Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (12 page)

13. Poverty is not the root (“rut”) cause of crime.

14. There’s a simple way to solve the crime problem: obey the law; punish those who do not; and

15. If you commit a crime, you are guilty.

16. Women should not be allowed on juries where the accused is a stud.

17. The way to improve our schools is not more money, but the reintroduction of moral and spiritual values, as well as the four “R’s”: reading, ’riting, ’rithmatic, and Rush.

18. I am not arrogant.

19. My first 35 Undeniable Truths are still undeniably true.

20. There is a God.

21. There is something wrong when critics say the problem with America is too much religion.

22. Morality is not defined by individual choice.

23. The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they’re not liberals.

24. Feminism was established as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.

25. Follow the money. When somebody says, “It’s not the money,” it’s always the money.

26. Liberals attempt through judicial activism what they cannot win at the ballot box.

27. Using federal dollars as a measure, some cities have not only been neglected, but poisoned with welfare dependency funds.

28. Progress is not striving for economic justice or fairness, but economic growth.

29. Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.

30. Compassion is no substitute for justice.

31. The culture war is between the winners and those who think they’re losers who want to become winners. The losers think the only way they can become winners is by banding together all the losers and then empowering a leader of the losers to make things right for them.

32. The Los Angeles riots were not caused by the Rodney King verdict. The Los Angeles riots were caused by rioters.

33. You could afford your house without your government if it weren’t for your government.

34. Words mean things.

35. Too many Americans can’t laugh at themselves anymore.

A lot of the new Undeniable Truths were obviously there for shock value or humorous effect, but at their core was a prescription for electoral victory in 1994 and beyond. To win, the Republicans needed to revert to Reaganism, with its belief in small government, lower taxes, less social welfare, tougher law enforcement, and a sense of America as a great and exceptional country with the power to keep the world safe for itself and for its friends. “The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they’re not liberals,” Limbaugh said. It was time to go back to the bedrock principles of capitalism and individualism that characterized the reign of Ronaldus Maximus.

CHAPTER FIVE

E
veryone expected the Republicans would make some gains in 1994. The party out of power usually does. But Limbaugh saw an opportunity to seize control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the start of the Eisenhower administration. His strategy was to take the election national. Rush’s audience provided the GOP with the means to reach into almost every congressional district in the country with a unified daily message. Thousands of fired-up “Dittoheads” (as Rush’s fans are known) can’t swing a presidential election, but they are enough to nominate conservatives and help them beat Democrats in much smaller congressional districts.

Six weeks before the 1994 election, one of Limbaugh’s old friends and sometimes rival, Newt Gingrich, gathered a group of fellow conservative House hopefuls and issued a manifesto: the Contract for America. It offered a ten-point legislative program that candidates promised a Republican-led House would pass within one hundred days. These initiatives included introducing a constitutional amendment to require the federal government to balance its budget; a tough anti-crime package; a prohibition on welfare payments to mothers under the age of eighteen and a requirement that able-bodied recipients go to work; an “American Dream Restoration Act,” with a five-hundred-dollar-per-child tax credit and repeal of the marriage tax penalty; a cut in financial support to the United Nations; weakening product liability laws to discourage frivolous litigation; tax adjustments and cuts for small business; the introduction of a constitutional term-limit amendment for senators and representatives; and “family values” legislation that would provide incentives for adoption, discourage abortion, increase parental control of education, and enact tougher anti-pornography laws. Finally, Clinton’s 1993 tax hike on Social Security would be repealed.

These ideas had been floating around conservative circles for a long time. Many were in Ronald Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union message. George H. W. Bush had set them aside. Now Gingrich was reviving them, at least as campaign rhetoric. Limbaugh had no direct role in drafting the contract, but it couldn’t have happened without his vociferous cheer-leading for the return of Reaganism to the Republican Party. “Rush was talking about the elements of the Contract for America before there was one,” says Karl Rove.

Two months before the election, Limbaugh predicted victory. “Historians will remember 1994 as a watershed year in American politics,” he said. “This was the year that modern liberalism, the ideology dominating nearly every important cultural and political institution in the country, tipped its hand, revealing its deep insecurity. Liberals are terrified of me. As well they should be.”

Limbaugh had set his sites on Congress as far back as 1992, when the House Bank was caught allowing representatives to kite checks with impunity. Limbaugh dramatized the scandal with a radio skit.

The bit took what might have been an inside-the-Beltway embarrassment and turned it into a national story everyone could understand. Eventually six people were convicted of felony charges and twenty-five more were singled out by the House Ethics Committee. All but four were Democrats.

Limbaugh also used satire on Illinois Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, one of the most entrenched and powerful liberal Democratic committee chairmen in the House. Rostenkowski was accused of using the Congressional Post Office to launder money, just the sort of arcane piece of business that powerful lawmakers had been getting away with forever. Limbaugh turned it into theater.

The laughter proved lethal. Rostenkowski was forced to resign his chairmanship, got indicted for mail fraud, lost his seat in 1994, and served fifteen months in jail before he was pardoned by President Clinton.

Limbaugh’s anti-corruption kick was not an act of disinterested good government broadcasting. He was after Democrats, who controlled the House and supported President Clinton. It was his good luck that his political opponents, grown fat and sloppy after so many years in power, gave him such inviting targets.

On November 8, the Republicans won a sensational victory. The GOP went from 176 seats to 230, enough to take control of the House. The Democratic Speaker, Tom Foley, was defeated in his own district, and Gingrich became the first Republican Speaker since Joseph Martin in 1953. Mary Matalin, who had served as a deputy campaign manager on Bush’s 1992 campaign, watched in awe as Limbaugh led the Republican bandwagon. “Rush was a market force in 1994,” she says. “I would go to political meetings all over the country and hear conservatives speaking the way he speaks, saying the things he says. The clarity he brought to issues got repeated back in questions from the audience. Back then, like now, along with Gingrich, he was one of the two most important conservatives in the country. Newt had come up with the plan, but Rush had sold it in every district in the country.” A month after the election, grateful Republican lawmakers held a dinner in his honor. Representative Barbara Cubin, a member of the freshman class from Wyoming, told Limbaugh that 74 percent of the nation’s newspapers had endorsed Democrats. “Talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide,” she said. Vin Webber, a former congressman from Minnesota, cited data from pollster Frank Luntz showing that people who listened to talk radio more than ten hours a week voted Republican three to one. “Those are the people who elected the new Congress,” Webber said.