Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (14 page)

Clinton found such opposition infuriating. On June 24, 1994, bound for St. Louis aboard Air Force One, he aired his grievance in an interview with radio station KMOX, which carried Limbaugh’s show. “I’m not frustrated about [Limbaugh’s criticism] exactly, but I tell you I have determined that I’m going to be aggressive about it. After I get off the radio today with you, Rush Limbaugh will have three hours to say whatever he wants, and I won’t have any opportunity to respond. And there’s no truth detector. You won’t get on afterward and say what was true and what wasn’t.” Limbaugh scoffed loudly at this display of presidential petulance—since when did a liberal deconstructionist like Clinton even believe in “truth”?—and dubbed himself “America’s Truth Detector.”

The spectacular Republican gains of 1994 had an obvious influence on the Clinton agenda. The Democrats no longer controlled Congress, and both the president and the Congress had to consider the election of 1996 in light of what had happened. Clinton’s liberal agenda slid toward the center. Even before the 1994 election, he signed the Limbaughesque Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which built prisons, expanded the death penalty to dozens of federal offenses, and provided funding for one hundred thousand local cops. He went on to sign a welfare reform act aimed at forcing people back into the labor market, which he trumpeted as legislation that would “end welfare as we know it.” He also signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which formally defined marriage as between a man and a woman. The Congressional Black Caucus and gay Democrats were respectively dismayed and outraged by these bills, but Clinton was clearly following the advice of his campaign theme song: “Don’t Stop [Thinking About Tomorrow].”

Limbaugh was thinking about it, too. In 1993 he told
Playboy
that he didn’t intend to get caught up in selecting Clinton’s opponent. “I don’t involve myself in primaries,” he said. “After the party and the people have chosen the candidate, then it’s a different ball game.”

Would he endorse Dole?

“Well, who knows what Bob Dole’s going to learn,” Rush said airily. “It’s a long time till 1996.”

Dole did get the nomination, mostly because he was blessed with one of the least inspiring fields of rivals in the annals of modern American politics—inflammatory reactionaries Pat Buchanan and Alan Keyes and bland mediocrities such as Steve Forbes, Lamar Alexander, Richard Lugar, and Arlen Specter. In this group, Dole seemed like a towering figure. But he never had a chance to beat Clinton. The president was young and attractive. The economy was doing well. The Cold War was over and the country was enjoying a peacetime holiday. With the help of his adviser Dick Morris, Clinton had triangulated himself into the center of the political spectrum. Ross Perot was running again, but he was a spent force, and whatever votes he did pick up would probably be at the expense of the GOP. Even a terrific Republican candidate would have had a hard time winning.

Dole was not terrific. At age seventy-three, he was listless and sometimes disoriented. Campaigning in Chico, California, he lost his balance and toppled off a stage. He praised pitcher Hideo Nomo of the “Brooklyn Dodgers” (the Dodgers hadn’t played in Brooklyn since the Eisenhower administration). A reporter asked him why he was running, and he vacantly replied, “You know, a better man for a better America. That’s sort of our slogan.”

Dole’s running mate, Jack Kemp, was also a dud. Limbaugh was favorably disposed toward him at the start of the campaign; the candidate was, after all, both a Reaganite and a former pro quarterback. But Kemp flubbed his vice presidential debate against Al Gore in what Limbaugh described as “a disaster.” After Dole’s second debate with Clinton, Rush opened his show by admitting that he couldn’t tell if the Republican presidential candidate had won or lost. Dole himself called the show later that day and tried to do some damage control. “Rush,” he said, “I think we nailed him last night on a few things.” Limbaugh was polite but unconvinced.

