Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (21 page)

Limbaugh’s audience is routinely disparaged by the national elite as a collection of dummies; civil rights attorney Constance Rice, writing in the
Los Angeles Times
, called them “a low information cohort.” In fact, Limbaugh listeners have above-average education and an unusually high degree of interest in what the Pew Center defines as “hard news.” They also fare better on current information tests than the readers of most elite publications, including the
Los Angeles Times.
¹¹

Whatever their IQ, Dittoheads are presumed to be a collection of miserable human failures. Professor Marc Cooper of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication calls them “embittered and battered” fools who can’t discern their real allies from their enemies. “Limbaugh’s audience is not a happy lot,” Cooper says. “They are completely convinced that an unholy coalition of liberals, homos, Feminazis, and overly entitled minorities are responsible for the mess of their own tiny, dead-end lives.” Professor Cooper didn’t cite a source for this conclusion. My own unscientific hunch is that the lives of Limbaugh fans are not necessarily tinier, messier, or more embittered than those of the average professor.

 

 

 

The Limbaugh Institute of Conservative Studies provides a daily tutorial on a variety of political, cultural, and historical issues, but no topic is visited more often or with more vehemence than the professional—ethical, ideological, and moral—imperfections of the mainstream American media establishment. The national media have constituted a Republican bête noire since the Washington press corps fell in love with JFK and Jackie. Richard Nixon famously hated journalists and put some on his enemies list. His vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, blasted the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Ronald Reagan was mocked by elite editorial pages and senior Washington correspondents as a dangerous fool for believing that the Soviet Union was an evil empire that should, and could, be defeated. Republican voters were caricatured as angry rednecks, religious fanatics, and reactionary idiots by an overwhelmingly Democratic press corps. (In 1972, when Richard Nixon got about 60 percent of the popular vote, the national press corps overwhelmingly voted for McGovern.)

When Rush Limbaugh came along, in 1988, the elite national media consisted of four conventionally center-left liberal television networks, three big Democratic newspapers (the
New York Times
,
Washington Post
, and
Los Angeles Times
), two politically correct weekly news magazines (
Time
and
Newsweek
), two nominally objective wire services (AP and Reuters), and the unmistakably liberal PBS and National Public Radio. There was no Internet, no
Drudge Report
, no Fox News, and no conservative talk radio. Right-wing opinion could be found on the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal
, in a couple of small magazines of opinion, and in the columns of a few token conservative pundits like Bill Safire and George Will. Limbaugh rudely shattered this soothing consensus. He was the un-Cronkite, the anti-Moyers, the Bizarro Brokaw, the inventor of back-talk radio. He wasn’t fair or objective and he didn’t pretend to be. His very existence on the other side of the teeter-totter provided balance. “I am equal time,” he has boasted.

If Limbaugh had been all bombast, his act wouldn’t have lasted long. But he proved to be not just a great broadcaster but a very astute media critic. He realized that the mainstream media’s greatest vulnerability was high-handed obtuseness. News organizations acted as though their biases and interests—financial, political, and personal—were invisible to the public. Limbaugh pointed out, in the clearest possible way, that the Emperor’s clothes were all tailored in the same shop, according to the same specifications, and he let his listeners in on why and how.

This was embarrassing, of course. Journalists like to think of themselves as independent thinkers and speakers of “truth to power.” In fact, they work for big organizations and, like organization people everywhere, they toe the company line. To soften this reality, editors and reporters are almost uniformly recruited from a pool of like-minded people. They don’t need to be explicitly told what to cover or how, any more than the Pope needs to send out memos to his cardinals about abortion. Here and there you can find editors and reporters with a certain degree of independence, but they are rare. As for editorial writers, they have all the latitude of West Point cadets.

