When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes “uncivil” to call out liars, lying becomes free. President Obama lowered taxes. Why doesn’t the country know that? Rick Perlstein on how Rush Limbaugh helped mislead a nation–and why the Democrats let him get away with it.
[ Rick Perlstein ] We live in a mendocracy.
As in: rule by liars.
Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday.
But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite–”civil,” just like Obama promised–to say much. So people believed the lie. From this all else follows.
And it was all too predictable.
Consider February 24, 2009, when, after four glowing weeks in office, Obama delivered his first, triumphant, address to a joint session of Congress. Two weeks earlier, he had signed the $700 billion stimulus bill. This was his speech defending it.
That was the one in which Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, looking like a cross between a deer in the headlights and a 10-year-old delivering a prize school report, delivered the Republican response. You remember! He singled out for excoriation the $140 million in stimulus spending “for something called ‘volcano monitoring’”; this happened to be about a month before a volcano erupted, releasing a 60,000 foot cloud of ash near–dot dot dot–Wasilla, Alaska.
On CNN, David Brooks followed Jindal. He called the governor’s “stale, government-is-the problem” rhetoric “a disaster for the Republican Party,” and excoriated those who insisted on hugging tight to it as “insane.” The people appeared to agree. In a snap poll, 92 percent of those surveyed had a positive reaction to Obama’s speech–68 percent a very positive reaction. Only 8 percent had a negative reaction.
The next morning I tuned in to Rush Limbaugh. I was fascinated to see how the hell he might respond.
Like a deer in the headlights? Not quite. The first caller, though a self-professed ditto-head, took objection to Rush’s argument that Obama had revealed himself in the speech as a tax-and-spend liberal. The caller quoted Obama’s words: “Because of this plan, 95 percent of the working households in America will receive a tax cut–a tax cut that you will see in your paychecks beginning on April 1.” (Which was true: People did.)
Rush responded, fluidly and without a gram of doubt. “Pay no attention to what Obama says. He means the opposite in most cases. What he says is irrelevant.”
So the guy to whom all Republicans must kowtow on pain of political death had just laid down a marker that everything Obama said was a lie.
What if the White House had in those months in early 2009 put in the rhetorical forefront a story about Rush’s tens of millions of listeners, and all politicians who refused to denounce Rush, were effectively saying anything the Chief Constitutional Officer of the United States said was a priori a diabolical lie?
But Obama didn’t. That would be the “old politics of division.” Not Obama’s bag.
This would have been one of many opportunities to wedge the opposition between the authoritarian nihilists and the “constructive” Republicans who had America’s best interests at heart. Instead, the nihilists got to tell the story that endures in the day-after punditry from last Tuesday: that the electorate “rejected Obama’s agenda.”
The vector worked, and works, like this:
(a) A mountebank teaches his millions of followers that everything the president says is a priori a lie;
(b) The mainstream media that acts as if anything his millions of followers believe is a priori deserving of respect as heartland folk wisdom (note the cover article lionizing Limbaugh in this week’s Newsweek);
(c) The president unilaterally renders himself constitutionally incapable of breaking the chain between (a) and (b), such that,
(d), the assumption that Obama raised taxes when he really lowered them becomes hegemonic for a majority of the electorate, and even a large plurality of Democrats.
Q.E.D.: Governing has become impossible.
When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes “uncivil” to call out liars, lying becomes free.
So you find him at a press conference, the day after the midterm elections, saying with all apparent sincerity that he agreed the majority of Americans participated in a “fundamental rejection of his agenda”–who, that is, implicitly believe he raised their taxes.
———————————————————————————————————————————————— Reference:Mark McKinnon: To Hell with the Press. And dammit, the essence of Obamaism as an ideology is that it is Uncivil to Call Out Liars.
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In an ailing radio industry, with a graying audience and a pro-government landscape, Rush Limbaugh should be shuffling off into irrelevancy. Instead, his ever more outrageous attacks have everyone debating whether he’s the G.O.P.’s de facto leader, while the party shapes its ideology to fit his needs. “How far will he go? You don’t know what might come out of his mouth. What if he truly goes to war against the leadership? He could, you know, if he wanted to just split the party. Walk out with the hard-core conservatives.
