Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

Table of Contents

 

 

 

NONFICTION

 

FICTION

SENTINEL

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First published in 2010 by Sentinel, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Zev Chafets, 2010

All rights reserved

 

Portions of this book appeared as “Late Period Limbaugh” in
The New York Times Magazine.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

 

Chafets, Ze’ev.

Rush Limbaugh : an army of one / Zev Chafets. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-43456-7

1. Limbaugh, Rush H. 2. Radio broadcasters—United States—Biography.

3. Conservatives—United States—Biography. I. Title.

PN1991.4.L48C53 2010

791.44’028’092-dc22

[B] 2009053904

 

 

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To my brother Joe Chafets and my sister Julie Chafets Grass with love

I know the liberals call you “the most dangerous man in America,” but don’t worry about it, they used to say the same thing about me. Keep up the good work.

—Ronald Reagan in a letter to Rush Limbaugh, December 11, 1992

P
eople tend to remember the moment they first heard Rush Limbaugh. Mine came in the fall of 1989 in Detroit, driving down Woodward Avenue in a black Le Baron convertible. I was there researching a book about the racial politics of the city where I grew up and which I had left many years before. Out of habit I had the car radio tuned to 1270 AM, the popular rock-and-roll station of my teenage years. Clarence “Frogman” Henry was singing “Ain’t Got No Home,” a song that had always made me smile, when suddenly he was interrupted by a baritone voice intoning, “
Dadelut! Dadelut! Dadelut!
Homeless update.”

In Detroit you get accustomed to bad news. I listened for the latest installment. But this wasn’t about Detroit; it was about a think tank in Washington, D.C., that had, according to the baritone, just put out an inflated figure of the number of homeless Americans—a typical liberal trick to deceive the public and allow Democrats in Congress to funnel “emergency” money to their cronies in big cities. This grew into a riff on the evils of profligate government spending, the debasing effect of welfare on its recipients, and the cynical willingness of the “mainstream media” to treat liberal propaganda as news. The baritone didn’t seem angry. On the contrary, he seemed delighted and amused to be catching another bunch of bleeding hearts, rapacious pols, and crooked journalists in the act. He called himself “El Rushbo” and “America’s Truth Detector,” and he announced that his program was on the “Excellence in Broadcasting Network.”

I had been living abroad for many years, but I knew perfectly well that broadcast networks in America sounded nothing like this. They wouldn’t have dared to strike such an irreverent tone about homelessness or make raucous fun of revered liberal axioms and icons. It is hard to describe how transgressively original Rush Limbaugh sounded in this media environment. Listening to him on the radio reminded me of the first time I saw Elvis on TV with my father sitting in the next room—a feeling that I was witnessing something completely different and possibly even dangerous.

My friends and relatives in Detroit looked at me blankly when I mentioned hearing Limbaugh. Nobody knew a thing about him. When I described how he had gleefully and artfully ripped into a whole herd of liberal sacred cows, the looks became disapproving. These were their cows, after all. What was funny about a man laughing at feminism? How could a white commentator mock Jesse Jackson? And what sort of troglodyte would dare question the settled science of the environmental movement? This man sounded like a conservative. Whose side was I on, anyway?

Listening to Rush became a guilty pleasure. I didn’t agree with everything—in fact, I disagreed with a lot—but agreeing wasn’t the point. He was doing something really interesting. Ridicule has always been a weapon used by the left against the right. Limbaugh had somehow seized the cannon and turned it around. I relished his bravado, laughed at his outrageous satire, and admired his willingness to go against the intellectual grain. But I didn’t expect him to last long. He was too irreverent and subversive, too bold. The keepers of the culture would never let him get away with it. Somehow, they’d find a way to shut him up and make him go away.

Which, looking back on it more than twenty years later, is pretty much what my father had said about Elvis.

CHAPTER ONE

F
our days before Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States, Rush Limbaugh went on the air and told his millions of listeners what his policy toward the new man in the White House was going to be. He had been asked, he said, by a major American publication—the
Wall Street Journal
, it later turned out—to write four hundred words about his hopes for the new administration. Limbaugh told his audience that he didn’t need four hundred words. Four would suffice: “I hope he fails.”

Limbaugh said that he fervently disagreed with Republican moderates who were calling on the party to cooperate with Obama or even give him a chance. This was a reference to a meeting between Obama and a group of conservative pundits that had taken place a few days earlier at the home of columnist George Will. The guest list had been unpublished but was immediately leaked, and it included some of the brainiest right-of-center commentators in Washington. They had ideological differences with Obama, but they had a lot in common, too, including a common language. They, like the president-elect, were products of elite liberal educational institutions.

Obama’s goal was to flatter and charm the guests, and by all accounts he succeeded. “He’s making good on his promise to reach out to Republicans and conservatives with this post-partisan stuff, whatever that means,” Larry Kudlow, a conservative economic commentator, later told a reporter. “I was very impressed. He’s a nice guy, terribly smart, well informed, great smile. He’s just really engaged. He said he likes to know the arguments on all sides.”

Obama had no illusions about converting anyone that night (although he evidently made some inroads with
New York Times
columnist David Brooks). He simply wanted these critics to recall his smiling face and reasonable demeanor when they wrote about him. He had another purpose as well: to divide his opponents into “good” and “bad” conservatives.

“The Obama message is a crafty one,” blogged
Vanity Fair
media columnist Michael Wolff the next day. “He’s choosing these fretting, parsing, neurotic, limp-wristed, desperate-to-be-liked print guys, over the crass, spitting, scary, voluble guys on television and radio, the Ailes-Rove-Limbaugh wing of the Republican Party.”

By coincidence, Rush Limbaugh was in Washington on the day of Will’s gathering; in fact, he was at the White House, where President George W. Bush threw him an intimate fifty-eighth-birthday luncheon. When word of the Obama dinner got out, the media began buzzing with rumors that Limbaugh had been there.

The following day, Limbaugh laughed at the very idea. He wasn’t looking to get along with Obama; he wanted to thwart him. That was the meaning of “I hope he fails.” The president was a liberal Democrat, and as far as Limbaugh was concerned, the Republican Party was not in business to expedite or assist liberals. “I’ve been listening to Barack Obama for a year and a half,” he said. “I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don’t want them to succeed. He’s talking about the absorption of as much of the private sector by the U.S. government as possible, from the banking business to the mortgage industry, the automobile business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don’t want this to work.”