FYI: I present this in the frame of media and radio, not in politics. - Greg
July 6, 2008
Magazine Preview
Late-Period Limbaugh
By ZEV CHAFETS
This article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.
'The Rush Limbaugh Show' goes on the air every weekday at 12:06 P.M. Eastern
Standard Time.
At one time, Limbaugh did his program from a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper he
dubbed, with tongue-in-cheek grandiosity, the Excellence in Broadcasting
Building. These days, he mostly broadcasts out of a studio in Palm Beach, Fla.,
which he calls the Southern Command, and describes on the air as a "heavily
fortified bunker."
In fact, Limbaugh's show emanates from a nondescript office building on a
boulevard lined with tall palms. There isn't even a security guard in the
lobby. The elevator opens directly onto a pristine anteroom furnished in
corporate glass and leather. An American flag stands in the corner. Only a
small, framed picture of Limbaugh, bearing the caption "America's Anchorman,"
reveals that this is the headquarters of one of the country's most admired and
reviled figures.
The anteroom was empty when I stepped off the elevator one afternoon in
mid-February. Limbaugh receives very few visitors at work, and no journalists
from the hated "mainstream media." When I was buzzed into the control room, I
was met by Bo Snerdly - a very large man in a Huey Newton beret - who glared at
me. "Are you the guy who's here to do the hit job on us?" he demanded in a deep
voice.
"Absolutely," I said.
Snerdly, whose real name is James Golden, held my eyes for a long moment before
bursting into emphatic laughter.
"It's just that we aren't used to seeing reporters here," said a woman named
Dawn. She is a stenographer whom Limbaugh hired in 2001, after he went deaf.
These days he has a cochlear implant that enables him to hear callers, but Dawn
sends him real-time transcripts of on-air conversations, just in case.
"The media doesn't know about this place," she said. "They don't know where we
are. During Rush's big drug story they staked out the whole town, even his
house, but they never found us here."
For the next hour I sat behind the glass panel of the control booth and watched
Limbaugh at work in front of the "golden E.I.B. microphone." Unlike Howard
Stern or Don Imus, he has no sidekicks with him in the room. He does, however,
keep up a running conversation with an unheard voice. I always assumed that
this was just imaginary radio shtick. Now I saw that the voice was attached to
a human interlocutor, Snerdly, who banters with and occasionally badgers
Limbaugh via an internal talk-back circuit.
After the broadcast, Limbaugh waved me into the studio and offered me a seat
directly across from him. The room's acoustics make it relatively easy for him
to hear, but he also reads lips.
I had come to talk to Limbaugh about his role in Republican Party politics.
During the primaries he assailed John McCain as a phony conservative and
apostate Reaganite. Despite Limbaugh's best efforts, it now appeared that the
Arizona senator would be the nominee. There was speculation that Limbaugh would
not support him in November.
"I've never even met the man, never spoken to him," Limbaugh said. "I'm sure
there are things about him I'd like if we meet. This isn't personal." He then
delivered a litany of the presumptive nominee's personal failings - too old,
too intense, too opportunistic, too liberal. But, he assured me, he would be
with McCain in the fall. "It's like the Super Bowl," he told me. "If your team
isn't in it, you root for the team you hate less. That's McCain."
It already seemed, when I made my visit, that McCain's opponent might well be
Senator Obama, and I was curious to know how Limbaugh planned to take on
America's first African-American major-party nominee. "I'll approach Obama with
fearless honesty," said Limbaugh, who speaks of himself in heroic terms on air
and off. "He's a liberal. I oppose liberals. That's all that's involved here."
I asked if he had any specific tactics in mind.
"I haven't yet figured that out exactly," he said. "You know, I've had a
problem with substance abuse. I don't deal with the future anymore. I take
things one day at a time."
In this case, it took two. I was back in New York, listening to the radio, when
I heard Limbaugh say: "Ladies and gentlemen, I had a conversation with a friend
Wednesday afternoon after the program, and he said, 'Nobody's criticizing
Obama. How are you going to do this? How are you going to handle criticizing
the first black American to run for president?' I said: 'I'm going to do it the
way I always do it. First, at the top of the list, I'm going to do it
fearlessly. I'm not going to bow to political correctness. I'm going to do it
with humor. I'm going to focus on the issues. I'm going to react to what he
says. Simple. I'm going to do it just like it were any other case - he's a man,
right? He's a liberal. How do I criticize liberals? I criticize them.' But I
have devised, ladies and gentlemen, an even more creative way of criticizing
Obama. I have, just this morning, named a new position here on the staff that
is the Official Obama Criticizer. The E.I.B. Network now has an Official Obama
Criticizer. He is Bo Snerdly."
Snerdly introduced himself as an
"African-American-in-good-standing-and-certified-black-enough-to-criticize-Obama
guy," and declared that he was speaking, "on behalf of our E.I.B. brothers and
sisters in the hood." The bit was typical Limbaugh - confrontational,
deliberately insensitive and funny. It was also a declaration of independence.