[ By: Michael Wolff ] Rush Limbaugh, it seemed to me, had to be in huge trouble. Beyond his history of drug problems-in liberal circles there remains a constant is-he-isn’t-he speculation about the status of his prescription-painkiller addiction-beyond even the fact that the mighty conservative tide which he’d ridden to such success had certainly peaked, there were the terrible problems in his core business. Radio advertising rates were falling-even before the recession-Internet competition was rising, and Rush’s much-vaunted audience of 14 million was down from its high of 20 to 25 million during the Clinton years to closer to cable-TV size. The view at MSNBC was that, on a minute-by-minute basis, Limbaugh’s audience was now no bigger than that of its liberal stars, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.
So, when, in the beginning of February, Limbaugh said he hoped that the new president would fail in his efforts to deal with economic calamity, this seemed much more like a desperate bid to stay in the game than it did a stroke of master showmanship. By any logical assessment of behavior, it still seems as if the man may be imploding. And yet, within a month of his issuing his provocative or nihilistic view about an Obama-led recovery, the argument had become not whether he was hopelessly marginalized but whether he was the most significant figure in the Republican Party.
In a jaunty and rapid-fire manner, he’d dealt with Republican congressman Phil Gingrey, who had mildly suggested-to a reporter’s question about Limbaugh’s derogatory comments about the Republican leadership-that there were able gentlemen running the party. After a torrential news cycle, Gingrey offered Rush an abject apology, which had the added sweetener (a little carrot and stick) of getting him an appearance-to reiterate his apology-on Rush’s show. Then Limbaugh laid into Republicans who had expressed reservations about Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s response-lame by every estimation-to the president’s speech on February 24 before a joint session of Congress. No matter how lame, Jindal still hewed to the orthodox conservative small-government views; hence, according to Rush, Jindal was “brilliant. He’s the real deal.” And if anybody said otherwise, well, they’d have to deal with Rush. Then, the day after Limbaugh addressed the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (cpac), Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele gamely tried on CNN to face down D. L. Hughley’s assertion that Rush was the effective party leader. “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh, his whole thing is entertainment,” Steele sputtered, only to find himself apologizing shortly thereafter when Rush had mauled him on the air. (The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put up a Web site-I’m Sorry, Rush-offering an automated form through which congressional Republicans could apologize to Limbaugh. Indeed, as I was writing this piece, a half-dozen Republican officials and operatives first committed to talk with me about Limbaugh and his effects on the party, and then, in a process of hand-wringing and revising their views, each decided, on better thought, not to risk even the smallest chance of waking up on the wrong side of Rush.)
The cpac speech was the Limbaugh topper. The meeting, an annual and usually uncommented-upon gathering of right-wing enthusiasts (Ana Marie Cox, the Washington gossip and political reporter, roaming the halls in her new job as a radio reporter for Air America, described it to me as “Woodstock for wing nuts”), was treated nearly as a third-party political convention because Rush was the main event. The entire three days of the conference, with Mike Huckabee, Ann Coulter, and Newt Gingrich, was a buildup to Rush. Fox News, carrying the speech live, promoted it for several days before.
The 58-year-old, post-pill-popping, post-cochlear-implant (to correct his deafness), post-fat-and-sloppy Rush appeared on the stage to a pounding welcome, looking like nothing more than … Johnny Cash. In black suit and black shirt, two buttons open, hair slicked back, he pronounced this-considering Fox’s live coverage-to be his “first ever address to the nation.”
He’d become, second only to the fortunes of the new president, the biggest political story going, one loved equally by right and left. By the right because he so infuriated the left, and by the left because he so discomfited Republican moderates. He was the perfect political lightning rod, polarizing but entertaining too.
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. Since this Top 40 D.J. and local talker in Sacramento went national, in 1988, as a right-wing voice, he has made hundreds of millions of dollars in salary, bonuses, participation in advertising revenue, and the sale of his show to the Sam Zell?controlled Jacor radio production company (Zell, a real-estate entrepreneur, now controls the Chicago Tribune), which was then sold to Clear Channel. His new contract, signed last summer, is worth a reported $400 million over eight years. There are, too, his newsletter, his paid Internet site with its voluminous traffic, his blockbuster best-sellers, his speaking fees, his half-dozen cars, including a Maybach 57S, his Gulfstream G550, and his Palm Beach estate with five houses.
