Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (24 page)

Limbaugh’s intention was not to question Obama’s veracity. It had very little to do with Obama. He was taking the challenge of opposing a black candidate and turning it into an opportunity to make fun of the Democratic Party’s convoluted racial coalition building and the racial authenticity tests of the American left. In June, Charles Steele, the former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King’s old group, claimed that Obama was getting an easy ride from white people because he wasn’t really black. “Why are they attacking Michelle Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and not really attacking, to that degree, her husband?” Reverend Steele wondered aloud. “Because he has no slave blood in him. He does not have any slave blood in him, but Michelle does.” It wasn’t hard to figure out Reverend Steele’s meaning—that Americans have an easier time dealing with blacks whose ancestors were not chattel for four centuries—but expressing it in terms of blood levels conjured up the old Jim Crow “one drop” criterion. Limbaugh, who sometimes reminds his audience that Democrats (including Bill Clinton’s mentor, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas) were historically the party of racial discrimination and segregation, knew what to do. He turned the microphone over to Golden once more, who went on the air as Bo Snerdley, “Official Barack Criticizer for the EIB Network, certified black enough to criticize with a blend of imported and domestic one hundred percent fortified slave blood.”

Throughout the campaign, Obama sent mixed messages about his cultural identity. When Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton ran for president, they sounded unmistakably like themselves, black preachers. Obama’s self didn’t sound like that. Black English was not his mother tongue. For national audiences he spoke in the flat, Midwestern tone of the Kansan grandparents who raised him. When he appeared before black audiences, in churches or at venues like the convention of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, he slowed and softened his speech and dropped in South Side Chicago expressions (but never any South Side attitude).

Linguistic flexibility is common political practice. Al Gore spoke Southern in Tennessee and Northern above the Mason-Dixon Line. In the campaign of 2004, Bostonian John Forbes Kennedy went to a store in rural Ohio and asked, “Can I get me a hunting license here?” And who can forget candidate Hillary Clinton at a civil rights meeting in Selma, Alabama, trying to channel the gospel style of the Reverend James Cleveland (“I don’t feel no ways tired / I come too far from where I started from / Nobody told me that the road would be easy”). But in Obama’s case there was a special significance to his changing dialects.

During the campaign, a black waitress at Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington, D.C., asked the candidate if he wanted change, and Obama replied, “Nah, we straight.” A Politico reporter, Nia-Malika Henderson, explained that this exchange was conducted in black code. “The phrase was so subtle some listeners missed it. The reporter on pool duty quoted Obama as saying, ‘No, we’re straight.’ But many other listeners did not miss it. A video of the exchange became an Internet hit, and there was a clear moment of recognition among many blacks, who got a kick out of their Harvard-educated president sounding, as one commenter wrote on a hip-hop site, ‘mad cool.’ ”

“Mad cool” in the barbershop in Harlem plays differently at the Varsity in Cape. Same with the famous fist-bump that Barack and Michelle shared at the Democratic Convention. Something seemed to be going on that white middle America didn’t get, a change of cultural signals they failed to decode. Such changes had happened before, in music and other forms of popular entertainment, and eventually they were accepted and adopted. The high-five was once considered a radical greeting; today parents teach it to their two-year-olds. “Right on” and “Uptight” and “Do your thing” went from 125th Street to Sesame Street as an enrichment of the English language. Go to any Elks Club in Michigan on a Saturday night and you will find baby boomers dancing a flat-footed variation of the Watusi to the sounds of Motown. In a few years, these same Elks will be fist-bumping and saying “Nah, we straight,” without giving it a thought. But meeting these innovations for the first time in a presidential campaign was jarring; a lot of people were suspicious that they were a form of secret black communication, something that has animated the white American imagination since drumming was banned during slavery.

This concern was fueled by Obama’s longtime relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his pastor and mentor in Chicago. Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama’s longtime congregation, preaches black liberation theology. According to its Web site, the church is “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian. . . . Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.”

Video clips of Reverend Wright’s heated anti-American sermons about “the USA of KKK” and American chickens coming home to roost on 9/11—shown first on FOX News and then, grudgingly, on other networks—made it clear who Obama’s minister thought was the source of injustice. Such rhetoric is the stuff of the black liberation church, and Obama may very well have ignored it, as many candidates have ignored the sermons of their pastors over the years. But white America heard the congregation cheering Wright and found it disconcerting. The fact that Obama had dedicated one of his books to Wright added to a general sense that there was something deeply different and alienated about the senator from Illinois and his exclusionary brand of religion.

Michelle Obama compounded the problem during the election campaign when she called the United States a “mean” country and said that her husband’s candidacy had made her proud, for the first time, to be an American. Obama’s advisers realized that these remarks were too blatantly honest and revealing, and with the candidate’s approval, they scheduled appearances that would enable Michelle to walk them back and show the country that she was just as sweet and friendly as the nice (white) girl next door.