Whatever special courtesies John McCain might plan to extend to Barack Obama,
Limbaugh is going to conduct his air war, as he always has, by his own rules of
engagement.
ON AUG. 1, LIMBAUGH WILL CELEBRATE the 20th anniversary of his national radio
program. At 57, he is an American icon, although his fans and critics don't
agree on precisely what he is iconic for. I've heard him compared to Mark Twain
and Jackie Gleason, the Founding Fathers and Father Coughlin. Serious people
have called him a serial liar and a moral philosopher, a partisan hack and a
public intellectual, nothing more than a radio windbag and nothing less than
the heart of the Republican Party.
One thing is certain: Limbaugh has been a partisan force for two decades. In
1994, he was so influential in the Republican Congressional landslide that the
grateful winners made him an honorary member of the G.O.P. freshman class. He
moved not only voters, but the party itself. "Rush talked about the 'Contract
With America' before there was a 'Contract With America,' " Karl Rove told me.
"He helped set the agenda."
Limbaugh has been a factor in every national election of the past 20 years, but
not since the mid-1990s has he been so prominent. Democrats have blamed him for
everything from invading their primaries to starting scurrilous rumors about
Michelle Obama. Limbaugh denies the latter accusation, but he happily embraces
the former. His vehicle was so-called Operation Chaos, a radio campaign
designed to encourage Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton and prolong
internecine fighting among liberals.
Nobody quite knows how effective Operation Chaos was. Karl Rove said he thinks
it helped tilt Texas for Clinton. She herself gave this some credence on the
day after the vote by jauntily saying, "Be careful what you wish for, Rush."
Howard Dean implored primary voters in Indiana and North Carolina to ignore
Limbaugh. The Obama supporter Arianna Huffington called Limbaugh and other
conservative hosts "toxic curiosities." After Clinton won in Indiana, where 10
percent of Democratic primary voters admitted to exit pollsters that they were
really Republicans, Senator John Kerry accused Limbaugh of "tampering with the
primary" and causing Obama's defeat.
Limbaugh was delighted. He deemed Operation Chaos to have "exceeded all
expectations" (his customary self-evaluation) and explained once again that he
wasn't supporting Clinton but merely trying to bloody Obama because John McCain
was too chicken to do it and because he believed that Obama would then be
easier to beat in November.
Probably both the Democrats and Limbaugh overstated his actual impact. But
Operation Chaos was a triumph of interactive political performance art.
Limbaugh appointed himself Supreme Commander, deputized his listeners and
turned them into merry pranksters. "Rush is a master at framing an issue and
creating a community around it," says Susan Estrich, who ran Michael Dukakis's
1988 presidential campaign and has since become a talk-show host herself.
Operation Chaos drew a crowd, which is what Limbaugh does for a living. It got
people laughing at the Democrats, which is what he lives for. And, ever the
devout capitalist, he turned an extra buck by peddling Operation Chaos gear.
The stuff flew off the cybershelves of the E.I.B. store, the biggest seller
since his Club Gitmo collection ("my mullah went to Club Gitmo and all I got
was this lousy T-shirt").
None of these high jinks would have mattered if Limbaugh were a regular radio
personality. But he isn't. Michael Harrison, the editor and publisher of
Talkers magazine, a trade publication, puts Limbaugh's weekly audience at 14
million. Limbaugh himself says it is closer to 20 million. Either way, nobody
else is close. He has been the top-rated radio talk-show host in America since
the magazine started the ranking 17 years ago.
Such massive and consistent popularity makes Limbaugh a singular political
force. "Rush has completely remade American politics by offering an alternative
to the networks and CNN," Rove told me. "For 20 years he has been the leader of
his own parade."
Harrison offered an even more grandiose view: "He's a phenomenon like the
Beatles. Before Rush Limbaugh there was nothing like talk radio. He's been to
talk what Elvis was to rock 'n' roll. He saved the AM dial."
"ANTICIPATING A QUESTION," Limbaugh said when we pulled into the garage of his
secluded beachfront mansion in Palm Beach, "why do I have so many cars?"
I hadn't actually been wondering that. Very rich people tend not to stint on
transportation. For example, we drove to the house from the studio, Limbaugh at
the wheel, in a black Maybach 57S, which runs around $450,000 fully loaded. He
had half a dozen similar rides on his estate.
"I have these cars for two reasons," Limbaugh said. "First, they are for the
use of my guests. And two, I happen to love fine automobiles."
He also loves space. There are five homes - all of them his - on the property.
The big house is 24,000 square feet. Limbaugh lives there with a cat. He's been
married three times but has no children.
Limbaugh informed me that I was the first journalist ever to enter his home.
