Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (23 page)

Only one aspect of the torrent of criticism of his CPAC speech actually got to Limbaugh—the comments about his physical appearance. “Personal bulk” was comparatively kind. Timothy Egan called him “a swollen man.” Begala mocked his “bloated face.” MSNBC’s Ed Schultz invited Limbaugh on his show this way: “C’mon, you fat pig. Let’s get it on.” David Letterman joked that the way he was dressed made him look like a European gangster.

Rusty Limbaugh had been a tubby kid, and Rush, in his various adult iterations, has been a fat man. At CPAC he weighed 290 pounds. “I dressed for comfort because I was overweight,” he wrote me in May, “I did not want a closed collar and tie because I did not want to sweat. I did not intend to attract attention or comment with my attire. I wanted to be comfortable and not be distracted by how I felt based on my attire. Those of us who are overweight do NOT ever think of making fashion statements, nor do we believe our attire will ever be mentioned one way or another. I was surprised my attire drew attention. I have never relied on looks to contribute to my ‘image.’ I have never tried to project an image. My mind does not operate that way. I rely on, and hope my ideas, my substance, speak for me, not the superficiality of appearance.” He also started losing weight, but no diet was going to make him less visible.

In the first week of March, Pew reported that Limbaugh stories amounted to 8 percent of all the news stories in the national media organizations it monitors. White House reporters once again queried Gibbs on the efficacy of the strategy, and this time Gibbs conceded that it might be counterproductive. But ten days later, after Dick Cheney said that Obama was “making some choices that, in my mind, will in fact raise the risk to the American people,” Gibbs tossed another Rush bomb. “I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy, so they trotted out the next most popular member of the Republican cabal.” The Democratic National Committee announced an Internet contest to pick a national slogan to use against Limbaugh in a billboard campaign.

Vanity Fair
media critic Michael Wolff marveled at the centrality of Limbaugh. A year ago, he and his fellow media mavens had written him off as a dead man talking. Now he was not only back but bigger than ever. Wolff was perplexed by this. AM radio was a dying medium, a dinosaur even when Limbaugh began to broadcast twenty years earlier. Now, on the Internet, how could one man with a microphone dominate the debate so thoroughly? “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.”

When would Limbaugh peak? On March 26, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie told Joe Scarborough that Limbaugh was in decline. “People here recognize that argument only goes so far. So notice the last few weeks we haven’t heard too much about Rush Limbaugh.”

Rush jumped on it. “Savannah,” he said in his most patronizing tone, “let me just read to you what we have just received.” He then recited his latest ratings. His show was number one in its time slot in New York; Chicago; Los Angeles; Houston; Washington, D.C.; and Detroit, and second in San Francisco. The numbers were up, sometimes sharply, all across the country. The pro-Limbaugh Web site Radio Equalizer asked, “Given this blockbuster data, will the White House think twice before targeting Rush again?”

A lot of Democrats now agreed, and the attacks on Limbaugh tapered off briefly. But he was too hot to quench. Colin Powell, former secretary of State under George W. Bush and one of the leading Republican moderates Limbaugh had scored at CPAC, went on Fareed Zakaria’s show and took a shot at Limbaugh. “I think the party has to stop shouting at the world, at the country,” he said. “I’ve talked to a number of leaders in recent weeks and they understand that.” Powell went on to quote columnist Mort Kondracke on Limbaugh’s unfitness to act as party spokesman because of his appeal to peoples’ “lesser instincts.”

Limbaugh responded the following day by telling his audience that Powell was still angry because Powell had endorsed Obama during the 2008 campaign, and Rush explained it as Powell putting racial solidarity over his party and his friend, McCain.

“So, General Powell, let me explain something. The fact is, Republicans did not listen to me. They listened to you. They have not been listening to me for years. The Republican Party nominated your ideal candidate. They nominated a moderate who’s willing to buy into an endless array of liberal causes . . .”

Round two of Powell-Limbaugh started in May, on
Face the Nation
. Dick Cheney was asked who was a better Republican, Limbaugh or Powell. “If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh,” the former vice president replied. “My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.”

A few days later, Powell delivered a speech to a crowd of business leaders in Boston. “Rush Limbaugh says, ‘Get out of the Republican Party.’ Dick Cheney says, ‘He’s already out.’ I may be out of their version of the Republican Party, but there’s another version of the Republican Party waiting to emerge once again,” Powell said.

Limbaugh was palpably bored by the controversy. He had made his point—Powell was an Obama Democrat and a political nonentity, and it was now time to turn the whole thing into a joke. With mock seriousness he announced that he was resigning from the position of “titular head of the Republican Party” that had been bestowed upon him by President Obama and the media. “There, frankly, is someone far more qualified and capable and more in tune with today’s Republican Party than I, to be not only its titular head but its real head, and that would be General Colin Powell. So I now pass the baton to General Powell. . . . I now today pronounce and proclaim General Colin Powell as the titular head of the Republican Party. From now on out, those of you who want to know what the party should do to win elections, to beat back the onslaught of Obama-ism, ask General Powell.”

A few weeks later,
USA Today
-Gallup published the results of a poll question: Who is the main person who speaks for the Republican Party? Limbaugh finished first, with 13 percent, followed by Cheney, at 10 percent. McCain and Newt Gingrich tied for third at 6 percent. Among Republicans only, Limbaugh and Gingrich tied at 10 percent. George W. Bush got less than half a percentage point. Colin Powell wasn’t even mentioned.

