The policy of engagement hasn’t shown many results, either. The reset button with Moscow jammed. The Iranians are building their nuclear weapons undisturbed. Obama went to China and got a cool reception; its leaders even warned him not to endanger the value of their dollar by inflating U.S. currency with profligate spending. During the presidential campaign, he promised to remove U.S. troops from Iraq and close the prison at Guantánamo Bay during his first year in office, but did neither. His appeal to the Arab world in Cairo, in which he went so far as to equate the plight of the Palestinians to that of the Jews after the Holocaust, got him nothing in return. Obama went to the UN Global Climate summit in Copenhagen and brokered an obviously meaningless deal. His only foreign policy success was winning the Nobel Prize, an honor even he admitted was undeserved.
A poll published by
Vanity Fair
in its January 2010 issue found that 26 percent of Americans think that Limbaugh is the most influential conservative in the country. Glenn Beck was a distant second, with 11 percent. Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin tied for third place with 10 percent. Sean Hannity got 8 percent. The highest-scoring currently serving Republican official was House Minority Leader John Boehner, with 4 percent. In 1994 Rush came out of right field to sell Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. This time, the election is Limbaugh’s to win or lose. If the results of 2010 resemble the landslide of 1994, Limbaugh will want more this time than to be named an Honorary Freshman.
The momentum of 1994 was squandered in 1996 by the nomination of Bob Dole, a moderate Limbaugh viewed with disdain. Rush didn’t have a candidate of his own that year, but he won’t make that mistake again. He will be backing somebody next time. It won’t be Mike Huckabee, whose “Club for Greed” slams at the corporate wing of the GOP have made him Rush’s idea of an irresponsible populist. It won’t be Gingrich, either; Newt has gone soft in Rush’s opinion. And it very likely won’t be Bobby Jindal. Limbaugh has stopped referring to the Louisiana governor as “the next Ronald Reagan” and scarcely mentions him at all these days.
Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty is a possibility. Rush said good things about Pawlenty when he was being considered for the vice presidential nomination in 2008; and in 2009 he took note of Pawlenty’s endorsement of conservative candidate Doug Hoffman. Limbaugh respects Mitt Romney, but probably not enough to push hard for him. Right now, the frontrunner for his support is Sarah Palin, whom he calls “the most prominent, articulate voice for standard, run-of-the-mill, good old-fashioned conservatism.” When Palin’s autobiography was published Rush gave it a rave review in the
Limbaugh Letter
, and spent an hour with her on his show—the sort of gesture he usually reserves for Republican presidents and special friends. In that interview, Rush noted approvingly that Palin was unpopular with the Republican Party establishment, by which he meant the McCain-Steele moderates. Listeners came away with the impression that if the nomination were being decided tomorrow, she would be his candidate.
It isn’t, of course; 2012 is a long way off. New candidates, perhaps including some Limbaugh conservatives, will emerge from the 2010 congressional elections. Palin may turn out to be the conservative Geraldine Ferraro and disappear, or wind up with a lucrative career in the private sector. She might prove to be the lightweight her critics, in the Republican Party and beyond, take her for. On the other hand, she might get herself nominated and even elected. If a washed up, elderly movie actor like Reagan, or a black man raised in Hawaii and Indonesia named Barack Hussein Obama, can be elected president, anything can be imagined. And it would be undeniably ironic if the first woman president owed her job to Rush Limbaugh, the bête noire of feminism.
President Obama was unpopular at the start of 2010, but he still has plenty of time to recover. Even if the midterm elections go badly for the Democrats, he could still win reelection with the sort of comeback Bill Clinton staged in 1996. It is possible that Obama, as liberal pundits like Frank Rich believe, represents a new American political demography that will rule for years to come. It is also far from certain. John F. Kennedy was the herald of a new generation “born in this century” (the twentieth)—and four of his first five successors were older than he. Twenty years after Camelot, Reagan, who was born during the administration of William Howard Taft, supposedly redrew the electoral map by turning the clock back to Norman Rockwell’s America. Bill Clinton moved it forward again to the Age of Aquarius. As Larry O’Brien, one of JFK’s smartest aides, once observed, there are no final victories in politics.