The light Limbaugh has shined on the news business has played an important role in undermining the public’s respect for it. In 1985, three years before Limbaugh went on the air nationally, only 45 percent of Americans thought the news media were politically biased. In 2009, 60 percent thought so. The number of people who said the media tend to deal fairly with all sides declined almost by half. Three quarters of Americans now believe that the media favor one side—and by a more than two-to-one margin they think the favored side is the liberal one. The majority have gone from trusting the media to be fair and reliable to believing that they are neither. Rush Limbaugh did not cause this to happen all by himself, but no single individual, with the possible exception of FOX News President Roger Ailes, Limbaugh’s former producer and close friend, has contributed so much to the public’s realization that “news” is not whatever the half dozen like-minded news organizations in New York and Washington decide that it is. “I
am
equal time,” is not a hollow boast. At the very least he is a check and a balance on the power of the liberal media, a man willing to challenge the dominant news narrative. He is hated for this, of course, by people whose monopoly he destroyed. Some, like Professor Todd Gitlin of the Columbia School of Journalism, think the government should take Rush off the air. “Limbaugh is a liar and a demagogue, a brander of enemies, a mobilizer, and a rabble rouser,” Gitlin told me. “I’m for re-instating the Fairness Doctrine [the federal policy, revoked in 1987, that paved the way for uninhibited political commentary on the radio],” Gitlin said. He conceded that this would constitute a government limitation of free speech. “The corner that right-wing radio has on the medium is a warping factor in our politics,” he says. “Limbaugh is truck-driver radio. His voice is the voice of resentment, or in Nietzsche’s sense,
ressentiment
—it sounds better, more venomous, in French.”

When I told Limbaugh that Professor Gitlin, a prominent faculty member of America’s preeminent school of journalism, had called him a liar, Limbaugh seemed amused. “Anybody who talks for fifteen hours a week extemporaneously for twenty years makes mistakes, but I correct mine as soon as I can, for a very practical reason,” he told me. “If people don’t trust me, they won’t listen, and I won’t have any sponsors. I make my living selling advertising. I have no idea who Todd Gitlin is, but he obviously doesn’t know anything about the media.”

He also doesn’t listen to Limbaugh. Rush, like any satirist, engages in hyperbole, sarcasm, and ridicule, none of which is meant to be taken literally. Only the most oblivious or humorless critic would confuse it with lying. On reflection, and after consulting the Media Matters archive, Gitlin himself contacted me and asked to amend “liar” to “bullshit artist.” In the commentary business, “bullshit” is what you call the opinions of those with whom you disagree.

“The liberals’ favorite argument is that there is no argument,” Thomas Sowell has written. “Nothing uttered in opposition to liberal beliefs exists, in their minds, at least nothing worthy of their intellectual engagement.” This is certainly the way Democratic politicians, professors, and journalists have dealt with Limbaugh, and it has proven to be a highly unproductive strategy. For more than twenty years Limbaugh—using nothing more than ideas, words, and a microphone—has won (and kept) the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, reshaped the contours of the national media, articulated the central messages of conservatism, and helped set the Republican agenda. And, as the past year has demonstrated, he is very far from finished.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

L
imbaugh’s central place in the national debate was on display at the end of February 2008, when eight thousand right-wingers gathered in Washington, D.C.’s Omni Shoreham Hotel for CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference of the American Conservative Union Foundation. Only a few years earlier, at the 2004 Republican National Convention, the party had fielded a dream team of popular speakers and advocates: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson, the former senator from Tennessee who was now playing a district attorney on the TV series
Law & Order
. But they were all out of the picture now. Schwarzenegger had veered to the left on social issues and made a botch of California’s economy. Bloomberg had become an independent. The primaries killed off Giuliani and Thompson. Pataki came to Iowa, opened an exploratory office, found out what he wanted to know, closed the office, and disappeared. In the posttraumatic climate of the economic melt-down, Mitt Romney reminded voters of the CEO who fired them. Jeb Bush was probably the most talented Republican politician in the nation, but for once in his life he had the wrong last name.