Clinton’s reelection was less impressive than it should have been. Once more the Democrats failed to win a clear majority of the popular vote, a fact that Limbaugh stressed in his postmortem analysis. But he didn’t seem brokenhearted. The prospect of a Dole presidency had excited no one, not even Dole. Four more years of Clinton meant four more years of sparring with the president of the United States. And Limbaugh had a score to settle with Clinton that went back to April 19, 1995, when a massive bombing destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. One hundred and sixty-eight people had been killed in the worst domestic terror attack in American memory. Six hundred and eighty more were injured. Clinton vowed to find the bombers and bring them to justice. Two—Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols—were caught and convicted. Michael and Lori Fortier pled guilty to foreknowledge. McVeigh was put to death; Nichols got life in prison.
⁶

The bombers were survivalists who denied the legitimacy of the federal government. During their trial it became clear that the immediate trigger for their act was outrage at the storming of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.

On April 24, President Clinton was in Minnesota talking to a college group when he began to speculate about the motives of the killers. “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today,” he said. Their sole goal “seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression, by their very words, that violence is acceptable . . . Those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, we have our responsibilities, too.” Clinton identified the promoters of paranoia as people who speak “over the airwaves.”
New York Times
columnist William Safire took Clinton to task for this extraordinary assertion. “The impression Mr. Clinton left, by his very words,” Safire wrote, “was that the Oklahoma bombing had been incited,” and that the phrase “over the airwaves” was simply a coded way of saying “conservative talk radio hosts.” At this time, Limbaugh was the only significant right-wing talk-show host in the country, and he was furious at what he saw as Clinton’s effort to smear him as an accomplice to mass murder. He demanded an apology, but none came.

Limbaugh bided his time. It came in early 1998, when the Drudge Report Web site broke the story of Bill Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. The president denied it, and his wife went on the
Today
show to stand by her man. The host, Matt Lauer, asked her if she had really told friends that this was “the last great battle,” and that “one side or the other is going down.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’ve been that dramatic,” Mrs. Clinton replied. “That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle . . . the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

It wasn’t Hillary’s finest moment. She looked foolish for denying what everyone else already knew. And the accusation about a right-wing conspiracy seemed paranoid. The mainstream media was with the Clintons;
Newsweek
had refrained from even publishing the Lewinsky story, which it had before Drudge, evidently out of a misguided belief that it could keep the story from going public. Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh and some Republican billionaires who wanted to see Clinton humiliated might be a lot of things, but they were hardly a vast conspiracy.

In fact, Rush always saw what was charming about the president. He may even have been a little envious. He once said that Bill Clinton was the kind of guy it would be fun to chase women with or just hang out with. But the Lewinsky scandal was too good to pass up. Ever since the Gennifer Flowers “bimbo eruption” in the 1992 Clinton campaign, he had been jabbing at Clinton’s extracurricular sexual exploits in a series of skits and song parodies. Paula Jones inspired “Hey, Paula” and “Mrs. Jones You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” sung by a Clinton soundalike. Now, Monica got “The Ballad of the Black Beret” (
“DNA upon her dress / War’s declared on terrorists / Hundreds more rolled in the hay / But only one wore a black beret”
) and “Mambo Number 5” became “Bimbo No. 5” (
“A little bit of Monica, not my wife / A little Miss America on the side”
). Hillary got a song, too, “Stood By My Man” (
“Sometimes it’s hard to be Missus Bill Clinton / Cleaning up the mess behind that man”
). No political conspiracy had ever been so public, no president subjected to such cruel, relentless ridicule, three hours a day, fifteen hours a week. He embraced the conceit of the conspiracy as he always embraced accusations against him. “Vast right-wing conspiracy?” Hell yeah. He even began peddling coffee mugs with the words emblazoned on them. Bill Clinton never came close to having as much fun with Monica Lewinsky as Rush did.

CHAPTER SIX

I
n 1997 Rush Limbaugh moved to Palm Beach. He had been in New York for almost a decade, but it had never been a good match. The acceptance he sought from his peers didn’t materialize.

After Clinton’s reelection, Rush was treated by the media as a has-been. It was wishful thinking—he still had his audience—but it bothered him to be discounted. The only New Yorkers who really seemed to care about him were the tax collectors.