What America has instead is a permanent argument between Federalists and Jeffersonians, progressives and traditionalists, conservatives and liberals. This is an essential argument about human nature, and the balance between personal freedom and collective responsibility. The presence of this debate is one of the vital signs that a society is open and free. Those who decry Limbaugh (or, on the other side, relentlessly partisan liberal Democrats like Frank Rich or Paul Krugman) “polarizing” ignore the fact that only totalitarian states are unipolar. Democracies are adversarial, and you don’t get to choose the other side’s advocates. Limbaugh isn’t interested in putting himself in the shoes of the Other. He doesn’t want to make a deal, split the difference, or strike a blow for civility. “There are no books written about great moderates,” he sometimes says. “Great people take stands on principle, not moderation.” That’s not true, of course—the founding fathers Limbaugh venerates compromised their way into a Constitution, and even Ronaldus Maximus knew when to bend. Politics is the
art
of compromise. But, of course, Limbaugh is not a politician or even a political strategist. He is a polemicist and, as polemicists since Cato the Elder have known, moderation doesn’t draw a crowd.
On December 22, 2009, Limbaugh opened his show by announcing that he had been chosen “radio personality of the decade” by
Adweek
magazine. “The man manages to stay in the headlines no matter who’s in the White House or who’s gunning for him,” he quoted approvingly. A few days later he flew out to Cape for Christmas with the Limbaugh family, and then on to Hawaii for a golf outing, and promptly made headlines once again. On the afternoon of December 30 he was rushed to the Queens Medical Center with a severe chest pain he thought was a heart attack. The ambulance was still on its way when Wikipedia flashed a bulletin to the world: Rush Limbaugh is dead.
The news of Limbaugh’s death, like that of his fellow Missourian Mark Twain, proved premature. Within fifteen minutes Wikipedia corrected its report. Limbaugh was alive, resting comfortably, and, as it turned out, all right. Like Tom Sawyer, he had been given a preview of his own funeral. His fans deluged him with e-mail prayers followed by joyful messages. Limbaugh-hating bloggers expressed their delight at his demise and then their deep disappointment. Soon rumors raced through cyber-space that Limbaugh was using drugs again and had overdosed. To counter them, a fit-looking Rush held a press conference with his cardiologist, Doctor Joana Magno standing by, and explained that an angiogram had turned up no heart problem at all. A reporter asked if Limbaugh was once more using pain pills for his back, to which he responded with a grin. “No. Prednisone,” an anti-inflammatory cortiscosteroid.
At the press conference Limbaugh lavishly praised the hospital for the outstanding care he had received and remarked that as far as he was concerned the American health care system was just great. This provoked a political storm, with commentators on the left charging that Limbaugh had taken a swipe at Obama’s health care initiative. Limbaugh was perfectly well aware that it would, too. “That little comment, we’re going to get three days out of this,” he told Kathryn Rogers. He was wrong. He got a week.
Like all originals, Rush Limbaugh contains multitudes. There is some Sunday School boy in him, left over from the Centenary Methodist Church, and a fair amount of Hugh Heffner; Bo Diddley’s swaggering guitar, and Bill Buckley’s drawing-room harpsichord. He is an introvert with forty guests for dinner on Thanksgiving, a cynical romantic who doesn’t understand women but keeps on trying (in December he sent out save-the-day notices to his friends for a June wedding to Kathryn Rogers), a polite, soft-spoken listener who, on the radio, shouts rude, sometimes vulgar personal insults at his ideological enemies. Limbaugh is a biting and sophisticated political satirist whose own taste in humor runs to mother-in-law jokes told by Borsht Belt tummlers like Myron Cohen and Professor Irwin Corey. There probably isn’t another man on the planet whose heroes and role models have been Ronald Reagan, Muhammad Ali, James Madison, Gordon Gekko, superjock Larry Lujack, and Justice Antonin Scalia.
But, more than anything else, Rush is his father’s son. Big Rush taught Rush and his brother, David, that being an American meant being a Limbaugh, and that a Limbaugh worth his salt was an outspoken patriot, a conservative Republican, a college-educated professional, a family man, a pillar of the church and the community, and a passionate defender of the well-established truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition as understood in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, circa 1956. Like all sons, Rush often fell short of his father’s standards, but he never stopped believing in them, or trying to win Big Rush’s approval by carrying his message to the world.