Rush’s business plan seriously impacts on the future of the Republican Party.
Indeed, the extraordinary thing Rush has done, something arguably never before accomplished in the history of the co-dependent relationship of media and politics, is manage to keep his media day job while assuming something rather close to direct political power. Every other entertainer who has discovered a political mission-from Ronald Reagan to Sonny Bono to Al Franken-has had to quit show business and run for office. Not Rush.
Rather, one hand ably washes the other.
For instance, the single most important issue in Rush’s radio career is now among the hot-button issues in conservative politics: the Fairness Doctrine, a formalized fair-and-balanced rule for covering controversial issues on the nation’s airwaves, which the Reagan F.C.C. killed in 1987. The most liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which puts substantial blame on talk radio for a generation of conservative dominance in Washington, wants to revive the doctrine, which would pretty handily destroy conservative talk. According to the official cpac polling of its members, restoring the Fairness Doctrine is the third-most-significant Democratic Congress policy initiative opposed by the right wing, ranking behind only expanding government and public health care.
There is, with Rush’s orchestration, a rabidness to the cause. Opposing the Fairness Doctrine is up there with opposing abortion.
In the hours after Phil Gingrey found himself in the stew for criticizing Rush, much of the intense and angry reaction-Gingrey’s office came under instant siege-was focused on the misperception that Gingrey was in favor of the Fairness Doctrine. “Rush has turned opposing Fairness into a core principle,” says a Gingrey spokesperson. “That’s why we had to apologize.”
Lee Vanden-Handel retired just a few months ago, at 82, from the Clear Channel?owned Premiere Radio Networks. Vanden-Handel, along with Ed McLaughlin, the former head of the ABC radio network who discovered Rush in Sacramento in 1987, helped build the EIB radio network around him, taking advantage of a singular change in the radio business: music had moved to the better, FM band, leaving AM radio without much of an audience. The oompah-pah of Limbaugh’s no-breath-taking voice, which McLaughlin flew out to Sacramento to hear for himself, had something like the lulling effect of music.
Curiously, in a wide-ranging discussion about his more than 20 years of working with Limbaugh, Vanden-Handel never once brought up politics. Vanden-Handel’s inside view of Limbaugh involves almost entirely a nuts-and-bolts discussion about the peculiar craft and salesmanship involved in the radio business. “Rush,” he says, echoing R.N.C. chairman Steele, “is an entertainer. A consummate professional. He knows his audience. He stays with it, and it has stayed with him. That’s not politics. That’s … well … good business.”
Similarly, Jon Sinton, founding president of Air America, the network specifically constituted to be the liberal antidote to Limbaugh and the other conservative talkers, doesn’t much, in his analysis of the Rush effect, consider ideology, beyond that Rush connected with the country’s dedicated population of Reagan-lovers, one of the most faithful demographics in politics and media.
Limbaugh’s absolute dominance of this niche produced, according to Sinton, a paradigm-shifting development in radio. “Radio had always been a barter game. You give us your show and we’ll give you back some ad spots for you to sell. Rush became so important to AM radio that he could demand both a cash payment and ad time,” says Sinton with some professional awe.
The Rush voice and timbre had another effect which changed both radio and politics: format hegemony. “In the way that you could not play Led Zeppelin on a country station,” says Sinton, “you could not mix liberal talk with conservative talk, and since the conservatives, as the first talk movers, had come to dominate radio, there was virtually no room in major markets for anything other than a conservative format.”
Which would be key to setting the agenda for the next 20 years.
It’s that hegemony that the left has helplessly objected to for so many years (and hence is hoping to deal with by pressing the Democratic Congress to pass new fairness rules) that is now causing problems for the Republicans. “I think, in hindsight, we abdicated a certain responsibility in terms of communication,” says a source close to a senior House Republican. “Aspects of the Republican constituency were more efficiently dealt with through the power of talk radio. We let the talkers represent us.”