Florida seemed like a better location. The weather was great. He could drive his own car instead of being chauffeured around or forced to walk, which he found both tiring and frustrating. Like any entertainer, he appreciated recognition, but in the streets of Manhattan he was still relatively anonymous. When strangers did notice him they were often rude. Florida was different—a conservative state full of avid Dittoheads. Palm Beach, with its ostentatiously rich lifestyle, wasn’t reminiscent of Cape Girardeau, but it felt more like home to him than New York ever had. And, there is no state income tax in Florida.

Limbaugh didn’t change his act when he left New York. He still went after Clinton almost every day and continued his war against the mainstream media. But very attentive listeners could hear a change: Limbaugh seemed slightly less aggressive. It was especially noticeable in the after-math of the 2000 presidential election. Rush was living and broadcasting from Palm Beach, the epicenter of the controversy. This should have been his moment, but strangely he didn’t really seize it. He supported Bush, of course, and made fun of his nemesis Al Gore (“Algore” in Rushian), but he didn’t dominate the right side of the story as he had in 1994 (and would again in 2008). There was also something different in Limbaugh’s voice. Sometimes he sounded a bit fuzzy, and occasionally he seemed distracted. He was increasingly absent from his show, replaced for a day or two at a time by a rotating roster of guest hosts. His fans asked: Was Rush getting tired after all these years?

On October 9, 2001, Limbaugh provided an answer: He wasn’t tired, he was almost completely deaf. His hearing had been declining for a long time, and the previous spring he had lost it entirely in his left ear. Now it was gone in the right as well. There was genetic hearing loss in his family, but he told his stunned audience, it couldn’t really explain what had happened. “There’s something more going on,” he said. “All those times that you thought I was on vacation or playing golf, I’ve been in an MRI machine or getting blood drawn, or on a stress EKG machine or at a cardiologist, the hearing doctor, what have you.” The diagnosis, he said, was autoimmune inner ear disease.

Limbaugh explained that he could sometimes hear people with a particular voice range, especially in one-on-one conversations, but he couldn’t hear radio, including his own voice, or the sound of music. “I am,” he said, “for all practical purposes, deaf.”

Limbaugh had been using powerful hearing aids, but even though they no longer worked, he had continued to broadcast.

“I’m not going to explain to you how we’re doing this,” he said. “Put two and two together, if you wish.” The answer was Dawn, a court stenographer whom he hired to type callers’ questions directly into Rush’s computer.

Limbaugh had no intention of quitting just because the world had gone silent on him. “As long as the passion exists to do it, then we’ll find a way,” he said. He had decided to gamble on a cochlear implant. “It’s the last thing they do because it’s irreversible,” he explained on the air. “Once you do that you’re finished, and if it doesn’t work then there’s nothing they can do to put you back the way you were. So you must wait until you are entirely deaf for approval for this. The FDA even gets involved in this because it’s surgery which involves the brain . . . I’ve talked to a number of doctors who say that it would be an improvement over the situation I’m in now.”

Limbaugh left the show in the hands of guest hosts and flew out to the House Ear Clinic in Los Angeles. Dr. Antonio De la Cruz installed the implant, which consists of a microphone capable of receiving sound and transmitting it to a speech processor. The processor converts mechanical sound into an electrical signal, which is then sent to the brain via electrodes implanted in the inner ear.

The device worked. Limbaugh was back on the air full-time by the start of 2003. “This cochlear implant will reconnect Mr. Limbaugh to his environment, and that is an important benefit to his quality of life,” said Dr. De la Cruz. It did not have the same effect on Limbaugh-haters who had dared to hope that they had heard the last of him.

That hope sprung anew the following October, when the
National Enquirer
broke a sensational story: Rush Limbaugh, the voice of America, was a drug addict who might be headed for prison.

The source of the story was Wilma Cline, who worked for Limbaugh as a housekeeper between 1997 and 2001, and did some drug dealing on the side. As the
Enquirer
story reported, Limbaugh learned that Cline’s husband was taking hydrocodone pills and asked if she could get him some. She could, and soon she was supplying him with thirty a month. When her husband’s doctor cut off his prescription, Limbaugh told Cline to find another source, which she did. He hid his stash under the mattress (presumably a Select Comfort, one of his sponsors), to keep his wife Marta from finding out.