Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (22 page)

At exactly 5:00, Limbaugh took the stage to the tune of his radio theme music, the Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone.” Limbaugh looked terrible, bloated and sweaty in a black sports coat and a black shirt open two buttons at the neck. He looked less like the avenging angel of Republican values than John Goodman playing a Vegas lounge singer.

The audience cheered wildly and chanted “Rush! Rush! Rush!” as Limbaugh pumped his arms and threw down some self-mocking rock star moves. He is a radio man first and foremost, but he is not uncomfortable on stage. In his early years in New York, he did three annual
Rush to Excellence
tours across the country, one-man shows to build his audience. The tours were a success, and his Web site touts them as examples of his “mastery of live performance on stage.” Recently, though, Limbaugh has limited his live appearances to a handful each year, and his stage chops seemed a bit rusty. Still, he was obviously delighted by the reception and thrilled to be delivering what he repeatedly called “my first live address to the nation”—a bit of faux presidential bombast intended to enrage any liberals who happened to be watching.

As usual, Limbaugh was joking and serious all at once, playing his celebrity for laughs, but he was mindful of the moment. Ronald Reagan (“a two-bit actor,” people once said) had occupied this very same podium at CPACs thirteen times. Now here he, Rush, was, center stage.

Limbaugh opened with a not-too-funny joke that began, “Larry King passed away, goes to heaven . . .” The story was an old one—King went to heaven, sat on the celestial throne, and was told by God that the seat belonged to Limbaugh. The crowd chuckled at Rush mocking his own pomposity. Would a guy who actually was pompous do such a thing? I later learned that Limbaugh had another motive for telling that particular joke. In 1993 Limbaugh was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, and Larry King presented the award. “There is a new organization being formed,” King said at the time. “It’s called ‘Feminists, Blacks and the Homeless for Limbaugh, and they are meeting in a phone booth in Wichita.” Limbaugh didn’t react at the time, but he was mortified—many of his radio idols were in the audience. It took him sixteen years but that evening he settled a score—“Larry King passed away” on national television.

Limbaugh then turned to the issue at hand. “Let me speak about President Obama for just a second,” he said. “President Obama is one of the most gifted politicians, one of the most gifted men that I have ever witnessed. He has extraordinary talents. He has communication skills that hardly anyone can surpass.”

There were nervous giggles, as the crowd waited for the punch line, but Limbaugh held up his hand, signaling that he was serious.

It broke his heart, he said, to see the president misuse his gifts by fighting for high taxation to promote government welfare programs that would only make citizens more dependent on Washington rather than inspiring them to individual effort in the free market. He accused Obama of suffering from the chronic liberal disease of pessimism about America. “Ronald Reagan used to speak of a shining city on a hill,” he said. “Barack Obama portrays America as a soup kitchen in some dark night.”

The audience cheered, and this time Limbaugh let them go on as long as they liked. He was on national television and he was in no hurry to get off national television. “President Obama, your agenda is not new,” he said. “It’s not change, and it’s not hope. Spending a nation into generational debt is not an act of compassion.” It was not, he added, the role of Obama or any other politician to remake the country, tear the country apart, and rebuild it in their own image.

Having diagnosed the problem, Limbaugh went on to the solution. “The blueprint for landslide conservative victory is right there,” he said. It was Reaganism. It frustrated him that the Republican moderates didn’t see this, or care. “Why in the hell do the smartest people in our room want to chuck it? I know why. I know exactly why. It’s because they’re embarrassed by some of the people who call themselves conservatives. These people in New York and Washington, cocktail elitists, they get made fun of when the next NASCAR race is on TV and their cocktail buds come up to them [and say]: ‘These people are in your party?’

“Conservatism is a universal set of core principles. You don’t check principles at the door . . . Beware of those different factions who seek as part of their attempt to redefine conservatism, as making sure the liberals like us, making sure that the media likes us. They never will, as long as we remain conservatives. They can’t possibly like us; they’re our enemy. In a political arena of ideas, they’re our enemy. They think we need to be defeated!”