Limbaugh had been concerned about Obama’s view of America for a long time. From his perspective, he was right to be. Obama did not share Limbaugh’s veneration of the founding fathers or the conviction that the Constitution was a near-perfect document. He saw the United States as a deeply flawed nation whose international behavior was often aggressive and self-aggrandizing. He ran as a revolutionary, someone who would alter and improve precisely those things about America that Limbaugh most wanted to preserve. Rush had always been a master of ambiguity—Is he serious? Is he kidding?—and he saw that Obama had a similar skill, to be Harlem or Harvard, Hawaii or Kansas, a man of the world or a bro from the hood, as the occasion demanded. Limbaugh wanted to make the point that Obama was a shape-shifter, but the candidate was too good at it. His wife, who had less practice, made a better target.

Michelle Obama opened the Democratic National Convention with a major speech. Obama’s team worked with her on a talk that would showcase her as a patriotic mom from the Midwest who happened to be African American. They came up with a template: The upscale, non-threatening, good-natured cast of the
Bill Cosby Show.
The media, briefed in advance on the message, prepped the country. “Michelle Obama has to make this the Huxtables,” said NBC’s Norah O’Donnell. “Present the Huxtable image of the Obamas,” urged Eugene Robinson of the
Washington Post
. “The challenge is making the Obama family into the Huxtables,” said Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. Her colleague Chris Matthews begged Michelle to show the country, “This is the Bill Cosby family!”

The future first lady stayed on script, and the next day Rush unleashed his Official Criticizer. “It was evident, my dear, that you have been handled,” James Golden said. “We did not see the real Michelle. . . . [Y]ou papered things over with a nondescript presentation that could have come from Martha Stewart’s America.”

Golden then slipped into his Bo Snerdley persona.

Limbaugh himself concentrated his fire on the Drive-By Media, which he accused of attempting to throttle criticism of Obama by enforcing a code of acceptable commentary:

After the election, the Washington press corps took to writing about Obama in heroic terms, comparing him with the great figures of American history. Limbaugh regarded this as a blatant dereliction of duty. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton had mocked her opponent’s ethereal style, and now, taking a page out of her playbook, he began calling Obama “the Messiah.”

Limbaugh was quick to notice that, despite his reputation for eloquence, Obama was not much of an extemporaneous speaker. In fact, the new president rarely spoke without a teleprompter. After Obama accidently read the speech of his guest, the Irish prime minister, instead of his own, Limbaugh developed the conceit that the teleprompter, not Obama, was in charge.

“Teleprompter, do you have a name?” he asked. “In your opinion, how is President Obama doing so far? Did he convey the level of anger you hoped for regarding what you told him to say about AIG? Teleprompter, is the president ever argumentative with you, or is he compliant with your instructions? Are you dating anybody, Teleprompter? Mac or PC?” This bit caught on, and when the wind blew over the teleprompter during a speech by Vice President Biden, he cracked, “What am I going to tell the president when I tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?”

The mainstream comics and satirists were protective of the new administration. David Letterman attacked the teleprompter gimmick as “nitpicking,” and ran “Teleprompter vs. No Teleprompter,” a segment that contrasted an eloquent passage of Obama’s address to Congress with George W. Bush’s awkwardly extemporizing at a press conference. It took almost an entire year for
Saturday Night Live
to run a critical skit, based on the premise that Obama had accomplished nothing in office. Jon Stewart followed a few days later with a similar routine. This was so unusual that it made news. “Is President Obama in trouble with his late-night comedy base?” asked
New York Times
reporter Mark Leibovich, who, with considerable understatement, noted that late-night comedy had been “relatively gentle” on the new president. “Mr. Obama has of course been a puzzle to comedians for some time,” he wrote. “They agonized during the campaign about how his low-key and confident manner did not lend itself to edgy caricature. The challenge was made greater by the sensitivities inherent to lampooning a black candidate.”

In fact, the president and his administration—like all presidents and administrations—produced a daily menu of comic possibilities, from pompous declaration to incompetent execution. But liberal satirists (on the networks and Comedy Central there is no other kind), like nervous parents at a high school play, watched with crossed fingers and scowls for anyone rude enough to giggle at the performance. There was nothing funny here! This fine young man was doing his very best! And, of course, there were those “special sensitivities” to consider.

This left the field pretty much to Limbaugh, who had no trouble at all discerning and mocking the new president’s narcissism, his bowing and scraping to Third World dictators, his frequent changes of mind, and the pretense that he wanted a bipartisan government. Not all his jokes were funny; many were crude. But they demonstrated that the nation’s comics, like its serious journalists, weren’t doing their jobs.