The leader of the opposition - political commentator Rush Limbaugh - Cover Story

National Review, Sept 6, 1993 by James Bowman

Yes, but . . . Is Limbaugh really an homme serieux, a man with the gravitas to be a - let alone the - republican leader? A lot of very wealthy Republicans consider themselves sophisticated beyond the Limbaugh types," Bennett goes on. "They miss the point. Rush is extremely sophisticated, extremely smart. The great thing is that, never having been through a university, he is not complicated with pedanticism. He's very serious intellectually. He knows how to frame an issue, how to debate an issue, how to argue ad finem and ad absurdum. He does both. But he is larger than a leader of the political opposition. He represents a shift in the culture. Another ten years of the political change he stands for will take us beyond Republicans and Democrats."

What Would Make Rush Run?

All such praise from would-be rivals for leadership depends in part on Rush's own disavowal of any electoral ambition. Are there any circumstances in which he would be a candidate? "Maybe, but I don't know what they are," he told me. "I have said never to this - never, ever, I don't want to do it. And I don't. I have no desire. Primarily because, to do it, to be elected to anything you have to walk around like this - with your hand out. And you have to beg people to put something in it. Somebody always does, and they want repayment. And not with dollars. It's going to be with your soul, it's going to be with a portion of your soul. I don't look at it as fun." The point is that he does look at hosting the Rush Limbaugh show as fun - "more fun than a human being should be allowed to have," as he so frequently says. And if he is to be understood at all it is in terms of what he considers to be fun.

To look at, Rush is, to use one of his own favorite words, the epitome of the successful businessman. You have to look closely now to see any evidence of the teenage prankster growing up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who used to con people over the telephone by pretending to be running the Baptist Church's "Know Your Bible" or the Lions Club's "Know Your American History" contests (he and his brother got caught in the latter case because they called the wife of the Lions Club president). The evidence is there - in the smile that is a little too cherubic, the baby face that is altogether too innocent looking - but it is obscured by the big cigar (Ashton, Jamaica leaf) that he smokes with the swagger of a Victorian captain of industry. Famous for being fat, he comes across in person rather as an imposing presence: big, but with the grace of a jungle cat - a quality that goes with his yellow-green, cat-like eyes.

It is this combination of the solid citizen and the joker which is the essential Limbaugh. His sense of fun extends also to his enthusiasm for the business side of his daily radio and television shows, his pride in having done what no one thought could be done with the quintessentially local medium of radio: syndicate a national talk show with a conservative point of view in the middle of the day. "For the moment leave the conservatism out," he says: "just the business success of this show has been totally ignored . . . The media cultures in New York and Los Angeles refuse to write about this precisely because it's conservative, I'm conservative. They're scared of it and they try to come up with other kinds of ways to explain it, like the audience is a bunch of followers . . . just a bunch of dolts. But now everybody thinks they can do it! I am a trailblazer - if I can be so bold, do you mind? - there has been a revolution in the way radio is done, the way it is sold, the way our program makes money. We have identified new advertisers for radio, we have expanded the market of advertisers. [There is] more money than was in network radio before and now everybody wants to do it! What five years ago couldn't be done, everybody wants to do it."