The CPAC audience cheered and cheered. This was what they wanted, full-on defiance and resistance to the wave of liberalism that had left them disoriented since November. Rush wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know (many of them had learned it from him in the first place). They were applauding his clarity and his certainty.

The adoration got to Limbaugh. His speech was scheduled for thirty minutes, but he wouldn’t stop, and he went on for nearly an hour over the allotted time. Later he told me that the organizers of the event asked him to continue, but his own sense of timing should have told him he had gone on much too long. In the studio he is a master of control and timing, but today he rambled. The people around me began sneaking looks at their watches. We were getting very close to dinnertime. Limbaugh finally concluded the speech, accepted his award, went directly from the ballroom to the airport, and flew back to Palm Beach, where he had left a houseful of weekend guests. He had done what he had come to do—rally the troops, cement his role as the leader of the conservative movement, and keep the media fixated on him. His plane wasn’t even in the air when Bill Schneider, CNN’s political analyst, said that Limbaugh had “crossed a line” by reiterating his hope that Obama failed and described the speech as “sinister.”

It was just the first in a loud chorus of media indignation occasioned by Limbaugh’s CPAC performance. But the White House was pleased. They still thought there was political gain in putting Limbaugh’s face on the GOP. “Rush Limbaugh is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party,” Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said the following morning on
Face the Nation
. “Do you really think he is that important, that other Republicans are paying that much attention to him?” asked host Bob Schieffer.

“Well,” said Emanuel, “he was given the keynote, basically, at the Conservative Conference, to speak . . . I do think he’s an intellectual force, which is why the Republicans pay such attention to him.”

That night, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, a black Maryland lawyer, went on D. L. Hughley’s short-lived CNN interview program. Hughley is a comedian and former gang banger, a Blood so fearsome—according to himself—that his nickname was “Lil Rock.” Steele, who fenced in college, was clearly intimidated by such enormous street cred. When Hughley said that the Republican National Convention “literally looked like Nazi Germany,” Steele remained silent. But when Hughley referred to Limbaugh as a “clown” and “the head of the Republican Party,” Steele spoke up.

“No he’s not,” said Steele. “I’m the de facto head of the Republican Party—”

Hughley said he was happy to hear that, because he had heard Limbaugh say that he wanted Obama to fail.

“Let’s put it into context here,” said Steele. “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh, the whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it’s incendiary; yes, it’s ugly.”

The next day, on his first show since CPAC, Limbaugh had a few words for the chairman of his party. “Okay, so I am an entertainer, and I have twenty-two million listeners because of my great song-and-dance routines. . . . Michael Steele, you are head of the RNC. You are not head of the Republican Party. Tens of millions of conservatives and Republicans have nothing to do with the RNC, and right now they want nothing to do with it, and when you call them asking them for money, they hang up on you. . . .”

Limbaugh didn’t say how he knew this. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t reporting on the party’s fundraising; he was threatening it. “If we don’t want Obama and Reid and Pelosi to fail, then why does the RNC exist, Mr. Steele? Why are you even raising money? What do you want from us?” He went on to say that he had personally campaigned for Steele when he ran for governor of Maryland and that Steele was now stabbing him in the back. Knives were on his mind. “If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it’s in, I would quit. I might get out the hari-kari knife because I would have presided over a failure that is embarrassing to the Republicans and conservatives who have supported it and invested in it all these years . . .”

It took less than one hour for Michael Steele to do what Congressman Phil Gingrey had done: crawl. “My intent was not to go after Rush,” he told Mike Allen of Politico. “I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a bit inarticulate . . . There are those out there who want to look at what he’s saying as incendiary and divisive and ugly, that is what I was trying to say. There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership . . .”

