Also on VF.com: Rush Limbaugh’s 10 most moronic remarks.
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.”
Michael Wolff is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