Mary Matalin, the Republican consultant, calls the place "aspirational," which
is one adjective that fits. The place, largely designed by Limbaugh himself,
reflects the things and places he has seen and admired. The massive chandelier
in the dining room, for example, is a replica of the one that hung in the lobby
of the Plaza Hotel in New York. The gleaming cherry-wood floors are dotted with
hand-woven oriental carpets. A life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo, as he often
calls himself on the air, hangs on the wall of the main staircase.
Unlike many right-wing talk-show hosts, Limbaugh does not view France with
hostility. On the contrary, he is a Francophile. His salon, he told me, is
meant to suggest Versailles. His main guest suite, which I did not personally
inspect, was designed as an exact replica of the presidential suite of the
George V Hotel in Paris.
Limbaugh is especially proud of his two-story library, which is a scaled-down
version of the 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 "an acre of mahogany."
A fastidious man, Limbaugh has a keen eye for domestic detail. His staff lights
fragrant candles throughout the house to greet his arrival from work each day.
Limbaugh led me into his private humidor, selected two La Flor Dominicana
Double Ligero Chisel stogies for us to smoke and seated me at an
onyx-and-marble table in the study. The room opens onto a patio, a putting
green and a beach. On the table was a brochure for Limbaugh's newest airplane,
a Gulfstream G550. It cost him, he told me, $54 million.
Limbaugh can afford to live the way he wants. When we met he was on the verge
of signing a new eight-year contract with his syndicator, Premiere Radio
Networks. He estimated that it would bring in about $38 million a year. To
sweeten the deal, he said he was also getting a nine-figure signing bonus. (A
representative from Premiere would not confirm the deal.) "Do you know what
bought me all this?" he asked, waving his hand in the general direction of his
prosperity. "Not my political ideas. Conservatism didn't buy this house. First
and foremost I'm a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest
possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great
entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime."
The average AM radio station reserves 18 to 20 minutes each hour for
advertising, devotes about 5 minutes an hour to news and spends the rest of the
time on other content. Limbaugh is not only paid by the stations, but his
program also owns five minutes of every hour of airtime, which it can then sell
to advertisers.
Some simply run their usual ads. Others use Limbaugh as their pitchman, which
costs them a premium and a long-term commitment. And lately he has created a
new option. At a much higher rate he will weave a product into his monologue
(To a caller who said he took two showers after voting for Clinton in Operation
Chaos, Limbaugh responded: "If you had followed my advice and gotten a Rinnai
tankless water heater, you wouldn't have needed to take two showers. And I'll
tell you why. . . .")
Limbaugh is being uncharacteristically modest when he attributes his wealth to
simple salesmanship. First, you have to draw - and keep - a crowd. "Rush is
just an amazing radio performer," says Ira Glass, a star of the younger
generation of public-radio personalities. "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 says. "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."
LIMBAUGH STARTED LOSING HIS HEARING seven years ago, at the age of 50.
Increasingly powerful hearing aids helped for a while, but eventually they
stopped working. For almost two months he did his show without being able to
hear a thing. Regular listeners began noticing that something was wrong. "When
I found myself going deaf, I didn't panic," he told me. "I was diagnosed with
auto-immune disease." (Limbaugh says he doesn't know what kind of auto-immune
disorder it was.) "Once I knew the problem, I looked for a practical solution,"
he continued. "Eventually I flew out to California and had a cochlear implant.
Luckily, it worked." Doctors, he told me, attribute this positive outcome to
the relatively advanced age when he lost his hearing and the short time he was
deaf.
Limbaugh is known for his wicked impersonations of Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy,
John McCain and others.
"How can you imitate anyone if you can't hear yourself?" I asked him.
He touched his throat. "I know how the muscles are supposed to feel when I do
the voices."
Limbaugh's voice is his instrument, and he has been honing it since he began
his radio career as a high-school disc jockey. He still loves music, although
he hears it most clearly in his memory. "The last song I actually remember was
probably a Luther Vandross tune," he told me. "But if I put on oldies I know
how they are supposed to sound."
He still uses a lot of rock 'n' roll in his broadcasts, introducing segments
with Tina Turner's "The Best" or sampling an old Bo Diddley riff: "Come on in
closer baby, hear what else I got to say. You got your radio turned down too
low. Turn it up!"
We were on the way to Trevini, one of Limbaugh's favorite Palm Beach
restaurants. Once again, Limbaugh was at the wheel. His girlfriend, Kathryn
Rogers, a West Palm Beach events planner, rode shotgun. They met at a golf
tournament last summer and have been an item since.
The Maybach was quiet enough for easy conversation, but the restaurant was a
different story. We sat at a prime corner table, but the place was packed, and
the decibel level caused him to frequently cup his hand to his ear, and
sometimes miss entire sentences.
Throughout dinner, people approached our table. Most were prosperous-looking
Republican men of a certain age. "God bless you," they told him, or, "Keep up
the fight." He smiled and thanked them in a good-natured way. One elderly gent
in a blue blazer and gray slacks went into a long spiel about his good works on
behalf of several conservative causes. Limbaugh nodded through the recitation,
but when the man left he confided that he had not understood a word of it.
