Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (18 page)

His vehicle was Operation Chaos.

On February 7, Limbaugh had suggested holding a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, who was trailing Barack Obama. He toyed with the notion for the next few weeks. Then, on March 3, the day before the Texas and Ohio primaries, he instructed his listeners in those states to go out and vote for Senator Clinton.

“The strategy,” he explained, “is to continue the chaos in [the Democratic] party. Look, there’s a reason for this. Our side isn’t going to do this. Obama needs to be bloodied up. Look, half the country already hates Hillary. That’s good. But nobody hates Obama yet. Hillary is going to be the one to have to bloody him up politically because our side isn’t going to do it. Mark my words. It’s about winning, folks!”

The next day, Hillary Clinton won Ohio and Texas (although Obama took the caucus and won the delegate count, 99 to 94). The national media, which hadn’t paid serious attention to Limbaugh for years, was shocked by the result, especially in Texas, which Clinton won by 100,000 votes. Various exit polls had contradictory findings, but Karl Rove, who knows more about Texas politics than anyone on earth, told me that 120,000 or so Republicans had crossed over in the open primary and won it for Clinton. The candidate herself didn’t seem to disagree. After the vote was announced, reporters asked her how she felt about Limbaugh’s role in the election. “Be careful what you wish for, Rush,” she replied jauntily.

Unlike Texas, Ohio is not an open primary. Voting is theoretically restricted to registered party members. Unregistered voters who turn up at the polls are required to sign a pledge of party affiliation to participate. Hillary beat Obama by more than 200,000 votes, winning 53.5 percent to 44.8 percent. Obama activists charged that Limbaugh’s crossover voters had tipped the scales. They also said that it was illegal—they hadn’t officially changed their party membership, as the law required them to do. Michael Slater, the executive director of Project Vote—Obama’s community-organizing alma mater—demanded action. “I think this is Rush and others inspiring people to commit voter fraud,” he said. “They should be brought under investigation.”

Chaos was working beyond Limbaugh’s (always high) expectations. The media were now full of stories and speculations about his influence on the Democratic race. Democratic calls for an investigation into how people voted sounded dire and un-American. The vote, after all, had been conducted by secret ballot. Maybe some of the crossovers had voted for Obama (or Hillary) for reasons that had nothing to do with Limbaugh. What were the authorities supposed to do, track down citizens and grill them on their party loyalties and determine whom they voted for?

Limbaugh wrung a week’s worth of hilarity out of this situation. On March 11, Mississippi held its primary. Obama won, but Clinton got far more votes than predicted. Once more the media reacted with alarm. Writing in the
Huffington Post,
John K. Wilson said that the Limbaugh Effect was saving Hillary. “Rarely in American politics have so many people ever intentionally voted for a candidate they hate so much. Approximately 40,000 Republicans in Mississippi decided to vote for Hillary Clinton in order to help her destroy the Democratic Party this year with a divided convention . . . The only hope for Hillary Clinton is that Republican voters will help her reduce the gap against Obama, and that the super delegates will somehow be convinced to obey the will of Rush Limbaugh and his acolytes by stealing the election from the legitimate voters.”

Limbaugh was, of course, triumphant. I was sitting in his studio on March 19 when he opened his show with news from the battlefield. “Operation Chaos headquarters, I am commander Rush Limbaugh, here at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Operation Chaos, we can safely say, is exceeding all objectives.” Limbaugh then read a selection of responses to Chaos, including one from author Marianne Williamson, an Obama supporter, who said that she, for one, would not “vote with my vagina.”

A Reuters-Zogby poll had just been released, showing Obama’s big national lead over Hillary Clinton evaporating. The pollsters thought that Senator John McCain was benefiting from the lengthy campaign battle between Obama and Clinton. “Well, yes,” Rush said. “That’s the primary purpose of Operation Chaos.”

A lot of seasoned political reporters thought that Chaos was more about ballyhoo than ballots, but the Obama campaign understood how much it was being hindered. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, described the Limbaugh Effect in his postcampaign book,
The Audacity to Win
. “If Rush Limbaugh had not encouraged Republicans to vote in the Indiana primary for Hillary as a way of extending our race, we would have won outright . . . Over 12 percent of the Indiana primary vote was Republican and Hillary carried it, despite her through-the-roof unfavorable numbers with these voters. Limbaugh’s project worked in Indiana—it cost us that victory—but it didn’t matter. The die was cast.”

