Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (19 page)

“First and foremost, I’m a businessman,” he said. “My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates.”

The average AM radio station devotes about five minutes per hour to news, reserves eighteen to twenty for advertising, and uses the rest for content. Limbaugh supplies that content on a barter system. For every hour of gross airtime, he owns around five minutes. Since he is on three hours a day, five days a week, on about 588 stations (in most places, he is number one in his time slot), that adds up to about forty-five hours a week.

Limbaugh sells these minutes. Some buyers are advertisers who simply run their usual ads. Others use Limbaugh as their pitchman, which costs them a premium and a long-term commitment. And lately he had created a new option: at double the normal rate card he will weave a product into his monologue.

To sell ads to a radio audience, first you need the audience, and nobody has one like Rush’s. “Rush Limbaugh saved AM radio,” I was told by Michael Harrison, the editor and publisher of
Talkers
. “He created the modern talk format. He’s Elvis and the Beatles combined. He’s been number one in the ratings for the past twenty years, and if he stays on the radio for another twenty years, nobody will ever surpass him.”
Talkers
puts Limbaugh’s weekly listenership at fourteen million; after 2008, it rose considerably. Nobody else was (or is) close. Sean Hannity, the number two talker, trails by more than a million listeners. Michael Savage was listed at number three. “Savage isn’t even in my rearview mirror,” Limbaugh told me.

Limbaugh is not effusive about most of his fellow talkers. Sean Hannity and Mark Levin are protégés, and he has defended Glenn Beck from attack by the Obama administration, but he doesn’t really consider them, or anyone else, in his league. When we met in March, Bill O’Reilly still had a syndicated radio show that competed directly with Limbaugh in his afternoon time slot.

I asked Rush what he thought of O’Reilly and, after a moment’s reflection, he said, “He’s Ted Baxter. Sorry, but somebody’s got to say it.” He claimed he has never listened to Don Imus or Laura Ingraham. Garrison Keillor? “I wouldn’t even know how to find NPR on the dial.”

“I never mention others on the air, and I don’t engage in contrived rivalry crap. That’s bad business; it encourages people not to hear the station you are on.” He has made an exception for Larry King, who he truly doesn’t like. “He never had nice things to say about me, from 1988 to the present. He was working midnights [on the radio] when I started and demanded that his syndicator move him to afternoon drive when my success was obvious. He bombed and quit radio for CNN e xclusively.”

Democrats have attempted over the years to find a liberal radio talker to counteract Limbaugh, but they haven’t found one. Mario Cuomo, Jim Hightower, and Gary Hart all tried and failed. “They all did two-hour Saturday shows to combat me, and the media gave them publicity out the ass . . . as though they were the Great White Hopes,” says Limbaugh.

In the spring of 2004, Air America was launched to great fanfare, as the progressive alternative to Limbaugh and his fellow conservatives. The talent included Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, and Randi Rhodes. But the venture was ill starred. It was discovered that the network received $875,000 in no-interest loans from a nonprofit Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx; the money was returned. Air America attracted a small audience, few stations, and fewer advertisers. Less than two years after its grand launch it filed for bankruptcy protection. Limbaugh celebrated the fall, calling Air America, “an embarrassing, blithering, total bomb-out of a failure.” Liberals, he said, can’t compete in the open marketplace of ideas, because they don’t really want to spell out what they actually believe. “There’s no hiding on talk radio,” he said. “When your ideas sound stupid, it’s out there to be exposed for one and all, and that’s why Air America and liberal talk radio doesn’t get an audience—because it’s not worth listening to!”
⁸

But more than ideas are behind Limbaugh’s broadcasting success. His innovation was to bring top-40 radio’s energy to political issues, and over his career it has won him four Marconi Radio Awards for Syndicated Radio Personality of the Year from the National Association of Broadcasters and membership in both the Radio Hall of Fame and the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.

“Rush is just an amazing radio performer,” says Ira Glass, the host of
This American Life
. “Years ago, I used to listen in the car on my way to reporting gigs, and I’d notice that I disagreed with everything he was saying, yet I not only wanted to keep listening, I actually liked him. That is some chops. You can count on two hands the number of public figures in America who can pull that trick off.”

Glass compares Limbaugh to another exceptional free-form radio monologist, Howard Stern. “A lot of people dismiss them both as pandering and proselytizing and playing to the lowest common denominator, but I think that misses everything important about their shows,” he told me. “They both think through their ideas in real time on the air; they both have a lot more warmth than they’re generally given credit for; they both created an entire radio aesthetic.

“Like everyone, I’m a sucker for the smart-ass outsider, which he plays with such glee. That’s what’s great about him at his best: it’s such a happy show! And the idea that he’d just sit there, not take calls, not have guests . . . is as radical an invention as Howard Stern’s format. Rush is a lone figure. Talking to us in that peculiar way you can over the radio—where he’s our buddy, leaning in for a joke, tugging on our sleeve as he tells us something nobody else knows, but he’s also a preacher, delivering the good news to the masses. When I first heard him, I was surprised to hear this tone work in the middle of the day. I’d always thought of that solitary sort of radio as something that works better in the dark, late at night. Something about Rush’s upbeat, triumphal, braggy joy—the happiness of the show—is what makes it play when the sun is still up.”

On-air joyfulness has always been the default persona for top-40 disc jockeys; it is something Limbaugh has been honing ever since he was Rusty Sharpe. The skits and parodies he runs, mostly written or cowritten with comedian Paul Shanklin, are a part of the jollity. So is the expert use of rock and roll. What other right-wing (or left-wing) talker would have known the spoken B-part of Bo Diddley’s 1962 song “You Can’t Judge a Book by Looking at the Cover” (
“Come in closer baby, hear what else I got to say / You got your radio turned down too low. Turn it up!”
) and thought to use it as bumper music?