Meanwhile, waiters buzzed around our table. They seemed to anticipate
Limbaugh's every wish, refreshing our drinks, serving unasked-for delicacies,
periodically checking to make sure everything was exactly to Limbaugh's
satisfaction.
Table talk focused on Limbaugh's house, or rather his concern over my reaction
to it. That afternoon I wondered aloud what a single man with no kids could
possibly want with a house that size. He frowned, obviously interpreting it as
a hostile question, a Democrat question. Now he wanted to revisit the topic.
"When you saw my house today, you probably noticed that it isn't filled with
pictures of me and famous people," he said. "That's not me. I don't have a home
that says, 'Look who I know!' "
"No, you have a home that says, 'Look what I have.' "
"Why would you say that?" He sounded genuinely surprised, possibly even hurt.
"It might have something to do with that acre of mahogany you mentioned
earlier."
"My home is a place I feel comfortable in, a place for entertaining my friends
and family," he said.
Later, his friend Roger Ailes, a frequent guest and the chairman of Fox News,
put the Limbaugh lifestyle in perspective. "He lives the way Jackie Gleason
would have lived if Gleason had the money. Some people are irritated by it."
Dinner was winding down, and I called for the check. It tickled Limbaugh to be
taken out to eat on The New York Times. A few weeks later, he sent me a copy of
an interview with Jeremy Sullivan, a waiter at the Kobe KobeClub in New York.
Sullivan told a reporter that Limbaugh, a fellow Missourian, was the biggest
tipper in town: "He likes to throw down the most massive tips I've ever seen.
The last few times his tips have been $5,000." When I read this, I felt a stab
of guilt toward the hyperattentive staff at Trevini. If I had only known, I
would have let Limbaugh leave the tip.
LIMBAUGH WAS A FAILURE almost as long as he has been a success. And although he
is now an apostle of sunshine ("having more fun than a human being should be
allowed to have," he crows on his show), he spent many years trying to convince
his family - and himself - that he wasn't wasting his life.
People sometimes wonder if Rush is a real name. It is, times three. He was born
Rush Limbaugh III in 1951, in the Mississippi River town of Cape Girardeau, Mo.
Cape Girardeau was Eisenhower America, Middle Western but far enough South that
Limbaugh's younger brother David still speaks with a discernible twang. "Rush
got the voice in the family," he told me, unnecessarily.
The Limbaughs were local gentry. Rush's grandfather, Rush Sr., was a venerated
lawyer who practiced law past the age of 100. Uncle Steve Limbaugh is a federal
judge, although he will soon step down as his son, Rush's cousin Steve, joins
the federal bench. David Limbaugh, who still lives in Cape Girardeau, writes
books and a syndicated political column, along with handling his brother's
legal work.
Limbaugh's father, Rush Jr., was a lawyer, too, a prominent local Republican
activist and the most influential figure in his sons' lives. He served as a
pilot in World War II and became vehemently anti-Communist and very much
committed to the ideas and ideals of small-town Protestant America. Limbaugh
remembers his father playing host to Vice President Richard Nixon in Cape
Girardeau in the 1956 election. To this day, Limbaugh calls his father "the
smartest man I've ever met."
Certainly he was one of the most opinionated and autocratic. "On Friday nights
my friends would come over to the house just to listen to my dad rant about
politics," Limbaugh recalls. "He was doing the same thing as I do today,
without the humor or the satire. He didn't approve of making fun of presidents.
He didn't think that sort of thing was funny."
Dick Adams, Rush's boyhood friend and high-school debate partner, told me: "Mr.
Limbaugh didn't suffer fools lightly, let's just put it like that. Many times I
was over there when he called down Rush or David in harsh tones. There was
usually a string of expletives attached."
Father-son arguments weren't political. Rush seems to have swallowed his
father's monologues whole. Like the great black singers of his generation,
Limbaugh took the familiar pieties and ambient sounds of his time and place and
used them to create a genre of entertainment, full of humor, passion and
commercial possibility. There are many ways to look at Rush Limbaugh III: one
is that he is the first white, Goldwater Republican soul shouter.
But first he had to get out of town.
"My father expected me to be a professional man," Limbaugh told me. "The
problem was, I hated school. I hated being told what to do. In the Boy Scouts I
never got a single merit badge. In school my grades were terrible. I just
didn't want to be there. I just wanted to be on the radio."
Rush's father hoped the boy would grow out of this ambition. But to appease
him, he lent 16-year-old Rush the money for a summer course in radio
engineering in Dallas. Limbaugh returned with a broadcaster's license, which he
parlayed into a job at the local radio station. Soon he had his own show. Being
on the radio made him a local celebrity, and he never lost the taste for it.
Limbaugh was miserable when his father insisted he attend college. Under
protest he enrolled at nearby Southeast Missouri State University, where he
lasted a year. Somehow he even contrived to flunk speech.
