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

National Review, Sept 6, 1993 by James Bowman

JFK as Dittohead?

In fact, he has proved to be an adept popularizer, often in advance of the serious press, of such economic arcana as the reading of the bond market and federal accounting by "current services baseline." His principal economic advisors are Lawrence Kudlow of Bear, Stearns and Thomas W. Hazlitt of the University of California at Davis, but a great many other people provide him with material which he proceeds to adapt to a popular audience. These include not only intellectual heavyweights like Bennett and George Will but the thousands of ordinary listeners who write to him, most of them via electronic mail. When a listener earlier this summer sent in a tape of a speech by John F. Kennedy to the New York Economic Club in 1962 in which Kennedy spoke of the economically stimulative effect of tax cuts, Rush played the tape with his own annotations on the air and retroactively proclaimed Kennedy a dittohead.

He himself disclaims any pretension to being an intellectual, and in fact feels humble and "in awe of many of them" who have been toiling away in obscurity for years. He once went to William Bennett and asked him for a reading list (Bennett set him to reading C. S. Lewis). "I am nothing but a regurgitation of what these original thinkers have labored all their lives to produce," says Rush. But the same could be said of Ronald Reagan or any other leader bright enough to see (as intellectuals often are not) what ideas will move the popular imagination. It was a feat not only of the loudest voice but also of a keen political brain to round up, as Rush did, the media herd and drive them into the conservative corral over the Clinton budget. Weeks after he began playing on the air tapes of the claims of Bush, Panetta, Sasser, and others for the 1990 deal and comparing them with what was being said about the Clinton budget, the mainstream media began making the same comparison. Tim Russert did it on Meet the Press and Joe Klein did it in Newsweek. But imagine Rush's gratification when the New York Times ran as its lead editorial "A budget worthy of Mr. Bush."

He does all this on his three-hour daily radio program with a tiny staff, consisting principally of the broadcast engineer, Mike Maimone, and two others: James Golden, his call screener, known on the air as Bo Snerdley, and his grandly named "Chief of Staff," Kit "HR" (for Haldeman) Carson. He sometimes makes reference to "the EIB memory division" or other (non-existent) research help, but the show is, as William Bennett says, basically just Rush reading the papers and cutting things out, carrying on a conversation with the American people." That, Bennett adds, "is talent on loan from somewhere." The problem is to tell how, or if, this conversation can translate into political potency. Fred Barnes makes the point: "Rush Limbaugh has a political - like following. He's not like Leno or latterman. But one of the things that makes you think about his influence is the outcome in 1992 - Bush's bad showing after Rush Limbaugh had been boosting him day after day. It makes you wonder if he's just preaching to the faithful."