Bombastic intros and cutaways to commercials are another Limbaugh trademark. There are more than seventy of these, and they rotate with the mood of Rush and his chief engineer, Mike Maimone, who works out of Limbaugh’s Sixth Avenue studio in Manhattan. Maimone sent me a very partial list:

Sometimes the cutaways are connected to current events—“insider information you can legally use,” in a segment on Martha Stewart’s trial, for example; or “drilling for truth” after an item on the fight to extract oil from protected lands in Alaska. From time to time Limbaugh adds something new, just to keep things fresh.

A lot of what makes Limbaugh’s show fun is his irreverence toward subjects that conservatives customarily discuss, in public, with extreme reverence or not at all. Like sex. I was in the studio when Limbaugh decided to take on the prostitution scandal that had just brought down the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, and the admission by his successor, David Paterson, had he, too, had engaged in adulterous conduct. Conservative commentators were bashing both men in harsh language, but Limbaugh took a different approach. He laughed at them.

There is a format to this kind of satire. Limbaugh first introduces the most ridiculous liberal take he can find on the matter at hand. Today’s text came from an article on
LiveScience.com
, “Are Humans Meant to Be Monogamous?” Then he reads it in an imitation of how he imagines the author of such a ludicrous article would speak. For scientific pieces, he usually employs a smug, supercilious Oxbridge tone. “Social monogamy is a term referring to creatures that pair up to mate and raise offspring but still have flings,” Limbaugh quoted. “So a cheating husband who detours for a romantic romp yet returns home in time to tuck in the kids at night would be considered socially monogamous.”

Now El Rushbo steps in to frame the issue. “Snerdley! Do you realize the great thing this is for mankind? This story has lifelong application for all of us, guys, thanks to Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson. Just keep a copy of this story in your pocket . . . get out there and do whatever, and then when you’re called on it, say, ‘No, no, no, look, science says I’m still monogamous . . .’ ”

Snerdley and Dawn exchanged looks. Rush has his unpredictable side and it wasn’t clear where he was taking this. Alarmingly, he was now reading another article about a Senate candidate in Idaho who had tried to change his name to “Pro-Life” because election authorities wouldn’t let him put his full name, Marvin Pro-Life Richardson, on the ballot. The phones were ringing. “Angela from Raleigh, North Carolina, Angela, thank you for waiting, you’re next, the EIB Network. Hello.”

“Rush, monogamous dittos,” said Angela, using the standard jargon of Limbaugh fans to voice their agreement with what has already been said on the show before their call.

“Thank you,” Limbaugh replied courteously. “Socially monogamous dittos, yes.”

“Socially?”

“Well, that’s what the story was, if I go out and cat around and get home in time to put the kids in bed, it’s social monogamy.”

Angela didn’t think it was funny. “The reason I called, I talked to your screener and I told him that my belief is that the family is the fabric of this nation, it’s what makes us great, and because it’s what fuels everything that we do . . . And I just feel like this is—these attacks on the family, I wonder if these people know what they’re doing.”

Limbaugh, faced with a humorless caller, headed for indignation. “Hell, yes, they know what they’re doing. Look, Angela, this is serious stuff. There are a lot of people in this country who want to do away with traditions and standards like you have discussed here . . . they want no standards, and in order to have no standards where they can live guilt free by doing what they want, they have to wipe them out for everybody, and they have to attack them . . . I did not mean to have my flippant attitude indicate to you that my devotion to such traditions and standards has wavered in any way, shape, manner, or form. I am Rush—Protector of Motherhood, Supporter of Fatherhood, Defender of Children—other people’s.”

That “other people’s” caused Snerdley and Dawn to exchange another look. This is the sort of W. C. Fieldsian aside that Rush sometimes can’t resist. He gets away with it largely because of the demographic of his audience. The vast majority of Dittoheads are men—72 percent according to a Pew Survey in 2008. This is much higher than any other non-sports talk show on radio or television .
⁹
This gender gap is the mirror opposite of the
Oprah Winfrey Show
, whose audience is 72 percent female and 28 percent male.
¹⁰
There are obvious differences between Rush and Oprah, but also some striking similarities. They are both innovators who have built and kept vast audiences who idolize them. Rush and Oprah are cultural and political figures as well as entertainers, courted and embraced by candidates and presidents. And both use their personal stories and travails to forge emotional bonds with their listeners. Oprah often discusses her troubled teenage years and her battles with weight. Rush happily recounts (and usually overstates) the number of times he was fired, alludes sometimes to his marital failures, jokes about his cigarette habit, and talks about his own struggles with weight.

Oprah is a touchstone for women who see her as a wise and empathetic counselor. Limbaugh dispenses a fair amount of advice, too, usually on how to achieve success in a capitalist society and on the value of passion in choosing a profession. On more emotional questions, he lacks Oprah’s gentle touch. One of my all-time-favorite caller exchanges was with a guy named Jerry from Ohio, who wanted to know about matrimony. “I know nothing is perfect, but I go, ‘Damn, if Rush has trouble making marriages work, I think I would have even more trouble because of your situation and everything.’ What do you think about that?”

Limbaugh told Jerry never to compare himself to others, least of all to him. “We had a woman call and say, ‘Don’t ever get married. Your work is too important to be distracted from,’ and I think there are some of us to whom that applies. I don’t know what you do, Jer, but I’m out there saving America and so forth, and that’s a full-time job . . .”