"My mother used to drive me there and pick me up, just to make sure I'd go," he
told me. "But it didn't do any good. First chance I got, I was out of there."
Limbaugh hit the road in a 1969 Pontiac LeMans. He spent the 1970s spinning
records at radio stations around the country under the name Jeff Christie. From
the start, he had a knack for making people laugh. In Pittsburgh he sometimes
convinced callers he could see them via a special telephone. He did voices and
parodies.
Limbaugh drifted from job to job. He was wounded by his father's disapproval,
unable to make a real go of the radio business and unlucky in marriage. In the
mid-'80s he took a job in the front office of the Kansas City Royals baseball
team. He was making $12,000 a year, and he almost quit to take a more lucrative
job as a potato-chip distributor. "They were offering $35,000," he told me.
"That sounded like a lot of money."
Instead, he decided to take a last gamble on his talent. He found a radio job
in Sacramento where, for the first time, he started airing his conservative
opinions and really developing his bombastic, politically incorrect, El Rushbo
persona. The show was a hit.
"In those days the mainstream liberals had a media monopoly," he says. "All
three TV networks, CNN, Time and Newsweek, and the newspapers. AM radio was
considered a dying venue. Nobody did political talk, let alone conservative
political talk."
Limbaugh said things that people had never heard on the radio. He mocked the
women's movement ("feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women
access to the mainstream of society"); scoffed at sex education ("condoms work
only during the school year"); and took on conventional wisdom ("using federal
dollars as a measure, our cities have not been neglected but poisoned with
welfare-dependency funds"). It is hard to imagine, so many years later, how
strange and rebellious, how simply wrong, such sentiments sounded.
In 1988, Limbaugh moved to New York and took his show national. He came to the
city with the usual make-it-there, make-it-anywhere expectations. The show,
carried locally on WABC-AM, was a national hit. But socially, he flopped.
"I assumed there was a fraternity of broadcasting guys in New York," he told
me. "I thought my success would launch me into a circle of accomplished people.
Look, I admired these people. Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather - people
watched these guys. I thought they would welcome me as one of them. I was
wrong." Eventually Limbaugh came to a rather obvious conclusion. "I realized
that my professional achievements were discounted because of my conservatism
and my constant criticism of those who I thought would welcome me."
Why on earth did he expect people he was mocking on the air to embrace him, I
asked.
"Immaturity," he said. "I was shocked by the visceral hatred. Nobody hated me
growing up. Nobody hated me in Kansas City. Even in Sacramento, which is a
liberal town, nobody hated me. That didn't happen until I got to Manhattan."
Not everyone in the big city gave Limbaugh the cold shoulder. William F.
Buckley Jr., the publisher of The National Review, saw the young broadcaster's
star power and took Limbaugh into his orbit. Limbaugh was honored by the
attention.
"I grew up on National Review and Mr. Buckley," Limbaugh told me. "Aside from
my father, he's the most influential man in my life." In Buckley's circle he
was an incongruous figure - provincial, self-educated and full of déclassé
rock-and-roll enthusiasm. But Buckley took Limbaugh seriously, cultivated him,
promoted him and saw to it that he connected with the right people.
Buckley died a few days after my first visit to Limbaugh in Florida. Limbaugh
mourned him on the air and off. But he also had a sense that, with Buckley's
passing, he now became the movement's elder statesman. Jay Nordlinger, a senior
editor at The National Review, watched Limbaugh's tutelage under Buckley, and
he takes Limbaugh seriously as a polemicist and public intellectual. "I hired a
lot of people over the years, fancy kids from elite schools, and I always
asked, 'How did you become a conservative?' Many of them said, 'Listening to
Rush Limbaugh.' And often they'd add, 'Behind my parents' back.' "
Limbaugh's audience is often underestimated by critics who don't listen to the
show (only 3 percent of his audience identity themselves as "liberal,"
according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press).
Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of "news knowledge questions,"
Limbaugh's "Dittoheads" - the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful,
supposedly brainwashed, audience - scored higher than NPR listeners. The study
found that "readers of newsmagazines, political magazines and business
magazines, listeners of Rush Limbaugh and NPR and viewers of the Daily Show and
C-SPAN are also much more likely than the average person to have a college
degree."
For his part, Limbaugh sees himself as a thinker as well as showman. "I take
the responsibility that comes with my show very seriously," he told me. "I want
to persuade people with ideas. I don't walk around thinking about my power. But
in my heart and soul, I know I have become the intellectual engine of the
conservative movement."
In truth, Limbaugh is less a theoretician than a popularizer of what he regards
as the correct conservative responses to contemporary issues. Most of his
concerns are economic. "I consider myself a defender of corporate America," he
told me. Limbaugh is admired by the religious right, but he is far from pious
on matters of adult behavior. He is also one of the few commentators - left or
right - who never speaks cloyingly about America's obligation to its children
and grandchildren.