The power of conservative radio is a phenomenon as much of direct marketing as of politics. Radio advertising is about the call to action: Show up at this sale and say that you heard about it here and get an extra 5 percent off. Go to this restaurant for brunch and get a free Bloody Mary (and then enter a contest and win a trip to Las Vegas). Put your money into this bank and, if you do it today, get a toaster. Rush, along with his advertisers’ calls to action, adapts this form to his pet political causes. Indeed, this became a curious demonstration of Rush’s commercial appeal. “If he could get people to write letters to their congressman, which they did by the bushel,” says Vanden-Handel, “then reasonably he might also get people to buy pre-owned cars.”
Indeed, for 20 years, three hours a day, nothing in radio has so moved the audience to action as Rush: the Republican base both buys the pre-owned cars he suggests ought to be bought and champions the causes he’s hot on. Nothing in politics, or the news cycle, is as direct and powerful as this. In seconds, he can move an awesome tide, unleashing e-mail, telephone calls, and scary Web-site rage. Minutes after R.N.C. chairman Steele tried to suggest to CNN that he, rather than Rush, was the bona fide leader of the party, Rush, reached for comment, merely said he’d respond on the air-which must have sent a chill down Steele’s spine.
When moderate Republicans talk about the Rush effect, there’s a plaintiveness with which I sympathize. Shortly after the war in Iraq began, when I was reporting from CentCom headquarters in Qatar, I asked an intemperate question of one of the military briefers in the daily televised news conference and, dissed by Rush for my lack of patriotism, got the full effect: more than 20,000 e-mails in 48 hours, shutting down my mail server.
And he isn’t just a man alone in a booth. Around himself he’s constituted his own political-action committee, or leadership group, of other talkers.
“It’s Rush who’s talking to Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. And they’re talking to others,” explains a Republican pundit, discussing with me media relationships among conservatives. “It’s incredibly networked. The message, the position is spread.” Limbaugh, too, is in regular contact with Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, which ran the live broadcast of the Limbaugh cpac address.
Arguably no message apparatus like it exists in the nation, except, perhaps, at the White House (or in Oprah-whose position with American women is curiously analogous to Rush’s position with American conservatives). It is concentrated and extraordinary power.
Except that this power ought to be ending. It ought to all be on the wane. It is not just the Obama victory and the magnitude of his approval ratings. It is not just that the gravity of the economic crisis, with historic unemployment rates, means it’s a lot harder to get people excited about Reagan-and-Rush-esque hands-off government.
It is, rather, a crueler demographic point. The dirty little secret of conservative talk radio is that the average age of listeners is 67 and rising, according to Sinton-the Fox News audience, likewise, is in its mid-60s: “What sort of continuing power do you have as your audience strokes out?”
You can begin to make plausibly large statements about the end of-or at least a crisis in-conservative media. “There are fewer advertisers, fewer listeners, shrinking networks, shallower penetration,” says Sinton. “A lowering tide lowers all ships.”
What’s more, it’s the Internet that is the fast-growing and arguably more powerful political medium-and it is the province of the young and liberal. The only sensible market view of conservative talk is that it will contract and be reduced, in the coming years, to a much more rarefied format.
And yet, by the end of Rush Limbaugh’s fractious month of calculated outrage, his audience was back up to 20 million.
That’s showmanship. “Or,” said a moderate Republican of my acquaintance, “nuttiness. The man has no behavioral regulators.”
Certainly he can pick a fight like nobody’s business. It is a contrarian talent and temperament. The ordinary sacred cows which Don Imus, for instance, might get run off the air for messing with are, in Rush’s hands, statements of challenge. He can go after Michael J. Fox, ridiculing his Parkinson’s symptoms, or he can publicly hope for the president to fail, or announce Teddy Kennedy’s imminent demise, because these assaults are cast not just as slurs but as threats. “If you disagree with him, you have to confront him, and then it’s you against Rush. In that match, you simply can’t win,” says Sinton.
There is, too, his specific political position. In the battle between what David Brooks characterizes as the reformers in the party and the orthodox Ronald Reagan loyalists, the Rush position is clear. A kinder, gentler Republican consensus would be much worse for the Rush brand and business model than even an F.D.R.-type era of Democratic dominance.