Limbaugh saw what Plouffe saw; Obama was going to win. Chaos had created turmoil in the enemy camp, but all good things had to end eventually. He had always known that either Clinton or Obama would win out, and he was pretty sure that the winner would also be the next president. It didn’t look like 2008 would be the Republicans’ year, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be a good one for Limbaugh.

Operation Chaos was not only an act of partisan harassment; it was also a piece of interactive political performance art. By enlisting his audience, he turned them from sullen conservatives without a real Republican candidate to support into merry pranksters. “Rush is a master at framing an issue and creating a community around it,” said Susan Estrich, who ran Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign.

Rush’s most famous venture in community building came in 1993 when a young guy from Fort Collins, Colorado, Dan Kay, called the show and said he didn’t have the money to subscribe to the newly founded
Limbaugh Letter
. Rush saw an opportunity to score a political point against Bill Clinton, whose administration was encouraging schoolchildren to symbolically help pay down the national debt with the proceeds of bake sales. Limbaugh said that maybe Dan should do the same to raise enough for a subscription. Listeners began calling the show to say that they wanted to attend Dan’s bake sale. An advertising company in Colorado offered to put up fifteen billboards to promote it. Brennan’s, one of the most famous restaurants in New Orleans, sent a chef to prepare and serve eight thousand orders of bananas Foster. Limbaugh flogged the event on the air. On the appointed day, at least thirty-five thousand people gathered in Fort Collins, where Limbaugh personally welcomed them to “the conservative Woodstock.”

Chaos was a national bake sale. It drew a crowd, got people laughing at the Democrats, and infuriated liberals—a Limbaugh trifecta. The goal was never to determine the winner of the primaries, just to keep the audience involved. He kept it going until Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign in mid-June, at which point Rush, speaking as commander in chief of Operation Chaos, grandly declared “mission accomplished.” Chaos even enabled Limbaugh to turn an extra buck. He started selling Operation Chaos gear, including a T-shirt that proclaimed its objectives: “Crossover to vote in Democrat primaries. Prolong the Democrat primary battle. Allow the Clintons to bloody up Obama politically, since our side won’t do it. Enjoy liberals tearing each other apart. Drain the DNC of campaign cash. Annoy the Drive-By Media . . . And WIN IN NOVEMBER!” The gear became the biggest seller since the Club Gitmo Collection.

CHAPTER NINE

“D
o you know what bought me all this?” Rush Limbaugh asked, waving his arm in the general direction of opulence. We were sitting in his study in Palm Beach, puffing on La Flor Dominicana Double Ligero Chisel cigars from his walk-in humidor. There are five houses on Limbaugh’s ocean-front estate in north Palm Beach. He lives in the largest, a twenty-four-thousand-square-foot mansion that he renovated and decorated; the other houses are for guests.

This is a lot of space for a man who was, at the time, living alone with his cat. When I pointed this out, Limbaugh frowned. I was the first journalist he had ever invited over, he told me, and I could see him wondering if it had been a mistake. He told me that the house was actually quite modest by Palm Beach standards. If I wanted to see really ostentatious living, I should go to south Palm Beach, where Donald Trump and other genuine plutocrats lived.

I never got to south Palm, but Limbaugh’s neighborhood seemed plush enough. On the way from the studio he had pointed out some good-sized estates, one of which was on the market for $81 million (and sold shortly thereafter). Rush had been offered $65 million for his place, but turned it down. He was comfortable; why move?

Limbaugh drives himself—at least he did in Palm Beach—in a black Maybach 57 S, $450,000 fully loaded. When we got to his house I saw that he had a garage full of them. “Anticipating a question,” he said, “why do I have so many cars? Two reasons. First, they are for the use of my guests. And two, I happen to love fine automobiles.”