Recently, I sent Limbaugh an e-mail message, his preferred means of
long-distance communication, asking what his own presidential agenda would look
like. His answer reflects his actual concerns. A Limbaugh administration would
seek to:
1. Open the continental shelf to drilling. Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge.
2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax.
3. Privatize Social Security.
4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education.
5. Revoke Jimmy Carter's passport while he is out of the country.
6. Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming.
No. 5 was a joke. I think.
EVERY APRIL, LIMBAUGH HOSTS A WEEKEND at his Palm Beach estate for his closest
friends. This year the guest list included Roger Ailes, Mary Matalin and Joel
Surnow, a creator of the television series "24" and a leader of the small
Hollywood conservative community. The event is social but hardly nonpolitical.
Anyone looking for an informal gathering of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
could do worse than this. Limbaugh is also close to Karl Rove, who dined with
him a few weeks earlier in Florida; Justice Antonin Scalia (last year he
attended a dinner at cousin Steve Limbaugh's Cape Girardeau home); and Justice
Clarence Thomas (who officiated at Limbaugh's third wedding). He describes his
fellow Floridian Matt Drudge as a buddy. George H. W. Bush invited Limbaugh to
sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.
More recently, Dick Cheney toasted Limbaugh at a dinner party; a copy of the
vice president's remarks hangs on Limbaugh's wall at home. But Limbaugh's real
hero and constant role model is Ronald Reagan.
Limbaugh admires many aspects of Reaganism, but he is especially animated by
his belief in American exceptionalism. "Reagan rejected the notion among
liberals and conservatives alike who, for different reasons, believed America
was in a permanent state of decline," he wrote to me in an e-mail message. "He
had faith in the wisdom of the American people. . . . He knew America wasn't
perfect, but he also knew it was the most perfect of nations. Reagan was an
advocate of Americanism." In response to a separate question, he wrote:
"America is the solution to the world's problems. We are not the problem."
Limbaugh said he believes that President George W. Bush is well meaning but far
from the Reagan standard of excellence. "I like President Bush," he wrote me,
"but he is not a conservative. He is conservative on some things, but he has
not led a movement as Reagan did every day of his career. Bush's unpopularity
is due primarily to his reluctance to publicly defend himself and his
administration against attacks from the left. . . . The country has not tilted
to the left in my view. What has been absent is elected conservative leadership
from the White House down to the Congress."
Needless to say, Limbaugh doesn't see John McCain as the answer to this
problem, and it infuriates him when McCain claims to be a Reaganite. "McCain
and Reagan do not belong in the same sentence," he wrote.
Of course, his problems with McCain won't prevent Limbaugh from trying to
defeat Obama or from trying to push McCain toward his views. Some think he is
already succeeding in the latter mission. Mary Matalin, who has a great belief
in Limbaugh's powers of persuasion with the public, said: "Why do you think
McCain changed on the immigration issue? Because of his advisers?"
Karl Rove says he thinks Limbaugh's greatest influence in this election cycle
will be as a backbone-stiffening agent: "He's a leader," Rove said. "If Rush
engages on an issue, it gives others courage to engage."
It is a tough job this year, and Limbaugh said he knows it. Despite his
insistence that Obama is just another liberal, attacking and ridiculing him
will be delicate work. "There is nothing worse than being branded a racist," he
told me at the end of our last meeting in Florida. "That's what Bill Clinton
tried to do to me."
At the first White House correspondents' dinner of the Clinton administration,
the president cracked that Limbaugh had stood up for Attorney General Janet
Reno, but he "only did it because she was attacked by a black guy." (The "black
guy" being Representative John Conyers.)
Limbaugh was in the audience, and he was livid. He demanded, and received, a
White House apology. It was reminiscent of the time F.D.R. went after the
legendary H. L. Mencken at a Gridiron Club dinner in 1934. Limbaugh took it as
a warning. "If they successfully tar you as a racist, you are David Duke,"
Limbaugh told me.
On May 16, Limbaugh delivered a monologue on what you can't say about Obama:
"With Obama we started out, we couldn't talk about his big ears 'cause that
made him nervous. We've gone from that to this: Not only can we not mention his
ears, we can't talk about his mother. We can't talk about his father. We can't
talk about his grandmother unless he does, brings her up as a 'typical white
person.' We can't talk about his wife, can't talk about his preacher, can't
talk about his terrorist friends, can't talk about his voting record, can't
talk about his religion. We can't talk about appeasement. We can't talk about
color; we can't talk about lack of color. We can't talk about race. We can't
talk about bombers and mobsters who are his friends. We can't talk about
schooling. We can't talk about his name, 'Hussein.' We can't talk about his
lack of experience. Can't talk about his income. Can't talk about his flag pin.
This started out we can't call him a liberal. It started out we just couldn't
talk about his ears. Now we can't say anything about him."