It has been more than twenty years since Rush Limbaugh first appeared on the scene and almost that long since Ronald Reagan passed on to him the half-serious title of “most dangerous man in America.” Limbaugh took the coronation seriously. Over the years he has endeavored to carry forward the banner of Ronaldus Maximus, which he always credits as “Reaganism.” But as time moves on the memory of Reagan fades. It is Limbaugh’s voice conservatives identify with. For millions, conservatism is now Limbaughism.
Even after more than twenty years there are still many people who refuse to accept that Limbaugh is more than an entertainer, a pitchman, or a hot-air balloon. These are the same people who mistook Reagan for an amiable dunce. Two decades should have been enough to convince even the most obtuse that Rush Limbaugh is someone you underestimate or ignore at your peril. He can’t be wished away or shouted down or sniffed into irrelevance. Smart liberals will listen to him, even if they hate what he has to say. The easily outraged, will be. Those with a sense of humor will find themselves laughing despite themselves. Presidents and politicians come and go, but Rush Limbaugh, equipped now with a clean bill of health and accompanied by a lovely new wife (and, who knows, maybe a future Rush Hudson IV), and in undisputed control of the conservative movement, is ready for the next act. He has often said that he doesn’t intend to quit until he has convinced every liberal in the country. He’s not in a hurry, either. His grandfather, the original Rush Hudson Limbaugh, didn’t retire until he was 103 years old.
EPILOGUE
THE PARTY OF “HELL NO”
I
was going to end this book at the end of 2009, but Rush just kept on rolling. On January 5, Democratic senator Byron Dorgan announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection. That news was followed by Senator Chris Dodd’s decision to retire (and a couple weeks after that by an announcement by Beau Biden, the vice president’s son and the presumptive favorite to win his father’s old Senate seat in Delaware, that he wasn’t going to run). “They know what’s coming in November,” said Limbaugh. “And they know why . . . Don’t doubt me.”
The momentum kept building. Republican Scott Brown won a special election for the U.S. Senate with moves right out of Limbaugh’s playbook—opposition to the Democratic plan to reform health care and a stinging critique of the administration’s antiterrorism policies.
Rush compared Brown’s victory to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Democrats had lost
Teddy Kennedy’s
seat! “This one’s for you, Mary Jo,” he said. “This one’s for you, Judge Bork.” He predicted that 2010 would be an even greater Republican landslide than 1994 and reminded his audience who was responsible. “A year ago [moderate Republican pundits] were telling us we had to cross the aisle, we had to hope Obama succeeded, we had to work with him, we had to show the electorate that we were for larger government . . . that’s what some in our party were actually saying one year ago. There was one man, ladies and gentlemen, who stood tall and opposed every aspect of that, and I don’t mind saying it was I, your host, El Rushbo.” Temporarily speechless at his own prescience, he ended the riff with James Brown’s “I Feel Good.”
Two days later, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out major portions of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform legislation, which limited the political contributions of corporations and unions. Limbaugh had been calling for this for years; the law, which he considered a limitation of the First Amendment, was one of the first things he raised when I asked him, in 2008, what he had against John McCain. Limbaugh hailed the Court’s decision as a “huge victory for freedom and liberty.”
More good news was coming. The Pew Institute’s annual poll of voter priorities found that Americans listed concerns about global warming dead last on a list of twenty-one issues. Not only that: The UN panel on climate change (ICCP) was forced to admit that one of its key assertions—that the Himalayan glaciers are rapidly melting—was based on nothing more than an unverified claim by an environmental lobby group. “The primary evidence that they used has been made up,” Limbaugh said. To complete Rush’s environmental trifecta, the AP reported that Osama bin Laden (or whoever issues audiotapes in his name these days) was warning that global warming threatened the world—and that the best way to stop it would be to destroy the American economy.
The new year rolled merrily along, Air America, the left-wing radio network founded in 2004 as the antidote to Rush, abruptly shut down. Limbaugh had predicted from the start that its staff wouldn’t succeed any better than previous Great Liberal Radio Hopes such as Mario Cuomo and Jim Hightower. Now he mockingly wondered why Air America employees hadn’t been among the millions of Americans whose jobs President Obama claimed he was saving with his stimulus spending—demonstrating once more that he is nothing if not a bad winner.