Rush is so much more lively, scary, jaw-dropping, and fabulous when he’s on the attack. Add to this that he might actually be crazy-the big fear of the moderates-that it isn’t showmanship but a train wreck that we’re all watching, one in which he takes everyone with him. “How far will he go? You don’t know what might come out of his mouth. What if he truly goes to war against the leadership? He could, you know, if he wanted to just split the party. Walk out with the hard-core conservatives. He could and he knows it,” said my moderate-Republican interlocutor.
At least he can until the demographic reality catches up with him. “It’s a last hurrah,” says Sinton, “because it isn’t and has never been first and foremost about politics. It’s always been about radio. And that endgame is written.”
About The Author: Michael Wolff — is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Michael joined Vanity Fair in 2004. He writes a monthly column on the media and politics. Prior to joining Vanity Fair, he wrote a weekly column called “This Media Life” for New York magazine. Wolff began his career at The New York Times. He has won two National Magazine Awards and been nominated three times. His books include the best-seller Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 1998) and Autumn of the Moguls (HarperBusiness, 2003).
From MediaMatters.Org: In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Andrew Klavan claimed he’s “never heard” Rush Limbaugh “utter a single racist, hateful or stupid word,” and offered a “[c]hallenge” to “liberals” to “[l]isten to the show … and keep an open mind.” However, Media Matters listens to Limbaugh everyday and has documented numerous examples of him spewing offensive commentary and basic misstatements of fact.
I do listen to Limbaugh too, not because I like scum that he peddles, but to keep in touch with what the ENEMY COMBATANT is up to.
Rush Limbaugh is the biggest Methamphetamine FIX for BIGOT America.
He plays a “therapeutic” role in milking and massaging the racist juices of those diseased Americans unwilling to walk out of the eighteenth century “Lynching Way of Life.”
The most racist of Limbaugh’s listeners are permanently SICK — and will never be “Cured.” Among his listeners, there are those who harbor delusional fears of retaliation by “coloreds,” angry about the past. The former cannot be “helped,” but some of the latter did vote for Obama, in the hope that the election of a black man would wipe out the heavy load of “Guilt” inherited from their fore-fathers — a sub-group I believe can be saved by thorough “Detoxification,.” They can be yanked away from the gorilla arms of Rush Limbaugh and co., to join the growing majority of progressive white Americans.
Even butt-licking Uncle-Toms like Michael Steele can be cured of their Negrophobia affliction, a psychoneurosis, a mental disorder symptomized by the love of hot white garbage like Rush Limbaugh and Sean “Klannity.”
Limbaugh’s psychopathological utterances are well documented, and therefore Andrew Klavan’s claim that liberals are “spoon-fed by the distortion-mongers of the mainstream media,” is laughable.
“Cattle Caller” Limbaugh’s years of Narcissism and ludicrous antics reminds me of Idi Amin Dada,….the Blood-stained former Ugandan dictator who mixed butchery with buffoonery. Even though I have never heard of anybody killed by Rush Limbaugh, the buffoonery is eerily similar.
Mr. Klavan — Limbaugh has been polluting the air-waves with garbage for 15+ years, and the verdict of the majority is: Rush Limbaugh is a twisted, racist, hate-filled, drug-snorting propagandist, a big FAT SICK Gestapo Maggot! The “20 million” people who listen to him daily or weekly, whatever the number is, are just but a SICK 1/15th of the population of the United States, a good chunk of who, I believe, listen to your charlatan Limbaugh, for entertainment — Jerry Springer Style.
Media Matters lists examples of offensive commentary and falsehoods by Limbaugh that they have documented in just the last month, complete with audio: [ Click Here ]. A compilation of some of Limbaugh’s most outrageous remarks prior to March can be found here.
Said Andrew Klavan:“I listen to Limbaugh every chance I get, and I have never heard the man utter a single racist, hateful or stupid word. Do I always agree with him? Of course not. I’m a conservative; I think for myself. But Limbaugh, by turns insightful, satiric, raucously funny and wise, is one of the best voices talking about first principles and policy in the country today.”
Go see a mental/ear doctor Andrew Klavan. FAT Limbaugh is an EVIL CONMAN, a POISONOUS REPTILE, and you have been had, Andrew!
Limbaugh on Obama: “He’s a bad guy. He’s one angry guy. His wife is angry as well.” Then he called Obama — “Barack Ogabe” — “A well known Kenyan name.”