So far Limbaugh's tactic has been to frame his attacks on Obama in the words of
liberals themselves. Among the musical parodies, which he writes with the
comedian Paul Shanklin, in his arsenal is "Barack the Magic Negro," sung to the
tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon," by a dead-on Al Sharpton impersonator. The
song was met by indignation when he first played it in March - until Limbaugh
revealed that the title and the idea of Obama as a redemptive black man à la
Sidney Poitier - came from an op-ed piece written by a black commentator, David
Ehrenstein, in The Los Angeles Times.
Sharpton is too much a master of such signification to miss the art in
Limbaugh's boomerang trick. "I despise his ideology," Sharpton told me, "but
Rush is a lot smarter and craftier than Don Imus. Limbaugh puts things in a way
that he can't be blamed for easy bigotry. Some of the songs he does about me
just make me laugh. But he's the most dangerous guy we have to deal with on the
right, including O'Reilly and Imus. They come at you with an ax. He uses a
razor."
THE ATMOSPHERE in the studio on the morning after our dinner at Trevini was
relaxed, even festive. When I arrived around 11, Limbaugh was at his computer,
wearing shorts and doing prep.
Augusto, his personal chef, was there, preparing lunch, signaling an occasion.
Limbaugh skipped the meal, explaining that he doesn't eat close to show time
for reasons of "burp prevention." Snerdly, Dawn and the engineer joined me in
the dining room, which looks as if it were decorated by Nancy Reagan's fussy
aunt.
Limbaugh's program that day was, as usual, a virtuoso performance. He took a
few calls, but mostly he delivered a series of monologues on political and
cultural topics. Limbaugh works extemporaneously. He has no writers or script,
just notes and a producer on the line from New York with occasional bits of
information. That day, and every day, he produced 10,000 words of fluent, often
clever political talk.
There was nothing he said that was startling - he spent parts of the show
mocking Obama's "change" mantra and excoriating those who believe in global
warming and talking about foreign affairs. But if you think it is easy turning
ancient Greenland, the influence of the teachers' unions or changes in E.U.
foreign policy into polemical comedy that will hold an audience for three hours
- try it for 15 minutes at your next cocktail party.
Limbaugh entertains, but he also instructs. He provides his listeners with news
and views they can use, and he teaches them how to employ it. "Rush is an
intellectual-force multiplier," Rove told me. "His listeners are, themselves,
communicators."
After the show, Limbaugh and I sat in the studio for several hours talking. He
was in an expansive mood, and he didn't duck when I asked him about the most
infamous chapter of his career, his drug bust. In 2006, after years of
addiction to painkillers, Limbaugh was charged in Florida with "doctor
shopping" prescriptions. He pleaded not guilty and cut a deal; the charges
would be dismissed after 18 months if he continued rehabilitation and treatment
with a therapist.
Needless to say, the case became a national scandal. His enemies jeered that
the white knight of American conservatism was a junkie. His fans feared the
scandal might end his career. Some prayed for him. Limbaugh's lawyer, Roy
Black, hired a Florida psychologist, Steve Strumwasser, to evaluate his client.
"I assessed Rush, and I saw he had a problem he couldn't control," Strumwasser
told me in a phone interview authorized by Limbaugh. "I knew his name and what
he did for a living, but that's about it."
Strumwasser recommended that Limbaugh check into the Meadows, in Wickenburg,
Ariz., a rehab center that specializes in celebrities.
"They guarded his privacy, but other than that, he was treated like everybody
else," said Strumwasser, who traveled with him to Arizona and checked him in.
"Rush did individual therapy, took part in group sessions and got along with
everybody."
According to Strumwasser, Limbaugh had previously tried twice to stop using
drugs on his own and failed. "It takes most people a lot of time to assume
personal responsibility for an addiction," he said. "Especially in a case like
this, where there is a professional risk involved. But by the time I met him,
Rush wasn't denying his problem at all. He went about getting better in a very
passionate way."
The passion was muted when Limbaugh returned to the air, after six weeks. He
candidly but drily, discussed his addiction and legal status, told his
listeners that he was not a victim and then went on with the broadcast.
In the studio the day we spoke, Limbaugh was more emotional. "I thank God for
my addiction," he told me. "It made me understand my shortcomings."
Being Limbaugh, he said he believes that most of these shortcomings stemmed
from his inability to love himself sufficiently. "I felt everyone who
criticized me was right and I was wrong," he confided. But, he says, he left
his insecurities behind in Arizona. "It's not possible to offend me now," he
said. "I won't give people the power to do it anymore. My problem was born of
immaturity and my childhood desire for acceptance. I learned in drug rehab that
this was stunting and unrealistic. I was seeking acceptance from the wrong
people."
Limbaugh told me he is no longer concerned about the opinions of his colleagues
and rivals, and he makes no effort to disguise his contempt for most of them.
Michael Savage, ranked No. 3 among talk-radio hosts by Talkers magazine? "He's
not even in my rearview mirror." Garrison Keillor? "I don't even know where to
find NPR on the dial."
