down Roger Ailes.

“I want to ensure that you didn’t take my comment that Fox News is Talk Radio on TV as a slam. Roger is one of my closest friends. I was speaking within the context of being proud of the things the success of my radio show spawned.”

In 1992 Limbaugh published his first book,
The Way Things Ought to Be
. He wasn’t a writer and he knew it—“I don’t have the iron butt you need for it,” he says.

Limbaugh enlisted John Fund, a young editorial writer at the
Wall Street Journal
, to tape conversations with him on the topics he wanted to discuss and shape them into a first draft. His brother, David, worked with him on the final version. “I’m more of a writer, Rush is more of a talker,” David told me. “In fact, he does his best thinking when he’s talking.” Rush dedicated the book, “To my parents, whose love and devotion made me the terrific guy I am.”

The Way Things Ought to Be
, with a picture of a sweetly smiling Limbaugh on the jacket, became a publishing phenomenon. It hit number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list and stayed there for almost half a year. More than a million copies were sold. When it got to be too big to ignore, the
Times
assigned TV critic Walter Goodman to review it.

“Some passages,” Goodman wrote, “alternate between slobberings of sincerity and slaverings of invective, but it is all in the service of the same cause.”

That cause, of course, was Limbaugh’s promotion of conservatism as he understood it. “This is a work for its time,” Goodman wrote. “Despite Bill Clinton’s recent victory, right-wing populism, an American perennial, is in bloom, and at the moment Mr. Limbaugh is its gaudiest flower. His appeal is to a part of middle America—call it the silent majority or The American People or the booboisie—that feels it has been on the receiving end of the droppings of the bicoastals as they wing first class from abortion-rights rallies to AIDS galas to save-the-pornographer parties.”

When a writer uses “gaudiest flower” and “booboisie” in the same paragraph, you can be pretty sure he is attempting to channel H. L. Mencken, the journalistic patron saint of irreverence, self-promotion, brutal satire, and public combat. Mencken often expressed his contempt for the influential right-thinkers of his time with a theatrical mockery. In 1926, for example, after an issue of his magazine,
The American Mercury
, was banned in Boston for publishing an “obscene” story about a prostitute who conducted her business in a graveyard, Mencken publicly broke the law by selling a copy of the magazine to the famous Massachusetts moralist J. Frank Chase—comically biting Chase’s coin to ascertain its authenticity (in an odd coincidence, the offending story, “Hatrack,” was set in Farmington, Missouri, just down the road from Cape Girardeau). The
New York Herald Tribune
editorialized against Mencken’s “incurable vulgarity” and “business acumen,” and derided him as a “professional smart-Aleck.”

A less antagonistic reviewer might have noticed that Limbaugh and Mencken had quite a lot in common, from self-educated disdain for schoolteachers to their incendiary satire and the impact it had on the culture.
¹

To Goodman, Limbaugh was merely a demagogue, devoid of ideas worth considering. Like most liberal intellectuals, the reviewer knew next to nothing about American conservatism, and it showed, especially when he tried to put Limbaugh and Pat Robertson into the same bag. Limbaugh did share many of Robertson’s political views—the two men were, after all, both conservative Republicans—but Robertson was the sort of televangelist Limbaugh had been mocking since his “Friar Shuck” bits in Pittsburgh. Rush might have a daily chat or two with Jesus, but his on-air banter about adult beverages, sexual innuendo, and at times profane language was anything but pious, and he certainly didn’t share Robertson’s belief that the Reverend Robertson could perform miracles.

Goodman conceded that dogmatic liberals sometimes invited Rush’s mockery and that he was a pretty fair radio comic. “The satire here is not subtle . . . I especially like the commercial for the Bungee condom, which has a daughter bringing Dad up to date on ‘the Bungee X27 model himhugger with extra torque capability’ which came in a Kennedy Weekend dozen or the Wilt Chamberlain carry-home crate.”

The review ended with a prediction based on a quotation. “ ‘We conservatives are the future,’ announces Mr. Limbaugh, and the reader may construe that as a political promise. On the evidence of
The Way Things Ought to Be
, with its deference to religion and patriotism, its relentless self-promotion (which may be a put-on, but then again maybe not), its no-budge line on crime, welfare, and sexual disarray, its massagings of honest, hard-working, clean-living, do-it-on-their-own folks, I’d guess Mr. Limbaugh will be running for office before very long, as America’s white hope.” Mr. Goodman would have lost that bet. By then Rush Limbaugh was too rich and too influential to run for anything.

Limbaugh was not only rich—his income in 1993, from books, radio, television, and his other ventures, was estimated at between fifteen and twenty million dollars—he was still growing. The EIB now consisted of 636 stations with about twenty-one million listeners a week. The TV show was prospering. He founded
The Limbaugh Letter
, a monthly publication that quickly attracted 430,000 subscribers—five or six times more than the circulation of the leading magazines of opinion on both the left and the right. His stage show, when he bothered going on the road, packed theaters and auditoriums. And, that year, he published his second (and thus far, last) book.
²

See, I Told You So
was dedicated to Rush’s 102-year-old grandfather: “For Rush Hudson Limbaugh Senior, You are the Limbaugh America should know.” Joseph Farah, Rush’s “conservative soul brother” from Sacramento, replaced John Fund as the designated journalist on the project, but, once again, the tone and content were unmistakably Rushian. The book went directly to first place on the
Times
list, and by the end of 1994 there were an estimated 7.5 million copies of Rush’s books, in print or on audio, in the hands of his fans.
³