This FAT goon seems to be incapable of keeping his fluttering pink little dick tucked in between his FAT thighs.
From MediaMatters: Limbaugh Wire: 3/24/2009 Part III — Published Tue, Mar 24, 2009 3:37pm ET
This hour of the Limbaugh Wire brought to you by Barack Ogabe
By Simon Maloy
To kick off the final hour, Rush noted a Reuters article headlined, “Resistance grows to Obama’s bigger government,” and encouraged us all to look at the bigger picture. Rush took us back to January 15, asking us to imagine where the country would be if, between now and then, there had been no resistance to Obama’s “assault” on capitalism. Before we could get around to envisioning that nightmare scenario, Rush explained why he took us back to that seemingly random date — the very next day, Rush first said he wanted Obama to “fail.” According to Rush, this was — he was — the tipping point, the “first breath” of opposition to Obama, without which there would be no opposition to Obama. But now, because of Rush’s desire that Obama fail, people are starting to raise questions. [ READ MORE ]
LOUD AND CLEAR: After President Obama called out the radio host by name, he went on the air and said: “I am Rush Limbaugh, the man President Obama has instructed you not to listen to!” As Republicans grapple with their fall from power, not all are comfortable with the talk radio king’s suggestion that he, by default, has become the politically wounded party’s unofficial leader.
[ Rush Limbaugh ] LA TIMES: Reporting from San Francisco and Washington — In 1994, Rush Limbaugh was a field marshal in the Republican revolution, rallying troops fervid in their passion, armed with a change agenda and determined to shake Washington upside down.
Fifteen years later, Republicans are politically hobbled and Democrats are fervid in their passion, armed with a change agenda and determined, along with their new president, to shake Washington upside down.
And again there is Limbaugh, master of the talk radio universe, unchanged and unbowed. If anything, his prominence and political import have increased.
Obama is “obviously more frightened of me than he is Mitch McConnell. He’s more frightened of me, than he is of, say, John Boehner, which doesn’t say much about our party,” Limbaugh said on the air, referring to the GOP leaders in the Senate and House, respectively.
That may be cause for personal congratulation (not to mention a bigger audience). But as Republicans grapple with their fall from power and undertake some inevitable soul-searching, not all are comfortable with Limbaugh’s suggestion that he has become the party’s unofficial leader by default.
“He motivates a core Republican, who is a very important part of the Republican coalition, and we need those guys to be interested and active,” said Jan van Lohuizen, a GOP strategist in Washington. “But it’s not enough. The Republican Party has shrunk and it needs to be expanding.”
While the GOP’s star has fallen, Limbaugh’s has soared. As party leaders struggle to find their voice, Limbaugh’s baritone booms loud and clear three hours a day, five days a week on 600 radio stations across America. If a $400-million contract and the title of most influential talk radio personality — as voted by industry pros — aren’t sufficient proof, consider President Obama’s decision to pick a fight with him three days into his presidency.
Hosting Republican lawmakers at the White House, Obama called out his nemesis by name. “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” Obama said, pitching his economic stimulus plan and offering a priceless advertisement of Limbaugh’s influence.
The radio host happily responded on his next program. “I am Rush Limbaugh, the man President Obama has instructed you not to listen to!” he crowed, adding to a long list of self-appellations that includes America’s Truth Detector; Doctor of Democracy; Most Dangerous Man in America; and All-Knowing, All-Sensing, All-Everything Maha Rushie.
By his own account, he is the most prominent voice of conservative thinking — “the last man standing” — now that Republican lawmakers have decided to, in his judgment, bow before the president. Indeed, Limbaugh seems more energized than ever. “Things just keep flying out of my fertile mind,” he said during a recent reckoning of how “Obama the Unifier” had sprinted to the liberal left.
Limbaugh’s listening audience is relatively narrow — it is predominantly white, male and politically conservative — but highly motivated. Many of the 20 million or so who tune in each week are willing, even eager, to pummel their opponents with letters, phone calls and e-mails to make their voices heard.
They can make a difference. Among their achievements, talk radio listeners helped kill President George W. Bush’s immigration reform effort. Recent polls suggest that, despite Obama’s high approval ratings, public support has declined for his stimulus bill since Limbaugh and his broadcast peers began railing against it.