At dinner the night before, Bill O'Reilly's name came up, and Limbaugh
expressed his opinion of the Fox cable king. He hadn't been sure at the time
that he wanted it on the record. But on second thought, "somebody's got to say
it," he told me. "The man is Ted Baxter."
Limbaugh does have his favorites. He admires Ann Coulter's ability to outrage
liberals. He is a fan of the columnists Camille Paglia and Thomas Sowell, both
of whom he considers honest thinkers. And he is especially impressed by the
essays of Christopher Hitchens. "He's misguided sometimes, but when you read
him, you finish the whole article."
Limbaugh has a deeply conflicted attitude toward Sean Hannity, his one-time
stand in and now perpetual No. 2 on the Talkers list. He speaks of the younger
man with the same condescending affection that Muhammad Ali once showed Jimmy
Ellis, a former sparring partner turned challenger. But he wanted me to
remember who is the Greatest. "I have no competitors," he said. "Hannity isn't
even close to me."
Hannity became a touchy issue in the late spring. For more than a year he was
on what appeared to be a quixotic campaign to raise the issue of Obama's
controversial pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Then the story exploded. Not only that,
Hannity also led the pack on Obama's connection to the former Weatherman leader
William Ayers. Operation Chaos was still garnering attention and amusing
listeners, but the election news was being made elsewhere.
>From New York, I sent Limbaugh a teasing e-mail message: "Hannity has been
>first and hardest on the Reverend Wright controversy and the Bill Ayers thing.
>Is it possible that he is running a separate Operation Chaos with superior
>intel?"
Limbaugh didn't dispute that Hannity was first on the Wright and Ayers
controversies. But, he wrote: "Things only take off when I mention them. That
is the point."
Two weeks later, The Daily Telegraph in London published a list of America's
most-influential pundits. Limbaugh finished fourth, behind Hannity. Once again
I wrote a message to Limbaugh: "Are we looking at a changing of the guard on
the right side of the dial?"
Limbaugh scoffed. "Since when have I cared what the media says?" he wrote.
"Media polls are not the measure. Ratings 'polls' and revenue are. And it still
ain't close."
I couldn't resist. "I wasn't asking about the media," I wrote him. "I was
asking about Hannity. Hannity can fairly take credit (as he does now, every
night) for being more influential than any other commentator in changing the
course of this election. That strikes me as new. Or am I wrong?"
At which point Limbaugh, who patiently and graciously answered dozens of my
questions, allowed me to invade his bunker and his castle, shared hours of his
time, permitted me access to his closest family and most-intimate friends, even
his therapist, had enough. "Write what you want," he snapped across cyberspace.
AS A BOY, Rush Limbaugh always preferred the company of adults, and it seems to
me he doesn't consider liberals to be real grown-ups. "They are destructive of
the institutions and traditions that make this country great," he says. "I want
to reduce them to a small group. I want no more than 10 to 15 of them in
Congress."
Limbaugh has no illusions that this will be the result of the 2008 election.
"Real conservatism wins every time it's tried," he told me. "But the party has
abandoned conservatives as a base. McCain doesn't want to criticize Democrats;
he wants Democrats to vote for him."
The oddity is that Limbaugh himself makes this strategy possible. Why, after
all, should John McCain take the low road, antagonize independents and become
embroiled in racial controversy when he can count on Limbaugh to become the
G.O.P.'s most-effective unofficial Obama Criticizer?
If McCain wins, Limbaugh will spend the next four years tugging him to the
right. If he loses, it will not be, in Limbaugh's estimation, Limbaugh's fault,
and it won't be the end of his world either. A secret of Limbaugh's success is
that his uncompromising, often harsh ideas are offset by a basically friendly
temperament. He is less like his angry father than his mature role models,
Buckley and Reagan, for whom sociability and fun were integral to their
conservative world view.
And increasingly, he has other interests. He's been spending more time with his
extended family in Cape Girardeau, where he's so popular that the municipality
runs a Rush Limbaugh tour for visitors. He toys with the idea of buying an
N.F.L. franchise. His friend Joel Surnow says that if there were a Rush
Limbaugh movie, it would be something along the lines of "Citizen Kane" meets
Howard Stern.
As for politics, Rush has already picked his candidate for the Conservative
Restoration: Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a 37-year-old prodigy whom
Limbaugh considers to be a genuine movement conservative in the Ronald Reagan
mold - "fresh, energetic and optimistic in his view of America." In the
meantime, though, there's the Democratic convention in Denver to muck around
in, and then the main event in November. Operation Chaos is over, but Rush will
come up with something new to delight his fans and infuriate his foes.
Presidents rise and presidents fall, but "The Rush Limbaugh Show" will go on,
weekdays at 12:06, Eastern Standard Time.
Zev Chafets is a frequent contributor to the magazine. His last cover story was
about Mike Huckabee.
Gregory S. Williams
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