For a while, Limbaugh had been touting Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the son of immigrants from India, as the coming man. At the age of four, Jindal had changed his name from Piyush to Bobby, in honor of his favorite character on
The Brady Bunch
, and in college he converted to Catholicism. It made a telling contrast to Obama’s journey from Barry to Barack and the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation theology. Jindal was an Ivy Leaguer and Rhodes Scholar with a common touch; he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives at age thirty-three, got reelected with 88 percent of the vote in 2006, and at thirty-six became America’s youngest governor. Best of all, from Limbaugh’s perspective, he was a Reaganite—hawkish on foreign policy, opposed to big government and high taxes, and conservative on social issues. Rush thought the Louisiana governor had the intellectual firepower and GOP-style melting-pot credentials to take on Obama, and he used this influence to help Jindal land the assignment of delivering the televised Republican rebuttal to the president’s first address to a joint session of Congress. But Jindal blew his chance. He came across as stiff, callow, and boring. YouTube lit up with comparisons with Kenneth, the overeager, hypernaive page on the NBC sit-com
30 Rock
. On the day after, Limbaugh spoke up for Jindal—“We cannot shun politicians who speak for our beliefs just because we don’t like the way they say it,” he said—but he understood that his protégé was a long way from prime time.

The delegates to CPAC 2009 wandered around the conference like political orphans, attending workshops with names like “The Key to Victory? Listen to Conservatives” and “Rebuilding the Movement Brain-storming Session.” Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schafley, Michael Barone, Ward Connerly, Senators Tom Coburn and John Cornyn, Representatives Mike Pence and John Boehner, and 2008 primary washouts Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney made speeches and presentations aimed at analyzing the party’s postelection predicament and rediscovering its electoral sweet spot. They were received politely but, as Malcolm X once said about the civil rights leaders of his time, they neither incited nor excited anybody.

That job fell to Rush Limbaugh, who was due to give the final speech of the event on Saturday at 5:00 p.m. As the hour grew near, the mood in the hotel grew lighter and more boisterous. El Rushbo was coming! Finally there would be some action. By 3:00 p.m. the five-thousand-seat Diamond Room was packed to capacity, and ushers began leading the spillover—a couple of thousand people, at least—into adjacent rooms where they could see the speech on huge television screens.

This was my first visit to a CPAC, but I had read about them, and I wasn’t surprised to see that men outnumbered women and there were very few dark faces. The youth of the audience was unexpected, though; close to two-thirds of the CPAC delegates were under the age of twenty-five, a great many of them students in on a free pass. I sat next to a twenty-year-old named Jake, a student at Gardner-Webb, a Christian college in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. In the 2008 primaries Jake had worked hard for Ron Paul, and he thought his man should be getting the Defender of the Constitution Award, which Limbaugh was slated to receive after his speech. “Rush is a defender of the Constitution,” Jake conceded, “but two years ago he laughed at Ron Paul.”

 

 

 

The elevated press platform in the center of the ballroom bristled with television cameras. FOX News was planning to broadcast the speech live and in its entirety, and CNN carried a large part of it as well. Reporters roamed the halls, asking the kinds of questions reporters ask at conservative gatherings and nodding vigorously at the answers to demonstrate that they didn’t think the people they were interviewing were imbeciles. Before Limbaugh arrived, CPAC published the results of its annual straw poll. In presidential primary years this poll is considered an important symbolic test of the relative strength of GOP candidates with their core constituency. This year it dealt mostly with policy. Delegates were asked to pick their main priority from among three choices. Seventy-four percent chose “promoting individual freedom by reducing the size and scope of the government and its intrusion into the lives of its citizens.” Only 15 percent picked “traditional values” by which they mainly meant opposition to gay marriage and abortion. Ten percent mentioned national security—a subject on which George W. Bush had won reelection four years earlier. The delegates were hawks and social conservatives, but, like Limbaugh himself, their first priorities were economic and ideological.

The poll included a second question: “Who is your favorite conservative media personality on either TV or radio?” Limbaugh won in a walk, outpacing Glenn Beck by 26 percent to 17 percent, and garnering more votes than Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Mark Levin combined. When these totals were announced, Jake shook his head unhappily. How could so-called conservatives give so much love to a man who had publicly laughed at Ron Paul?