CHAPTER TWELVE

R
ush Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” stance toward President Obama and his skirmishing with Powell over the nature of the party were bound to embroil Rush in charges of racism. He wasn’t surprised. When Obama first appeared as a viable Democratic candidate, Limbaugh saw that a great many moderate Republicans would be wary of taking on an attractive, charming, soft-spoken, intellectually gifted, young black candidate. The idea of voting for an African American was attractive; nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of history. Besides, it would be dangerous to stand against Obama. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic primary campaign against Obama even Bill Clinton, the darling of black America, a man whom author Toni Morrison famously called “our first black president,” was accused by the Obama camp of playing the white race card. In a different climate such a bogus charge would have been hooted down by the press corps, but in the campaign of 2008, mainstream reporters functioned as Obama bodyguards. Playing a role in the victory of the first African American president was a thrilling personal and professional opportunity, and the media seized it with undisguised enthusiasm. Limbaugh, of course, did not. He was a conservative and a Republican, Obama a liberal and a Democrat. Of course he would take on the Democratic candidate. That was his job.

One of Limbaugh’s favorite techniques is to take liberal words and turn them on their authors. In March 2007, the
Los Angeles Times
gave Limbaugh a gift in the form of an article by a black, liberal film critic, David Ehrenstein, entitled “Obama the ‘Magic Negro.’” Ehrenstein wrote that Obama was running for an unelected office that exists in the popular white imagination—the “Magic Negro.” This term, he explains, is not meant as a compliment; it is a white fantasy, a black man who “has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist.” Part of the help consists of allowing the white man to accept the Magic Negro, demonstrating tolerance at no real cost and separating himself from the legacy of slavery and segregation. In other words, the Magic Negro is a racial enabler. Ehrenstein said that Obama was being protected by white critics because they needed Obama to be perfect to fulfill their own fantasies of racial redemption. “The only mud that momentarily [sticks to him] is criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama’s alleged ‘inauthenticity, ’ as compared to such sterling examples of ‘genuine’ blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg.”

Limbaugh knew what he had right away. His goal was to stir problems in the Democratic camp (just as it was in Operation Chaos a year later) and to knock the halo off Obama’s head. He didn’t give a damn about the racial subtleties of the Magic Negro construct or any similar theoretical speculation. This was politics. That same day he read the
Los Angeles Times
piece on the air, in its entirety. Two days later he introduced a parody song, sung by a dead-on Al Sharpton soundalike, to the tune of “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”

The song worked on several levels. It attempted to set the Sharpton Democrats (those who weren’t supporting Hillary Clinton already) against Obama. It mocked Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s observation that Obama was “clean” and “articulate,” and the liberal pretense that only Republicans engage in negative racial stereotyping. It mentioned Farrakhan, always a hot button for Jewish Democrats. And it was funny—even Sharpton admitted that. “I despise his ideology,” he told me, “but Rush is a lot smarter and craftier than Don Imus. Limbaugh puts things in a way that he can’t be blamed for easy bigotry. Some of the songs he does about me just make me laugh.”

The media, which reflexively squawk at any politically incorrect use of racial language, couldn’t stop talking about it. Two years later, with Obama safely in the White House, the
Today
show was still asking Limbaugh to defend the song. No wonder it became Rush’s all-time-favorite parody.

The Magic Negro controversy was a year old when I first met Limbaugh. It appeared that Obama would very possibly get the Democratic nomination, and we discussed the problems it would pose for Limbaugh as a conservative satirist. A couple days later I was at home listening to his show when he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I had a conversation with a friend Wednesday afternoon after the program, and he said, ‘Nobody’s criticizing Obama. How are you going to do this? How are you going to handle criticizing the first black American to run for president?’ ”

It took me a few seconds to realize that Limbaugh was talking about me. I was surprised to hear myself described as a friend. Limbaugh said that he was going after Obama as he did all his political opponents, “fearlessly.” He had used that word with me, too, and I realized that this was one part of our interview that wasn’t going to remain exclusive.

“I’m not going to bow to political correctness,” Limbaugh said.

“I’m going to do it with humor. I’m going to focus on the issues. I’m going to react to what he says. Simple. I’m going to do it just like if it were any other case—he’s a man, right? He’s a liberal. How do I criticize liberals? I criticize them.”

That’s indeed what Limbaugh had said to me, almost word for word. But he wasn’t finished. “I have devised, ladies and gentlemen, an even more creative way of criticizing Obama. I have, just this morning, named a new position here on the staff. The EIB Network now has an Official Obama Criticizer. He is Bo Snerdley . . . When Obama needs to be criticized, our official criticizer, Bo Snerdley, will do so.”

The previous night there had been a candidates’ debate in which Obama recounted a conversation he had with an army captain whose platoon in Afghanistan was badly understaffed and underequipped because many of his soldiers and a lot of his equipment had been sent to Iraq. This was a stock complaint of Obama’s during the campaign; Afghanistan, the right war, was being slighted by concentration on Iraq, the bad one. It was, he said, a typical example of Bush’s poor leadership, which he proposed to reverse once he got to the White House.

Limbaugh played a clip of Obama saying this, and then turned the microphone over to James Golden, who introduced himself as “Bo Snerdley, African-American-in-good-standing-and-certified-black-enough-to-criticize-Obama guy.” Snerdley said he doubted Obama was accurately portraying the situation and asked for the name of the captain. Switching into dialect he said, “On behalf of our EIB brothers and sisters in the hood, we’re asking you, Mr. Obama, what’s up with that, yo? You got proof? On behalf of our Hispanic brothers and sisters, we’re asking,
Señor Obama, es verdad?
”