Limbaugh was now clearly the biggest elephant in the country. Robert Gibbs, the president’s spokesman, used the White House briefings to attack him day after day, alternately bemoaning his political obstruction and belittling him as merely a radio broadcaster trying to improve his ratings and make some money. Limbaugh laughingly pleaded guilty on every count. At one point, pro-Obama journalists in the press corps anxiously asked Gibbs if he wasn’t making a mistake by paying too much attention to Limbaugh.

That, however, remained the Democratic strategy. Howard Kurtz of the
Washington Post
reported that Obama people were going around town bragging about how they had lured the Republicans into a trap. “The White House has decided to run against Rush Limbaugh,” he wrote in a long article. It wasn’t exactly a scoop. Democratic strategist James Carville bragged about it on TV (Carville is married to Republican strategist Mary Matalin, one of Limbaugh’s best friends; they were among a handful of guests at Limbaugh’s third marriage), and Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, published an anti-Limbaugh op-ed in the
Washington Post
.

Limbaugh had become a full-fledged media obsession.
Saturday Night Live
did skits about him. A
New Yorker
cover depicted eight Limbaugh-faced infants squalling. David Letterman joked about how awful Limbaugh had looked at CPAC and asked his guest, CBS news anchor Katie Couric, what she made of “this bonehead, Rush Limbaugh.” Couric passed with a girlish “
Dave!
Don’t do this to me.”

“Every time you turn on the TV you see something about Rush Limbaugh,” said James Carville, on TV.

Limbaugh, as usual, kept coming. They wanted to make him out to be the leader of the Republican Party? Great!
Reductio ad absurdum
was his game. As the “titular head of the Republican Party” he challenged President Obama to a one-on-one debate, graciously offering to send the
EIB One
to transport the president to the event. It would, Limbaugh explained, save taxpayers money. Needless to say, Obama did not re spond.

Susan Estrich, who managed the 1988 Dukakis campaign, warned her fellow liberals, as Tina Brown had several weeks earlier, that they were being too clever by half. Limbaugh, she said, is not encumbered by the practical constraints and duties of real politicians, very much including the president. “Trying to beat him at his own game when your own game is played by a different set of rules is a losing proposition. He knows that,” she wrote. It was smart advice, but Obama’s strategists were not inclined to accept counsel from one of the masterminds of the Dukakis campaign.

Limbaugh assured his listeners that he was happy to be fighting the White House. “I was made for this. I was built for this,” he said. “I admit if this were happening my first year behind this microphone, I would probably be a little panicked and I’d be backing off and I’m sure my broadcast partners would say, ‘Ooooh, maybe gotta back away here, a little bit too out front there, blah, blah’ . . . But don’t worry, it’s not my first time.” Limbaugh admitted that the people close to him were concerned about the beat of criticism coming from the Oval Office and the Democratic leaders in Congress. He said that he considered it a teachable moment.

After CPAC, Limbaugh found himself fighting on several fronts.
Newsweek
columnist Jonathan Alter wrote that Limbaugh was destroying the Republican Party and that his actual influence in the country was on the decline.
New York Times
blogger Timothy Egan wrote that “smarter Republicans know [Limbaugh] is not good for them.” He quoted David Frum, who had been a Bush speechwriter: “If you’re a talk radio host and you have five million who listen and there are fifty million who hate you, you make a nice living. If you’re a Republican Party, you’re marginalized.” Limbaugh laughed at such criticism. Since when, he asked, did liberal columnists like Alter and Egan worry about the health of the Republican Party? “They only attack those they fear,” he said.

Newsweek
was in the process of remaking itself into a left-of-center magazine of opinion, and it assigned Frum to write a cover story entitled “Why Rush is Wrong.”

“With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word—we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time . . . Rush is to Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s.”

Rich Lowry, the editor of
National Review
, fired back: “I find the attacks on Rush from the right mostly stupid. . . . Rush is a huge benefit to the Right, and if we didn’t have him, we’d have to try to invent him (and probably fail, because so much of his success is a product of his natural, can’t-be-reproduced talent).”