I actually hadn’t been wondering why he had so many cars. Rich people tend not to stint on transportation. What I did wonder is why all of them were black. He told me that he likes black cars, which made a kind of sense. Limbaugh is old-fashioned, even elegant, in his personal furnishing. Flashy cars are for hip-hop artists and arrivistes; professional men of substance ride in dignified black automobiles. It’s what Rush’s grandfather would have driven if, for some reason, he had been faced with the question of what color Mercedes he should own.

There was no visible security at the gates of Limbaugh’s estate. We were greeted at the kitchen door by two members of Limbaugh’s domestic staff, which includes a chef he hired away from a local hotel. It was hard to look at these women without thinking of Wilma Cline, the drug-dealing housekeeper who turned Rush in. Limbaugh is known as a very generous boss, but Cline was an object lesson in the limits of loyalty.

Rush Hudson the First was a man who shunned conspicuous consumption, but his grandson is no Veblenite. Limbaugh’s house is, in the phrase of his close friend Mary Matalin, “aspirational.” Largely decorated by Limbaugh himself, it reflects the things and places he has seen and admired. A massive chandelier in the dining room, for example, is a replica of the one that hung in the lobby of New York’s Plaza Hotel. The vast salon is meant to suggest Versailles. The main guest suite, which I didn’t visit, is an exact replica of the Presidential Suite of the Hotel George V in Paris. There is a full suit of armor on display, as well as a life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo. Fragrant candles burned throughout the house, a daily home-from-the-wars ritual.

Limbaugh led me into his inner sanctum, the two-story library that is a scaled-down version of the massive library at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. Cherubs dance on the ceiling, leatherbound collections line the bookshelves, and the wood-paneled walls were once, he told me happily, “an acre of mahogany.” We sat at an onyx-and-marble table in a corner of the study with a view of the patio, a putting green, and the private beach beyond.

There was a brochure on the table for Limbaugh’s newest version of
EIB One
, a Gulfstream G550, powered by two Rolls-Royce BR710 engines. It can fly at fifty-one thousand feet for as long as it takes to get wherever he’s going. One of his Web sites shows photos of the plane’s interior (which is tastefully luxe) and gives specs, including “armaments: CLASSIFIED.” He told me that it would run him $56 million. Owning such a plane is a convenience, obviously, and a status symbol, but it is also an homage to his father, an aviation bug who subscribed to flight magazines and flew his own Cessna 182 out of the Cape Girardeau airport.

“One of the saddest things, one of the most regretful things I have is that my father died before we acquired
EIB One
,” he said one day on his show. “He would have not believed it. I would not have been able to get him out of the cockpit jump seat. He would have tried to go get his jet rating. He wouldn’t have been interested in sitting back in the passenger cabin with the flight attendant serving adult beverages and food.” When I visited him in the summer of 2009, he had a picture of the plane as his screensaver on his Mac.

Limbaugh was in a very good mood during my visit. Not only was Operation Chaos keeping him in headlines, but he was on the verge of finishing negotiations on his new contract. His payday from his radio show would be $400 million for eight years, with a signing bonus of $150 million. When this figure was announced it elicited howls of indignation from journalists, many of whom were losing their jobs in the great media contraction of 2008. CNBC asked
Vanity Fair
’s Michael Wolff if Limbaugh was worth the money. “I think it’s a monster error,” Wolff said. “I’m sitting here saying, ‘What are these people smoking?’ You know, the truth is that Rush Limbaugh has ridden the rise of conservatism for twenty-five years and . . . Maybe nobody quite—quite has been following the news, but that’s coming to an end. It’s going to be over, and Rush Limbaugh, in a relatively short period of time, is going to look like a kind of really-out-of-it oddity. And I cannot, for the life of me, imagine how someone could have made this deal.”

As predictions go, this one wasn’t especially accurate.
Talkers Magazine
, the nonpartisan industry trade magazine, estimated that Limbaugh’s weekly audience grew by a million listeners from the time he signed the deal with Clear Channel through the spring of 2009. A vexed-sounding Wolff wrote, “The most elemental fact about the Limbaugh career might be that, outside of seriously corrupt dictatorships, nobody has made as much money from politics as Rush Limbaugh.”

Limbaugh considers this kind of analysis amateurish. “Do you know what bought me all this?” turned out to be a rhetorical question, the answer to which is: capitalism.