Limbaugh has plenty of critics, not all of them liberal or Democrats. Some Republicans worry that the 58-year-old AM radio icon, highly effective at rallying disenchanted conservatives, may be turning off the less ideological voters whom Republicans need if they hope to again become a majority party.
Rush Limbaugh – A Concentrated Pile Of Human Waste
“The question is: Are we going to have an all-white-man litmus test under the Republican Party? Or is there room for diverse opinion on environmental issues, on the issue of right to life, the issue of taxes and spending?” said Rich Bond, a GOP strategist and former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “There must be room for dissent in the Republican Party. It must be sincere. It must have comity.”
To some, Limbaugh crossed a line when he recently rooted for Obama’s downfall. Asked along with other prominent political types to write 400 words on his hopes for the president, Limbaugh said: “I don’t need 400 words. I need four: I hope he fails.”
“That sort of thing is going to turn off moderate voters. It’s going to repulse some people,” said David Barker, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Rushed to Judgment: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior.” “There are a whole lot of people right now who just want to go ahead and give [Obama] his shot, hold back the arrows for a minute. And by immediately pulling out the partisan card, which is what Rush is doing, I think that repels more people than it attracts.”
However, Limbaugh is accountable to no one but his faithful fans, his words arcing like spears flung from the Palm Beach, Fla., studio he calls his Southern Command. Enemies rooting for his comeuppance have been disappointed more than once.
Limbaugh acknowledged an addiction to painkillers in 2003 and was arrested three years later. (Prosecutors agreed to drop a charge of prescription fraud if he underwent treatment.) He has been married and divorced three times. Still, nothing seems to shake his standing with core conservatives. (Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas hosted Limbaugh’s third wedding in his own home and performed the ceremony.)
Economic Stimulus Plan, George W. Bush, The Bush Immigration Reform Effort, GOP Strategist, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.)
Few Republicans dare cross him. “I don’t need him crawling up my [backside] any more than the president does,” said one GOP strategist and Limbaugh critic, who would speak candidly only if granted anonymity.
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) recently learned the perils when he defended McConnell and Boehner in an interview with Politico, a Washington publication. It’s easy for Limbaugh to criticize Democrats, Gingrey said, because he doesn’t have to work with them every day. After he spoke, Gingrey’s office was flooded with calls and e-mails from angry conservatives. He spent the next day apologizing all over cable television and on Limbaugh’s show for making “those stupid comments.”
These days, the radio host is so front and center that even his absence gets noticed. (He was on vacation last week and unavailable to comment for this article.) The liberal Huffington Post took note of Limbaugh’s absence — “Just as Rush Limbaugh ascends as the top leader of the Republican Party, it appears he has disappeared” — and suggested sarcastically that he may have been forceably removed.
Not likely, though Limbaugh may eventually recede.
Though there is a place for his contentious commentary, “eventually, he will pale in importance next to the collective efforts of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner,” Bond said. “He’ll pale in comparison to the goods work of the new Republican national chairman, Michael Steele. He’ll pale in comparison to the Republicans when they find new talent and new voices ahead of 2012.”
We live in a mendocracy.
But Obama didn’t. That would be the “old politics of division.” Not Obama’s bag.
” and “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.” Website: http://rickperlstein.org/.
Rush Limbaugh, it seemed to me, had to be in huge trouble. Beyond his history of drug problems-in liberal circles there remains a constant is-he-isn’t-he speculation about the status of his prescription-painkiller addiction-beyond even the fact that the mighty conservative tide which he’d ridden to such success had certainly peaked, there were the terrible problems in his core business. Radio advertising rates were falling-even before the recession-Internet competition was rising, and Rush’s much-vaunted audience of 14 million was down from its high of 20 to 25 million during the Clinton years to closer to cable-TV size. The view at MSNBC was that, on a minute-by-minute basis, Limbaugh’s audience was now no bigger than that of its liberal stars, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.
The 58-year-old, post-pill-popping, post-cochlear-implant (to correct his deafness), post-fat-and-sloppy Rush appeared on the stage to a pounding welcome, looking like nothing more than … Johnny Cash. In black suit and black shirt, two buttons open, hair slicked back, he pronounced this-considering Fox’s live coverage-to be his “first ever address to the nation.”
